04/27/2026
Hi friends,
We Are NOT Closing but
We are reaching out to everyone as we are in urgent need of some help. We’re looking for a lawyer who would be willing to assist us pro bono with a financial battle we are currently in with our new landlords. We are a family owned and ran small business. It’s just me, my 2 daughters about 10 teens/ young adults as our staff and performers. I am chronically ill and disabled and like the rest of you, just trying to keep my business afloat in this economy. This has been very stressful and I really don’t know what to do.
Olivia’s Dollhouse Tea Room has been at this same location for about 19 years. We have spent a long time building up clientele and making our venue as beautiful as we possibly can! We have been a proud staple in the South Bay, making wonderful memories for children and their families for almost 2 decades.
As some of you may know, we were unfortunately closed for over a year during covid. The only reason we made it through was due to the kindness of our clients as well as the kindness of our landlord/management at the time. During closure, we were unable to afford rent as we had no revenue coming in. We had to cancel and refund all deposits for upcoming parties and could not book anything from March 2020 to April of 2021. Of course, once we were finally allowed to reopened, we didn’t book a bunch of parties right away, it took time to return to our normal amount of monthly bookings.
We did however send in as much rent as we could through fundraising during those 13 months. We applied to many grants and government funding to no avail. The only thing we received was a small amount from the PPP and it had to go to the employees. We also sent a percentage to rent as well.
I informed our landlord that because our business being in-person parties and events plus due to the fact that we do not have merchandise to sell, we had no way of making money to pay our rent. I also discussed with him that if I was expected to pay back rent when we reopened, I would need to permanently close because we could not afford to pay that on top of our other monthly bills/ overhead. Mr. Mabry agreed with me and he let us stay. Luckily, we made it through and were able to reopen after the CDC finally gave us the permission to do so.
*Due to the nature of our business, we were the first to be shut down and the last to be permitted to reopen.
Now a new management company has recently purchased the property. This new management is demanding we pay back the rent that we were not able to pay during our closure. As you can imagine, we were absolutely shocked. We repeatedly have tried to explain to them that we had an agreement with the former landlords that rent during covid was forgiven. Unfortunately the new management insists that we owe $70k of rent from approximately 5 years ago. The amount they are asking for doesn’t make sense, it’s way too much. As I mentioned before, we did send in what we could after having fundraisers. (We offered online preschool, character visits & story time just to pay power, water, insurance and the loan I took out to purchase Olivia’s). Though I am the original manager of Olivia’s since we opened in 2006, I didn’t purchase it until October of 2017,
Side note: I am sure that Mabry Management either wrote it off as a loss or received help from the government because until now, we have not been asked to repay any debt. No one in the past 5 years or other several management teams has even mentioned it. This current owner is the 3rd one to take over in these past 5 years but there has been 4 to 5 different management teams within those 3 ownerships of Mabry Management.
As a small, family owned business, we simply cannot afford to pay them that amount. We are currently struggling to cover our normal overhead as parties have been way down since February of 2025. In these unsure times, people are watching their pennies and not throwing parties or attending events like they did just a year ago.
We would not be reaching out to if we were not in desperate need of some legal assistance and advice.
Please if you know anyone that may be willing to help us out, send them our way as soon as possible as the management wants to come to an agreement in one week.
We love getting to provide magical memories for the South Bay area and would be absolutely heartbroken if this situation forces us to move locations, or in the worst case scenario, close permanently.
Thank you for your time reading this post, we appreciate your support of Olivia’s Dollhouse Tearoom!
Please contact us at [email protected] or 310-257-1199
Thank you,
Holly Daluisio
Owner
