The Things That Matter

by Nate Berkus

  FOR ME, THE MOST SUCCESSFUL INTERIORS IN THE WORLD ARE PUT TOGETHER BY PEOPLE WHO SURROUND THEMSELVES WITH OBJECTS THAT BRING THEM JOY.

  The fact is, over the years we change, we evolve, we discard, we add on, we backtrack, we consolidate, we look at old photos of ourselves and can’t believe we were wearing that madras jacket, sporting that awful haircut, working that job. At some point for all of us, people, experiences, and aesthetics come together to create the interiors we live in, the styles we embrace, and the things that we can’t live without. As I stand in my home today, I see remnants of that Minnesota boy. I know my style wouldn’t be the same without my Midwest upbringing, my California summers, and the people, places, and things I’ve seen along the way. “Personality,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “is an unbroken series of successful gestures.” He could have said the exact same thing about the rooms we live in.

  I believe that the objects that bring us pleasure and comfort, that make us feel everything’s all right in the world, have their origins in the styles and sensibilities we were exposed to growing up. Which is why almost thirty years after they gave an exacting little kid his own basement bedroom to play around in, I owe a giant debt of gratitude to my family, for helping to put me on a path that became my passion.

  (Illustration Credit 1.15)

  (Illustration Credit 2.1)

  When I returned to college in the States from my year in Paris, I landed an internship (with full college credit) at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago. Somehow I managed to convince my parents that this internship was more important than attending actual classes, and faster than you can say “But don’t college kids belong in a dormitory?” I talked them into pouring whatever money they had set aside for my room and board into a small rental on Huron Street, in the heart of downtown Chicago. After graduating, my plan was to move to Europe, but in a sudden burst of reality, my mother had me call Leslie to find out if she would consider giving me a paid job. Leslie happily told me I could start the following week.

  I don’t mean to brag but I really managed to distinguish myself as an assistant. The fact is, I have been declared the worst assistant ever to file an invoice. I’m a very mediocre typist, I can’t fix a Xerox machine to save my soul, and when you get right down to it, shouldn’t grown men and women be capable of getting their own coffee?

  Me at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, Chicago, 1995 (Illustration Credit 2.2)

  The point is, instead of firing me, as the rest of the staff was begging her to do, Leslie summoned me into her office. “I actually think you’re smart,” she said. “So I am about to make your life really difficult, and we’ll see if you can rise to the challenge.”

  She put me in charge of a series of monthly auctions. My job was to try to convince all the people who were accustomed to buying a new chair for $750 that they were much better off buying a vintage chair from Leslie Hindman Auctioneers for $50. And I wasn’t just in charge of handling the auctions, I was also the entire marketing team, the sales force, and while I was at it, the auctioneer, too. “Everyone here is going to hate you,” Leslie said, “because you’re going to make them work on weekends, and they will find it very hard to believe I gave you this position, but I think you can handle it.” Oh, and one more thing: My little monthly auctions had to gross $100,000 a month, she told me, or I was fired.

  “Great!” I said, because that’s what you say when you’re 22 years old and have no clue what you’re doing but believe you can do it just the same.

  Another of my duties was to set up the showroom every month before the sale. It was during this experience—creating beautiful “rooms” to entice people to bid on the items in them—that I first thought, Maybe I can actually do this for a living. It was extraordinary and inspiring for me to see in such an intimate way how other people lived, what they collected, what they inherited, what they bought, what they saved, what they were relieved to walk away from, and what they just couldn’t bear to part with. I found all of it fascinating: where they ordered their stationery, why certain people had a home filled with reproductions, while others lived with only antiques. I loved noting trends: China starts mass producing their designs in the 1950s and suddenly chinoiserie begins appearing in upper-middle-class American interiors. And, of course, I loved the personal stories. What could be more interesting than watching an old woman point to a brooch in the jewelry collection that would be putting her grandson through college and hearing her explain that her aunt Eva buried the brooch so the Nazis wouldn’t get it. “And after the war,” the woman announced triumphantly, “she found it right where she’d left it, under the plum tree in her best friend’s yard!” I also got to see my share of tough businessmen suddenly melt. “That was my grandfather’s reading chair!” Or “I spent every Friday night sneaking scraps of pot roast to the dog under that mahogany table … nobody had the heart to tell my mother how awful her pot roast was!” they’d say, laughing.

  It’s not enough to know what you’re going to sell. A good auctioneer has to know what people are looking to buy. It’s really not so different from being a personal shopper; I made a point of always being aware of who was looking for a sideboard for their dining room and who needed a table for their entry. I got to see inside people’s homes; I got to know their particular style. And through that job, I met hundreds of people in Chicago, from dealers to real estate developers, many of whom are still my friends. I worked for Leslie Hindman Auctioneers for precisely one year, and thanks to a combination of hustle, youth, and an overwhelming fear of messing up and losing my job, every single month I managed to get that auction house their $100,000.

  At the time, I was dating a very successful event planner, and I remember being jealous of his incredible freedom. He worked hard, but if he felt like working out at 10:30 a.m., well, he went to the gym, no questions asked. If he wanted to start his weekend at 2:15 on Friday, he just did it. I, on the other hand, had to wait until 5:01 on Friday afternoon before I could call my life my own again.

