The Things That Matter

by Nate Berkus

  (Illustration Credit 3.13)

  (Illustration Credit 3.14)

  In Brian’s ceiling is a large skylight made out of blue, green, and pale yellow glass. When the sun is overhead on long summer days, the colors refract the light and send it shimmering around the room. Two oversized black-framed mirrors whose glass has been deliberately aged hang on the walls, one of them reflecting a sculpture of two intertwined lovers that, I want to be charitable, sort of reminds me of the famous scene on the beach in From Here to Eternity—if Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr had been played by two large lumpy brown chestnuts. “Everyone hates it but me.” Brian shrugs, adding defensively, “I thought it was interesting.”

  Actually if it’s interesting you want, then nothing beats the two packets of sky-blue letters with lacy handwriting on them, delicately knotted in black string. They look like envelopes sent home from boarding school, or camp, but they’re not. In fact, Brian isn’t even quite sure whose letters they are. He discovered them at a junk shop, and brought them home for safekeeping. “When I bought them, I thought to myself, ‘I wonder what’s inside there.’ But I’ve never dared to look. I figured it was invasive enough to own them, so I told myself I would never read them. I would protect them.” Just beyond the letters, two very striking green vases elevated on stone plinths can be found on the fire escape. “I keep them there as a reminder of the garden I don’t have,” Brian tells me. “Every year the co-op board threatens to call the fire department and make me remove them.” For now, at least, they continue to bring a touch of country life to Manhattan.

  (Illustration Credit 3.15)

  (Illustration Credit 3.17)

  Brian’s diaries are on the top shelf of his bookcase, accessible only by a stepladder. (If there was ever a fire, he assures me, he would snub the owl, the canaries, and the hummingbirds, grab his diaries, and run like hell.) He hides other volumes elsewhere in his apartment, and now and again he’ll dive into one of them. “It’s twenty years of my life,” he says simply. “And I like seeing the musical notes, annotations, and ideas I’ve inscribed during the years I spent studying music.” Next to those diaries is a vintage black Chinese painter’s box that holds an Indonesian puppet, the sort that jerks around on wooden sticks. “I keep the box locked,” Brian says. “I was afraid the puppet might come to life.” I have to admit, I’m sort of relieved.

  Are any of us as uncomplicated as we think we are? Do our design styles ever follow a straight line? I don’t think so. We inherit the DNA of what we love and though we can reject it or accept it, it will always form the earliest foundation of who we later turn out to be. What’s most fascinating to me about Brian’s space is how a childhood love of rocks, minerals, and sky has evolved into the completely grown-up landscape of light and stones that inhabit his interior. How a great-uncle he barely knew created the birds that look down from shelves and cabinets, alongside a couple of vintage green casserole pots that, granted, may never again see the likes of Texas Hash, but still remind him of the best parts of a Midwestern childhood. And how a batch of unread letters will remain, forever, a batch of unread letters.

  (Illustration Credit 3.18)

  I can now throw out a guess as to why Brian’s space is so mysterious. It’s because this very outgoing yet private man reveres the enigma of who we are and who we become. On his watch, a simple piece of stone on a tray is allowed to surge, a sand-dollar-shaped Buddhist amulet makes your jaw drop, and a bird that once raced through the night becomes a lovingly detailed miracle. The stones soar, the birds can’t, and yet they both come to life. Brian Sawyer may design spaces for a living, but he is also an architect and a curator of all the people he has ever been, and all the things he has ever seen, loved, and held on to.

  (Illustration Credit 4.3)

  When I first walked into Barri Leiner Grant’s new apartment off Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive and saw the chipping vintage bookshelves in her foyer, I almost didn’t need to see the rest of the place.

  “This is you right here,” I told her. And honestly, I couldn’t love anything more. The shelves spill over with mirrors, vases and figurines, framed family photos, vintage wooden boxes, Eiffel Towers in various sizes, and stacks of fashion and design books. There’s a collection of heart-shaped rocks, a little jade necklace, a pair of loving cups, a funny-looking owl, even a steel horse bit that you would swear was made by Gucci. And, of course, to know Barri is to know that there’s always going to be a plate of shells she brought home from the beach.

