by Nate Berkus
I think that’s exactly the way he would have wanted it, especially in light of all that I witnessed in the schoolhouse morgue. His brother Marcelo once said to me that the only thing that could ever have taken Fernando off this planet was one of the largest natural disasters in history—it took a tsunami to take Fernando from us. And so I returned to Chicago alone, back to the home he had changed for the better, the place where our lives had joined, where we’d spent so much of our time.
Since December 26, 2004, I have never defined myself by anything other than my ability to survive. I don’t think about whether I’m successful, or I’m not successful, famous or not famous, busy or bored. To me, the ultimate question, the only question, is, Can I survive or can’t I? That’s what matters. I remember once talking to a friend who never seemed able to appreciate the beauty of a moment. She and I had gone to a fantastic destination wedding, and the next day all she kept saying was how she couldn’t believe it was over, and that now she’d have to return to her everyday life. I had to remind her that the point of the trip wasn’t that it was over, but that it had happened. Which is how I think about the year I had with Fernando.
Coming back to Chicago was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do because it meant acknowledging that Fernando was really, truly gone. I mean, if I were still in Southeast Asia glued to the BBC as the newscasters continued to calculate the death toll, if I were still sleeping on a stranger’s floor alongside others who the tsunami had left lost and alone, if I were still fending off friends and family who were begging me to come home, well, that meant I was still inside the experience. Leaving meant the experience was over, that it was the past, that it had become a devastating chapter in my life, and I was now left to face the question of what the future would be like without Fernando.
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When I walked back into my apartment for the first time, my mom and dad—who, as I said, had been divorced since I was 2 years old—were sitting on the sofa. They had been together for days, waiting for me to board a plane from Southeast Asia and come home. It was my mother, actually, who told me there was a high risk of airborne illnesses in Sri Lanka and that I should return to the States as soon as I could get a flight. For my health. For my safety. For my sanity.
I spent the first two weeks at home in bed, not showering, not doing much of anything, really, but sleeping when I could and crying constantly and smoking cigarettes nonstop. A doctor came by to check on me, and a psychotherapist showed up at the house every day. I had no appetite, and was weighing in at 150 pounds. Because I was on such a crazy pharmacological cocktail—the doctors at the Sri Lankan hospital prescribed antibiotics, but neglected to explain that they’d also given me Klonopin, a strong tranquilizer—it’s no wonder I couldn’t sustain much of a conversation with anybody.
One of my greatest comforts at that time was being inside a home that was overflowing with memories. Fernando’s imprint and essence and vision—the fact that he’d flipped a vase upside down and set it on the fireplace mantel—held me together when I was coming undone. In the days before we’d left for our trip, we’d had an argument about what I wanted for Christmas. By now, you’ve noticed that we were both pretty good at arguing and, like any two people in the process of blending their lives, we did our fair share of it. I told Fernando that the best present I could ever receive would be one of his woven photographs. Fernando had always been inspired by woven crafts. He began cutting up his photos, then weaving the strips back together so that they almost resembled pictorial textiles. He took his work from being beautiful to being something that gave back a little bit more every time you looked at it. He sliced apart a moment, and then remade it on his own terms—more intricate, more fragile, more resonant, and far more unique. At the time I made my request, all twelve of his woven photographs were on exhibit at the Ralph Pucci gallery in Manhattan. Fernando was angry and hurt that I had asked him for one. The truth was, he didn’t want to sell any of them, and if he could afford to keep them all, he would have. He wanted to know how I could be so insensitive as to ask him for something he never wanted to part with in the first place? And yet the day before our flight to Asia, Fernando arranged to have not one, but two of them sent to the apartment. And when I got home that first awful night, they were leaning against the wall in the foyer.
“I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED THAT WHEN THE SOUL GETS WHAT IT CAME TO GET, IT GOES.”