  We were talking about all of this one day, when he turned to me and said, “Well, why don’t you become a decorator? You love decorating, after all.”

  And in that moment, everything crystallized for me. “You’re right,” I said. “That would be amazing.” Then and there, I decided to form a one-man band. I had business cards made with my name and cell phone number on them. I bought a printer. I set up a small office with a desk and a lamp, and exactly one year later a former co-worker at the auction house came to join me.

  Chicago is a city that roots for innovation (think Frank Lloyd Wright and deep-dish pizza), and people who need to catch a break (think the Cubs), so from the beginning, I felt incredibly supported and embraced. The local media was generous to me—my interiors began to get published, and before long I found myself building a client base. It’s easy to gloss over the bad days, but the truth is, terms like liability insurance and payroll taxes are enough to send any new business owner in search of a cold compress and a shot of tequila.

  That said, for a long time I couldn’t believe clients were really paying me to rummage through vintage stores for remnant fabrics to redo their chairs. It was like earning money to breathe or sleep or eat pasta. Looking back, part of my evolution as a decorator was to let go of what I felt was appropriate, bland, or conventional. When you’re getting your feet wet, slowly turning your passion into a business, and gradually growing a reputation, you tend to start off by playing it safe. But as time passed, and I was able to get a little experience under my belt, I began coming into my own, with the emphasis on my. My vision. My aesthetic. And eventually, my home.

  My pre-computer design notebooks

  My first apartment, Chicago, 1995 (Illustration Credit 2.3)

  Early Nate Berkus Associates stationery

  The first time I saw the Chicago apartment I ended up buying was during the good old days of 10-percent-down mortgages. Even so, the apartment was way too pricey for somebody just starting out. Sheila
Starr, my real estate broker, told me about a great place she had in mind for me. But before we visited, she said, there were three things to keep in mind. 1) She was afraid I was going to kill her since the apartment was so much more than I wanted to spend. 2) It was in slightly shabby condition. 3) Despite that, she couldn’t live with herself unless she showed it to me.

  It was winter, and the place was shadowy. There were no overhead lights, and no lamps, either. The draperies were tattered and there were sun spots on the floor. The apartment had been vacant for many years.

  If I was born with any kind of gift, here it is: the ability to walk into any interior and recognize its potential—to know intuitively if the bones are right. And if the bones are weak or broken, to know at once how to reset them so that the interior comes alive. The first thing I noticed about the place, which was built in 1918, was how beautifully crafted everything was. At four thousand square feet, it was truly a grown-up home. The walls were thick. The architecture, redone in the 1950s by Samuel Marx (he designed the New Orleans Museum of Art), was spotless, the master bedroom had fantastic built-in closets, the moldings were simple and perfect. As the rooms unfolded, I began to imagine what it would feel like to live in a space this classic and refined. How I defined myself, how I wanted other people to perceive me—not to mention my passion for vintage hardware and old fireplaces—was right there in front of me, already in place. I knew I’d come home.

  The one big drawback was the tiny bathroom. Noticing my expression, the broker said, “My friend Bill Blass says that dressing rooms should be large, and—”

  I finished the sentence for her. “—bathrooms should be small.”

  She was silent. “You know, this really is your apartment, isn’t it?”

  I knew there was work to be done. I knew I had to repair and refinish the floors and replace the kitchen linoleum with wood and paint the walls and update the electrical system and install air-conditioning and hunt down screens for all the windows. The apartment would definitely be a project. But the bones were there.

  “THE DRESSING ROOMS SHOULD BE LARGE, AND BATHROOMS SHOULD BE SMALL.”

  One of the questions people ask me the most is “How can I make this room look good while spending the least amount of money?” That was the question I had to ask myself. I knew buying the place would demolish my savings, and that I was risking pretty much everything. But I’ve never been afraid of money. It’s not because I was born with a trust fund—I wasn’t. In my four decades of life, I’ve had no money, some money, no money again, and lots of money. But I have always, always bet on myself. I had to believe I could afford to live in a vintage apartment in a gorgeous old building—and that even if it meant eating nothing but ramen noodles for the rest of my life, I would own it.

  Bathroom, Chicago

  I still have snapshots from the week I moved in, with my mother’s help. “There are four pieces of furniture in a thirty-foot space,” she remarked at one point. True enough, but I knew that over time the interior would become a place that spoke to the person I was, and the person I hoped to become. And I have to say, in many ways, I really did come of age in that apartment. It’s where I was living when Fernando Bengoechea came into my life.

  Fernando and I met in 2003 at a photo shoot for O at Home magazine. He had been hired to photograph the makeover process of a living room I was brought in to redo. How many people are lucky enough to have the very first meeting of a great love documented by the nature of what they do professionally? The day I met him, I could see, through his photographs, how he saw me, and I remember thinking, Things don’t get any better than this.