  A writer, photo stylist, jewelry designer, and mom, Barri could care less about the big stuff. The thing she is passionate about is what I call the “smalls”—a tattered ticket stub from a great evening out, a party favor from a night she couldn’t stand to see end, a handful of yellowing dice in a quartz holder guarded by a thumb-sized Scottie. The bookshelves in her foyer are the perfect landing pads for Barri’s mementos and an opportunity for her to tell the story of who she is.

  She’s a hunter-gatherer, one of those diehard souls who wakes up at dawn on a sub-zero Chicago morning, grabs a hot cup of coffee, woolly mittens, and haunts the outdoor flea markets. The dealers all know her by name. They look for her, wait for her, even set aside a shell-encrusted dish, or a rusted capital letter “B” for her.

  Since just about everything she loves comes from a flea market or a yard sale, the home she was looking for in Chicago had to have enough character to support her things. A modern glass box just wouldn’t do it. She eventually found what she was looking for—a vintage light-filled apartment with original moldings and old metal doorknobs that serves as the life-sized jewelry box for the trinkets and memories she lives with every day.

  What I love most about Barri’s apartment (aside from the fact that almost nothing in it is new) is that the rooms are both handsome and playful. The walls are painted pale gray to offset the apartment’s glossy white moldings—a color combination that always looks expensive—but she’s turned everything on its ear by throwing in an ottoman reupholstered in shocking pink. That’s very Barri. Even after fourteen years of friendship, she can still throw me a shocking pink curveball that I just don’t see coming. Her space always makes me think of a very elegant banker wearing a chalk-striped suit with funny socks. It’s filled with individual moments that knock me out. An old branch sitting on top of a bookshelf? (I can’t remember who did that first, Barri or me, but it’s in both of our homes.)

  Barri’s two favorite words are magical and memories. These words come up a lot when she talks about her late mother. Ellen Jane Leiner was fun and glamorous, a petite, head-turning babe, stylish in her Jackie O. dark glasses. “My mom polka-dotted our lives with places, experiences, with her words, and with love,” Barri says. Whether it was squeezing in an extra hour on the beach as the sun went down, or splurging on lobster at a local diner with her two girls by her side, or waiting impatiently every summer for her favorite Santa Rosa plums to show up in the local supermarket, Ellen Leiner always made room for a good time. “For my mother, the gas tank was always veering toward empty,” says Barri. “She was just constantly soaking life up. She used to say to my sister and me, ‘Lean forward, girls, we’re running on luck.’ … She had a giant personality, and she led a big life. And today I say that exact same thing to my own girls.”

  The Jersey Shore, where Barri grew up, in the late ’60s and early ’70s was miles of old-school boardwalk linking one town to the next. It was pebbly jetties extending out into the waves, where boys and men fished and hauled in crabs. It was a not-so-ritzy beach club with cabanas where a teenage girl could slather on the Coppertone and change into her bikini. It was beachfront snack bars selling burgers and hot dogs, and lots of arcade games. And when summer was over, and the population thinned out, long afternoons spent on the beach gave way to chunky wool sweaters, pumpkin patches, and farms glimpsed from the backseat of a station wagon. It was a place where a kid could have fun for free.

  Barri and her mother spoke every single day. So
when her mom died of cancer at age 50, Barri, then 26, was devastated. She remembers attempting to sort through and preserve the essence of her mother, but it was tricky. “You could fit in the palm of your hand what my mother physically left behind,” Barri says. “A few trinkets and bits of jewelry here and there. She wasn’t a saver, not a keeper of things.”

  Which is why, more than almost any other home I know, Barri’s interior is the one most linked to her past, and to the memories she wants to keep alive, not just for herself, but for her two daughters—Emma and Quinn. “I took a 360-degree turn from my mother’s design style, in that old, dinged-up things mean a lot to me. My mother was more ‘Live it, don’t chronicle it.’ The difference with us is that Emma and Quinn keep a record of what we do together as a family—whether it’s a receipt, a seashell, or a playbill from a show we saw.” And all these souvenirs are displayed.