I couldn’t love those two pieces more. They represent the sacrifice Fernando had made to be with me. He and I shuttled back and forth between New York and Chicago. He always carried the strips of his photos with him in a cardboard tube and worked on them in his spare time. He’d been wanting to give up commercial photography for fine art photography, and those amazing woven photographs symbolized that goal, and his decision to share them with me symbolized the hope he had for our future.
I was deluged with condolences, some a little awkward, some a little misguided, all genuinely well meaning. But one that stands out, that I remember very clearly, was that at some point during those excruciating first weeks, Oprah came to my house. She crawled into bed beside me and listened while I cried. I kept asking, “Why?” It was not a rhetorical question. I needed something to start making sense. She was quiet for a long time, then finally spoke: “I’ve always believed that when the soul gets what it came to get, it goes.”
In that moment, I felt I understood what Fernando had come to get: home. Even though he’d had incredible relationships before we met, his whole life he’d wanted nothing more than a feeling of home, of security. It’s what we both wanted and it’s what we were fated to give each other.
When you met Fernando, you knew you were among one of the strongest, most purposeful and persistent people you’d ever meet—that he was here to accomplish what he set out to accomplish, and that if you didn’t understand that, he had no time for you. He genuinely didn’t get what it was like not to have his own way. He set the bar extremely high for people but never any higher than it was set for himself. Because of Fernando, I hold the people I love a little bit longer; I try to listen when I’m too tired to listen; I can’t imagine ever worrying, let alone arguing, about taking three weeks off. And not a day goes by when I don’t think about him. I know when he would be proud of me, and when he would be disappointed in me. And I also know that the memories I have of making a home and feeling at home with another human being—that is all part of Fernando’s legacy.
Did the loss of Fernando make it impossible for me to stay in Chicago? The answer is both yes and no. Stronger than my grief is my instinct for nesting, for creating a space that feels like home. For about a year, I left things in my apartment exactly as they were when Fernando was alive. Then one day I was sitting in my living room, and I found myself wondering, What if those chairs faced the opposite direction? And, What if I moved that metal bookshelf over to that wall—wouldn’t that work better in this room? Then I thought, But I can’t move them, because this is the way Fernando and I had this room. If I moved things, I would be moving him, and the memories we shared in that space.
In the very next instant, I realized that moving things around and reshuffling interiors and surfaces had been a profound part of our relationship—and that the concept of leaving my apartment as it was, frozen in time like an exhibit, would have made Fernando laugh his ass off, that the best way to honor him was to follow my instincts, to mix it up and continue the experiment, just as I’d done my whole life. My home in Chicago was never about creating a shrine or a permanent collection. Fernando was alive in all the things I surrounded myself with—he still is—and for me to suspend that evolution was in fact the polar opposite of who he was and everything he believed in and everything we’d done together.
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I could tell you Brian Sawyer was born and raised in Indian
a, that he comes from farming stock, and that as a boy he collected stones, quartzes, minerals, and whatever seashells he could find, even though there weren’t any beaches for miles around. I could explain how at Wabash College he studied music and biology, before one of his professors recommended he follow his bliss and pursue landscape architecture. And that would pretty much bring us right up to the present, where as principal of Sawyer-Berson, his New York City architectural firm, Brian designs residences ranging from East Hampton mansions to Manhattan roof gardens to sprawling mountain homes in Telluride. But in telling you these things, all I’d be giving you is his bio. To really understand the life of Brian, you’ve got to see his stuff.
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A glimpse inside his jewel-box of a foyer, which also serves as his dining room and office, tells you almost everything you need to know about this brilliant man. The classic painted paneling matches the darkest vein from his Carrera marble fireplace and offsets the black table where Brian spends most of his time blueprinting the ways for his clients to live. An ancient-looking brass chandelier that began its life in a private club or a fraternity (he can’t remember which) hovers above the desk like some kind of mythological creature coming in for a landing. Against one wall is a black upright piano whose lid he hasn’t opened in two years, not because he doesn’t love it, but because he knows that the piano demands daily practice, and he has no time right now.