  Closet, Chicago

  Fernando was audacious and complicated and spontaneous and sophisticated and charismatic and demanding and graceful and volatile and extravagant and occasionally impossible. And when he walked into the room, he pretty much owned it. He was also contemplative and nurturing and soulful and insightful and intuitive and deeply kind. Our attraction was instantaneous and it was powerful. One week after we began dating, Fernando flew to Chicago to visit me. When he walked into the apartment, I naturally assumed he would be bowled over by its scale and design, and he was … only not quite in the way I imagined. In his typically contrarian style, Fernando said, “You are a more interesting person than this. I’m surprised that you live someplace so traditional.”

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  Fernando, Italy, (Illustration Credit 2.11)

  Fernando always woke up earlier than I did. And after that first night in my apartment, I walked into the living room to find that while I was sleeping, he had rearranged all the furniture. A lot of people would have been hurt or insulted or a bit of both. But I wasn’t bothered in the least. I actually kind of loved that he’d done that. I loved that as a photographer he was so visual that he couldn’t bear to look at something he thought could be improved upon. One reason Fernando was a genius at photographing interiors is that he was just compelled to experiment with spaces, to design new rooms and create tableaux that didn’t exist. It became a thing with us. We played with our stuff the way some couples do the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. I would visit him in New York on the weekends, and we’d spend hours moving his living room around. Though I didn’t put it together at the time, we would do the exact same things—reshuffle furniture; swap a picture for a mirror; rearrange books, and surfaces, and closets; add some texture; subtract some pillows, try this higher, that lower—I did in my bedroom as a child. We became partners in the pursuit of creating a feeling of home. It was a feeling I had never had so strongly before.

  One of the other things Fernando and I had in common was a love of traveling. He had been all over the world, and he was eager for me to see the places he loved most. “You can’t really call yourself a sophisticated person if you’ve only been to Mexico and France,” he said. “You have to see the rest of the world.” I agreed in theory, but I remember a fight we had early on when during one of my weekend visits to him in New York I urged him to come do a little hunting with me at the 26th Street flea market, which was only a few blocks from where he lived. Nothing I could say would convince him that it wouldn’t be filled with junk. He was sure that one of my all-time favorite places in Manhattan would be a ridiculous waste of his time. So I went on my own that morning and I bought a bunch of little things I knew he’d love, including a wonderful French-to-English pocket dictionary from the nineteenth century (it sits on my fireplace mantel today); some handcrafted wooden bowls, rustic yet refined; chunky African beads; and a silver picture frame. I will never forget the look of shock on his face when I handed them to him, one treasure at a time. The man had burned through eight passports in his travels around the world, and I’d just brought him the same stuff he used to jam into his suitcase. “You mean,” he said sheepishly, “the entire time I was trying to somehow fit all these things between my knees on a crowded airplane, they’ve been sitting on card tables four blocks from my apartment?”

  Fernando, Brazil (Illustration Credit 2.12)

  Fernando had taste, much more layered than my own. When I walked into his loft for the first time, I knew in my gut we would end up together. For starters, the place was ridiculously clean. It was bright and light and filled with vintage objects he’d dragged home from Russia and Vietnam, Italy and Thailand, Patagonia and the Basque Country, and a hundred other exotic places from his life on the road. In addition to his sofa on the other side of the room, he had a mattress on the floor in front of the fireplace, draped with a mix of plush, hand-knit blankets in shades of ivory and ecru, across from a wall of books he’d collected from museums and bookshops all over the world. Everywhere my eye landed, I saw something I loved. Each piece had a story to tell. His glazed pottery was from a small village in China; his incense from Esteban in Paris; his pots and pans from South America, so fine they almost made me want to cook (I said almost); two floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with embroidered textiles from Morocco and Mexico and India. The things i
n his apartment and the stories that went with them opened my eyes to cultures I only dimly knew existed. He made me want to watch the sun come up over the Sea of Galilee and study the tile mosaics of Marrakesh and buy saffron and curry at the Malaysian bazaars. He showed me a bigger life than I’d ever dreamed of for myself.

  Fernando rarely went back to the same place twice. There was simply too much else to see. But ten years earlier, while he was working as a photographer’s assistant, he’d gone to a small fishing village off the coast of Sri Lanka. He and I were arguing one day about how I never took any real vacations, the kind where you unplug from the world for two, maybe even three, weeks. I was trying to build a career, and if somebody needed me, I had to be available, so when he suggested we go somewhere for three entire weeks, he may as well have suggested I bungee jump off the Chrysler Building. “You can make it happen,” Fernando pushed. “Where do you want to go?”

  (Illustration Credit 2.13)

  You have to pick your battles, and I knew this was a fight I was not going to win. “You decide,” I said.

  He chose that little fishing village he’d visited a decade before. He booked our flights, and planned out an itinerary. We would land in Bangkok and stay there for two nights. Then we’d go to Cambodia for five nights to see the temples of Angkor, then return to Bangkok for a night, before spending two nights in Sri Lanka, in Colombo. We would visit the tea plantations in Kandy, then spend the rest of our vacation, a little more than a week, on the beach—no ruins to tour, no shops to check out—just being with each other.