  A magical mother and the spirit of a childhood “spent on vacation” are alive in every room. The apartment isn’t just a place that injects the spirit of sunshine-yellow flip-flops into a residential Midwestern neighborhood. It’s a home that evokes the breezy memories of a childhood spent on the beach. The apartment may be some 700 miles away from the nearest lobster trap, but it looks like a weathered house atop a sand dune, a place that’s been in the same family forever. If it had a driveway, that driveway would be made of broken oyster shells. Barri’s apartment is filled with memories and things that her own two daughters can literally have, hold, and pass on to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I think of my friend as a first-generation legacy-maker.

  One of the things I love most about Barri is her stylistic freedom—her ability to transform every single space in her house into a tableau that showcases the things that matter most to her. For example, one wall of her office has been transformed into a visual Grand Central Station, a wall thumbtacked with vintage postcards, I NY bumper stickers, place cards from dinner parties, quotes you instantly want to commit to memory, faded watercolors painted by her daughters, and sweet notes from old friends. Barri didn’t scour the aisles of a superstore for the perfect mass-produced magnetic strips or bulletin board, either. She just unrolled a wall-sized piece of cork and painted it white.

  Outside that back office, the rest of her space is all about silvery shells, gray rocks, and low tide. The beach and her love of vintage things show up in every piece she chooses for her home, from a simple scallop shell in a silver dish to a sheared beaver pillow she had made from her mother’s old fur coat. “I can smell her perfume when I think of her in that coat.”

  We often look to other people for permission to do things in our homes that haven’t occurred to us. I love taking something a person will never use anymore—the only one who needs a mink coat in 2012 is a mink—and turning it into a luxurious pillow that brings back the memory of a beautiful mother you’ll always miss. Why not tie a piece of twine around an antique glass decanter, or perch a branch atop a bookshelf, just because you happen to like the way these things make you feel? Why not fill your home with old rocks and shells and pieces of driftwood you’ve scooped up from the shore?

  Barri’s shells are everywhere—on side tables, mantelpieces, and windowsills; in cookie jars, silver bowls, and chipped porcelain dishes. Every little set of shells represents an actual trip she and her family took together. The mist-colored scallop shells on the side table beside the couch are from Nantucket. A bowl of darker shells were found on the beach in Ocracoke, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. One time, Barri—who is incapable of giving anyone a thoughtless gift—brought me twenty seashells, stacked from the tiniest to the biggest. They were wrapped in a little cellophane bag tied with a red-and-white gingham ribbon, and came with a vintage postcard on which she explained that she and the girls collected them on the beach for me. Those shells reside in my bathroom to this day. Another time, she gave me a small silver matchbook, engraved with a “B,” for Berkus. “You don’t know how hard it is for me to part with this,” said B for Barri. Believe me, I knew, which is why I love it all the more.

  Probably my favorite moment in Barri’s home—the moment that makes me covet her personal style—is the chalkboard she’s placed above the fireplace mantel in the living room. How many mirrors and paintings and flat-screen TVs have we seen above fireplace mantels? Putting an old black chalkboard in a plain wood frame above the mantel, and then having your kids draw on it whenever they want, feels spontaneous and imaginative and liberating. It’s a confident move, and when you think about it, you can’t really have personal style without confidence. You have to decide who you are and what you like.

  On one wall of the living room is a display of silhouettes of Barri’s daughters in wood frames (one with a water stain across it, which, no surprise, Barri loves). Taken from actual sittings, they’re romantic, stylish, and whimsical all at the same time. On the floor below the cluster of silhouettes sits an antique dollhouse, which Quinn filled with tiny, antique sticks of furniture, along with a couple of babies that look an awful lot like space aliens. The dollhouse may be missing part of its roof, but it looks like someone’s grandfather made it. “I never grew up with a dollhouse—I think my mother would have freaked—but I always liked dollhouses at other people’s places, so I found dollhouses at flea markets for my daughters.”