But just as you think you’ve got Brian pegged as a buttoned-up workaholic, you look around the room and it begins to dawn on you that he’s a lot more off-center and complex than that. The objects that collude and collide in my friend’s Greenwich Village apartment encompass everything from Buddhist amulets to ostrich feathers to beautiful bowls to photography to the most amazing menagerie of birds I’ve ever seen outside the Museum of Natural History. The truth is, when you enter Brian Sawyer’s apartment, you almost want to get the back of your hand stamped.
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A lot of the pleasure I get from owning something comes from telling the story of where and how I got it, what sort of deal I struck, and, of course, what I went through to get it back home in one piece. But Brian’s stuff always has an aura of mystery about it. Over our decade-long friendship, he and I have ducked in and out of who knows how many antiques marts and flea markets from Milan to Mexico. The thing is, I cannot remember ever seeing Brian buy anything! I’m the guy you glare at as he attempts to stuff the Moroccan side table under his airplane seat. But Brian is exactly the opposite. He looks, he touches, he occasionally circles back and looks again, but somehow he always manages to leave empty-handed. Then a week later I drop by his place, only to find it filled with the most amazing antique brackets and ceramic figurines and coral branches and African stools and always, always, a bird I could swear I’ve never seen before. And that’s Brian: highly strategic in all he does but (unless the two of you are riding your bicycles up to the Cloisters on a Saturday afternoon) one of those guys who never seems to sweat.
The other thing about Brian is that he’s fantastically improvisational. As he explains it, “I like to find stuff and then put it in more worshipful settings.” Which means that in his guest bedroom, a small Asian painting he found at a Chinese flea market in Manhattan (and which he happily dismisses as “a piece of junk”) has been done up in a new black frame, with a generous silk mat, and is well on its way to dominating an entire wall. My eyes are riveted to that painting, in a way they wouldn’t be if he hadn’t scooped it out of the chorus and given it a starring role. It’s a reminder that sometimes presentation makes all the difference. On either side of the bed are red lacquer lamps with small clocks built into them that Brian discovered in an antiques store in Los Angeles. And at the foot of the bed there’s an elegant eighteenth-century English wardrobe that Brian lined with marbleized paper. It doesn’t hold much twenty-first-century-sized clothing but it makes an excellent perch for the stuffed white dove that sits on top of it, encased in glass.
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Just down the hallway, Brian’s “summer bedroom,” as he calls it—“I admit, it sounds completely ridiculous,”—is both chic and comfortable. Mixed in with the books on his shelves are simple, circular shapes known as “bis.” It is now time for Bis 101: Bis (pronounced bees) are small stone offerings that people tuck behind the altars at Buddhist temples. While common across the world, the most precious ones are made from either pure white or a flawlessly transparent green jade. The smaller ones are about the size of drink coasters, while the larger ones resemble old record albums. Brian owns dozens and dozens of them. “Mine are all kind of average,” he says. “I go to Chinese flea markets and just start haggling.”
He also collects beautiful bowls, not to store paper clips or thumbtacks in—in fact, some cost so much he wouldn’t dare—but to admire as a form of everyday sculpture, especially the ones created by a friend, ceramicist Peter Lane, which combine inky blueberry colors, deep plums, and violets against a celadon glaze. He also collects and displays bowls and dishes made out of Chinese horn. “What I love most is the expression of material—rock or quartz—in this beautiful, unusual, almost translucent way.”
One of Brian’s most prized bookshelf possessions is an eighteenth-century courier’s box that he bought at the estate sale of Evangeline Bruce, renowned fashionista and wife of David Bruce, the U.S. envoy to France, Germany, Britain, China, and NATO. It’s designed to hold letters and documents, and even though Brian hasn’t figured out what to put inside it, he likes the way it looks. So do I. Another beautiful object with next to no function is a thick calligraphy brush connected to a piece of red-dyed coral. It sits on the shelf beside a travertine obelisk and makes him smile every time he sees it.
