Ericka Díaz is standing by vintage DANSK pots lining a wall like they’re holy relics. And honestly, they kind of are.
“I needed a shrine,” she tells me on a cloudy Friday afternoon in Uptown Whittier, hands lifted like a magician hitting the punchline of an elaborate disappearing trick. “This is the DANSK moment. Designed by Danish artists, American-owned, and constructed mid-century. Timeless. This was the focal point of my obsession with kitchen things.”
You don’t expect to find a cathedral to Danish cookware tucked between a Labubu shop and a Pokémon store in Whittier, but that’s exactly what greets you when you step into Newlin House by Brute Tenacity, a space dedicated to vintage kitchen tools.
Wooden-handled silverware from Japan. Dutch ovens as stylish as cars. An Art Deco tortilla press. A 1960s KitchenAid mixer that looks like it will outlive us all. Every shelf vibrates with obsession.
There are antique shops all over Whittier, but to the best of anyone's knowledge, this is the only vintage kitchen supply shop in Los Angeles County.
And it only exists because Ericka was finally ready to let go of her massive collection of vintage cooking gear.
“I’ve been a hoarder in vintage for like over 20 years, so I already had all the stock,” she explains.
A Hoarder’s Epiphany
The real turning point came at an estate sale. Everything was a dollar: immaculate mid-century cookware, heavy knives that could outlast generations, and wine glasses that once glittered at family dinners.
Díaz walked through the rooms and began to cry.
“My kids are gonna do this to me one day: Sell all my treasures for a dollar,” she thought, imagining how her hoarder lifestyle might impose upon her family.
She had always said “no” when people who followed her on Instagram for her baking videos asked if she sold her vintage cookware. After that day, she started saying yes.
At first, it was Instagram drops—small, fast, informal. They blew up. Then Newlin House fell into her lap.
“I was walking circles with my kid around here, and this space was empty. I didn’t even take this street normally,” she says.
She spotted the landlord outside, recognized him from the corner market, and when he mentioned it was already rented to a CrossFit gym, she refused to believe him.
“I just wouldn’t shut up,” she laughs.
Forty-five minutes later, she had the keys. No business plan, no retail blueprint. Just twenty years of hoarding vintage kitchenware and a hunch.
That’s Ericka’s vibe in a nutshell: energetic, tenacious, funny, and obsessed.
But it all comes from years of experience.
Ericka spent nearly 15 years as a broker in the grocery industry—placing displays, negotiating shelf space, and living in the fluorescent world of corporate food. Before that, she was a “cheese girl.” Before that, she was slanging clothes at the Paramount swap meet, like her siblings.
“We grew up swap meet kids,” she tells me. “That hustle is in us.”
Within two weeks of getting the keys, she opened the doors with her sisters (who now run the collectibles shop and a Pokémon store next door).
Ericka kept her broker job for six months before quitting to run the shop full-time.
“Fourteen years in corporate food and I was done,” she says.
A Kitchen Time Machine
Erika designed the shop the way she wanted to live: vintage cookware alongside pantry staples, hyper-local olive oil and salts, a table dedicated to modern cooking tools like her favorite spatulas, and a weekend pastry and coffee program with incredible homemade baked goods.
“I started in pastry,” she reminds me. “Did programs for Esca, Café Santo, pop-ups all over L.A.. But I’m older now, arthritic. Needed a shift.”
If the cookware is the altar, the shelves full of silverware are the sermon. At first she hesitated to sell them alongside the bigger vintage pieces.
“I thought people would think it was gross,” she admits.
But the knives, the forks, the spoons, the pieces with weight and artistry? They sell.
“They don’t make them like this anymore,” she says, pulling out a blade still in its original box and glowing like she’s introducing me to an ancient sword that once saved the world from dragons.
The deeper you dig through it, the more Newlin House feels like a time machine: a walnut cracker from the 1950s, an ice crusher that looks indestructible, soup tureens with matching bowls, and vintage Libby glassware from a time when the brand wasn’t boring and mass-produced.
Each piece is a portal into the idea that dinnerware could be art, that objects could carry time.
Newlin House is more than nostalgia, though. It’s defiance. A refusal to accept that “nice things” only exist for the wealthy or the white spaces that made her feel unwelcome.
“I didn’t want anyone to feel like shit when they walked through my door,” Ericka explains.
Her customers are mostly women of color in their thirties and forties, many new to cooking. They DM her photos of first meals, kids trying food for the first time, and family dinners made possible with tools they bought here.
She curates the shelves like she curates her community—mixing in Latina-owned brands like Happy Organics’ bee-inspired candles, sourcing from artists of color, and responding to polls on Instagram. She wants to make beauty accessible and approachable. A place where you can ask what the hell a soup tureen is without shame.
Newlin House is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 AM to 7 PM. Weekdays, you have to DM her, text her, or ring the doorbell, and she’ll come running from next door. Inside, you’ll find this altar to permanence in a disposable world, curated by a woman who turned hoarding into hospitality and obsession into community.
Newlin House By Brute Tenacity ~ 12725 Wardman St. Whittier, CA 90602