  In the dining room, beneath a vintage crystal chandelier, is a massive wooden table that I gave Barri as a present, surrounded by custom-embroidered 1960s Baker chairs that came from an old Grand Dame apartment on Lake Shore Drive. At one point, the embroidery was a dramatic orange, but time, and years of sun off the lake, has faded its blaze. What can I say? We both like them better this way.

  I see a lot of people struggling to make their spaces slightly unreal, to keep the actual life they lead out of their homes. I’m not a big fan of that, and neither is Barri. She thrives on imperfection, she celebrates all major flaws, she brings in real life in a way that’s unexpected and honest, and kind of great-looking.

  Above a tricycle parked in the dining room hang three weathered, wood-framed vintage maps of Maine, Chicago, and New Castle, Delaware, which Barri found in various flea markets over the years, with each representing a place she has either lived or vacationed in her life, while more shells lounge in a nearby antique tray. Inside an old bead-board cabinet in the dining room is one of her most prized possessions—a monogrammed glass Tiffany pitcher that her father kept in his office when Barri was growing up.

  “I never asked him for it, but I always loved that pitcher from afar. On my dad’s last visit, he gave it to me. It was like magic—and today I fill it with flowers.” Barri, who calls herself a “monogram maniac,” likes the rounded, engraved 1960s Mad Men–era type that makes up her father’s initials.

  In a nook of the kitchen hang some of her daughters’ framed stick-figure paintings and drawings, including one that says, “Momie, I love you because I like you,” and a 4-year-old girl’s feminist anthem: “I am a wimin.”

  When they first moved into the apartment, Barri told her two daughters that they could paint their bedrooms whatever color they wanted, with one stipulation: The color had to come from the beach. Emma went with a surf-blue for her walls, while Quinn decided on a lighter Nantucket-blue. Mixed in with the “Peace” and “Love” signs dotting both bedrooms are leopard-print sheets; antique quilts; sock monkeys; bead-board cabinets and hutches; a flea market “restaurant,” with its own fridge, stove, and sink; more shells; water glasses brimming with fresh tulips; and even a fat vintage Tiffany whale silhouetted against a windowpane.

  “Ever since my girls were little, they’ve each kept what I call ‘memory boxes,’ ” Barri explains. Opening the lid, she starts sorting through things. “These are progress reports from school. Here’s a candle from an old birthday cake. Here’s a ticket to some concert or other.” Recently, Quinn brought home a ticket from a ball game, all crinkled in her back pocket, so she could save it in her memory box. “She’s starting to make her o
wn memories. And you know something else? Both girls will probably collect shells for the rest of their lives.”

  Even if your story lacks storybook continuity, as most of ours do, a place, a home, and in some cases, a feeling—can be as unbounded as an Atlantic beach. We cherish the best parts of the past in different ways. If Barri’s mother polka-dotted her childhood with places, experiences, words, and love, Barri is doing the same for her own two daughters. Summertime can be transformed into a bowlful of scallop shells. A late-day breeze can become the creased wall map of a much-loved vacation spot. The memory of a mother’s appetite for life lives on in a family who will continue collecting memories together. In the end, “everything finds its place,” Barri says. “That’s what home really is to me.”

  (Illustration Credit 5.1)

  It all begins with a gazelle who goes by the name of Fiona. This extremely regal, but very demure, brass figure with pointy antlers lounges on a smoked-glass coffee table in Kelly Framel’s intimate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, living room, eclipsing all that surrounds it, including a black-and-gold deco table lamp, a small metal sculpture that looks like it recently fell to earth, a fat white candle, and a stack of oversized design books. Fiona takes in everything: the two overlapping black-and-white cowhides on the floor, the simple white sofa decked out with gold metallic–trimmed throw pillows, the black-shaded floor lamp whose long neck arcs over a nearby armchair, the Lucite dining table that can seat six without taking up any space visually, and a black-and-white leather ottoman that looks like it came straight from the Casbah.