In the foyer/dining room, Brian’s stuff really takes flight.… Stuffed canaries and hummingbirds sit patiently on the high shelf that caps the molding, while an enormous goose ringed by thistles shares space with a glaring snowy owl. The birds were a legacy of Brian’s great-uncle, a butcher who had a thriving side business as a professional taxidermist. When he died at the age of 102, he left Brian his entire collection. Over the years, Brian has added to what he owns, and friends have also chipped in with pheasants and songbirds. If they weren’t so exquisite, the room might look like Tippi Hedren was about to stop by—very Hitchcock. But they’re extraordinary, and maybe even a little melancholy.
Amid the birds, you can also find two small paintings—one by his maternal grandmother, the other by his paternal one (both of them liked to draw). Two other objects remind him of his childhood: a pair of old-fashioned dark green casserole dishes. Brian’s mother used to cook his favorite childhood meal in those pots, a 1970s-era hodgepodge known as “Texas Hash,” a kind of chili made with rice, cheese, and green bell pepper. As a guy who’s pretty much obsessed with a little something called “Bavarian Wiener Casserole,” I’m only sorry that there was no canned cream of mushroom soup involved. “Texas Hash was delicious, but it’s maybe better left as a memory,” Brian says, “because someone tried to make it for me a few years ago, and it was just awful. But my mother loved those pots, and I convinced her to give me three of them.” He is presently using one pot to collect raindrops from a leak in the hallway, one of the bona fides of New York City life.
Behind the door is a high chair you would have sworn Brian ate from as a baby, and he would have, he insists, if he’d been born in an English country manor somewhere around 1783. Instead, he recaned and refinished the chair because he wanted to restore it to its former glory, just as he frames his collection of birds in a way that accents both their oddness and their beauty.
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On the treasure-filled mantel above the fireplace, on either side of a blue-hued portrait of sky and clouds painted by an artist friend, are two glass bulldogs, one black and one white, resting on gold vintage wall brackets. Brian found the dogs at John Derian, an antiques store in the East Village that s
pecializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ephemera. They are joined by a small painting that was a birthday gift from the artist Ross Bleckner, and a second pair of moody little pugs, who gaze into the distance as if they’re waiting for their master to come home. “I thought those dogs went pretty well with the Chinese theme around here,” Brian says. Two more stuffed parakeets and an extremely colorful stuffed wood duck also populate the mantelpiece, along with a stern, beautiful portrait of a young Greek man created by my late partner, Fernando Bengoechea. “It’s one of my very favorite things,” Brian says. Mine, too.
Another treasure Brian brought home from the Evangeline Bruce estate sale is a tiny ink drawing of the Hotel de Crillon in Paris. It rests on three old brown-leather books. Two tall brass church candlesticks flank the fireplace, and two more large circular bis rest against the marble. The effect is incredibly calming.
Brian designed the classic black desk in his foyer. “I wanted the same leather as my cordovan shoes. It’s my favorite table. And it’s my absolute favorite place to sit.” On one edge of the desk rests something called a “scholar’s rock”—a naturally occurring piece of coral-like stone formed by the movement of water and tides. Scholar’s rocks come in all sizes and colors, and weigh anywhere from twenty to two hundred pounds. “They’re objects of contemplation,” Brian explains.
The roots of that passion—the first rocks, shells, and minerals Brian began collecting as a boy—sit on a tray in the foyer. Next to it is one of his favorite things, a pale white plaster bas-relief of Oscar Wilde in profile. Brian and his mother found it in an Indiana antiques store, and when it hit him who it was, he realized … well, you can’t not buy a profile of Oscar Wilde in the middle of Indiana. And as long as you’re exhibiting stuff that you just plain like, you might as well put out a tiny pristine white skull, and a small bowl holding what looks like dust, but is actually the crushed stone remains he brought back from an active Guatemalan volcano. (The soles of his shoes melted, but he got his rocks!)