The Things That Matter

by Nate Berkus

  As the guy with a stuffed leather rhino head mounted on the wall of his bathroom, I’m not about to question the presence of a golden gazelle in another person’s space. And though I may have swiped that rhino head from my mother’s basement in Minnesota, while Kelly and Fiona hooked up on eBay, neither Kelly nor I would ever consider making a move without them. “No matter what changes around here, Fiona always has a place of prominence in my life,” Kelly tells me as she shifts her brass friend’s position an inch or two to the left. “She brings a lot of glamorous energy to the space.”

  In fact, Fiona epitomizes the very glamorous, very female, very vintage energy of Kelly’s apartment, but she’s also willing to share the spotlight. Flea market treasures, design photos, offbeat artwork, mementos from Kelly’s Austin, Texas, upbringing—yep, that’s a hog’s jawbone on the small Lucite table, a gift from Kelly’s father, who found it on a hunting expedition—and, of course, the jewelry. When she’s not focused on Glamorai, her fashion blog, Kelly collects it, designs it, and revels in it. I believe it was Confucius who said, “If you choose a job you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.” That line seems custom-made for a woman whose life is her work, whose work is her life, and whose very chic interior is a combination of the two.

  Kelly is one of the very few people I’ve seen who has actually managed to turn a run-of-the-mill (think tasteful, yet generic) newly constructed apartment into a home layered with color, texture, and enough quirky little surprises to make it completely her own. It’s not easy to take a shell and create something vibrant, let alone—and this is a word I don’t just throw around—soulful. But by focusing on blacks, whites, and golds, she has created a sensuous, candlelit interior that mixes a little bit of Boogie Nights, a little bit of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and a whole lot of personal style.

  If the hog’s jawbone from Dad didn’t make it clear, I can tell you that Kelly comes by her love of stuff naturally. As a girl growing up in Austin, she—and her parents and her extended family—liked two things: going to open houses and scouring flea markets. Whether through luck or premeditation, the Framel ancestral gathering place happened to be close to a gargantuan flea market, and when they weren’t eating turkey or stuffing stockings, the family spent practically every end-of-year holiday browsing and haggling, so it’s no wonder that the woman was born to bargain. When she isn’t haunting vintage stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan, or slowing down in front of yard sales in the Hamptons, or digging for treasures online, she’s prowling flea markets across New England to ensure that Fiona will always have plenty of company.

  Take the trio of paintings hanging in her living room. The first shows two children huddled together —“That picture reminds me of my old roommate and me,” she says—the second is a preliminary sketch of what will eventually become a drop-dead chic party dress by a designer from Banana Republic, where Kelly has been a consultant, and the third is a portrait of Kelly that an antiques dealer made one day when she was poking around his showroom. It seems to me that the picture looks more like a really grizzled country star than a really stunning Kelly Framel, but it’s the thought that counts.

  Then there’s the portrait of the striking, milky-skinned girl gazing dolefully into space. Who is she? Well, whenever Kelly and her friends make their thrice-yearly pilgrimages to a Massachusetts flea market, they spend the night at a nearby inn whose interior is filled with turn-of-the-century paintings of children. But not just any children. In the early twentieth century, Kelly explains, traveling artists/salesmen pre-painted children’s bodies, then went door to door in search of parents who wanted a portrait of their kids. Wasting no time, the artists would paint the real heads onto their canvases. “It’s an extremely weird sub-genre of early American art,” Kelly says. “My friends and I like to call the paintings at the inn where we stay the ‘ghost babies.’ So when I found this at a flea market, I knew I had to have it.”

  Every square inch of that home is well used, and well loved. Kelly’s desk is populated with candles, an incense holder, and a giant brandy snifter crowded with matches from restaurants, nightclubs, and hotels. A dazzling 1970s-era silver-and-gold sculpture hangs on the wall, giving off a kind of ironic Bee Gees vibe. Kelly found the piece at a Massachusetts flea market, and aware that C. Jeré pieces were selling for up to $10,000 online, was more than happy to pay the $140 asking price. Somewhere outside Boston, a flea market proprietor is sobbing into his clam chowder.

  As for the bedroom, how gutsy is it to hang a giant longhorn above a perfectly pristine queen-sized bed? She found the three-foot-long steer horn online, and though I’m not from Texas, seeing it makes me want to lasso something and drill for oil. Even more fantastic are the two mannequins beside the bed, dripping with beads, necklaces, belts, and medallions, some of them Kelly’s own designs, others just stuff she loves wearing. On one wall are two framed black-and-white pictures Kelly tore out of French Vogue. They complement the old chest of drawers she got from Craigslist, sanded down, and painted into a black-and-white piece that could have fit very nicely in Christian Dior’s atelier. On that chest she’s laid out a sparkly tableau of vintage bowls overflowing with bracelets, necklaces, candles, an inky-black skull candleholder, and a lamp that on closer inspection reveals itself to be a woman with long legs that reach up into a lampshade skirt. A black wastepaper basket in the shape of a snare drum (another yard sale find) completes the picture.

  Kelly has also transformed her utilitarian kitchen into something fresh. She found the Lucite chairs on the streets of Brooklyn and draped lush pieces of sheepskin over their seats, which took them from vaguely uncomfortable to I’m-so-happy-here-I-will-never-stand-up-again. Instead of stuffing her silverware and glasses inside a drawer or behind a cabinet, she has hung rows of clear floating shelves on one wall, anchored by a plain plastic planter. For a moment you can almost believe you’re gazing at a contemporary art installation. Her forks, knives, and spoons are divided into a row of glasses on the bottom shelf; flea market glasses are lined up on the next shelf; another row of glasses sits on the middle shelf; vintage spice jars make up the next; and a collection of glossy white ceramic pieces top it all off. Kelly’s cheese board is a vintage black-and-white granite chess set she brought home from a Hamptons yard sale. “I don’t always like to use things the way they were intended to be used,” she says, pointing to a container with a gold reindeer-head lid that she stores her tiny Pyrex measuring glasses in. I’ve always been a sucker for anybody who tries to think outside the gold reindeer head.

  If your bathroom lacked the space for a full-length mirror, what would you do? Kelly has positioned hers on the hallway wall outside the bathroom. Then, in order to deflect attention from the fact that she has positioned one there, she hung nearly a dozen vintage mirrors around it. In a ground-floor apartment where the shades are perpetually drawn for privacy, the mirrors give her space light and a sense of fun … that is, if you define fun as cutting up a scrap of Ralph Lauren fabric and decoupaging it over the frame of one of your mirrors, using Mod Podge glue. And if she’s ever running short on shampoo, or soap, she can jot down a reminder on the slate board she keeps in the hall of mirrors, grab her favorite hat from the white bust sitting by the board—the bust looks like a Roman philosopher in training to become a drag queen, thanks to the feather and turquoise necklaces he’s modeling—and take it from there.

  “It matters a lot to me that I have a clear separation between my living and working spaces,” Kelly says. She’s managed to achieve that separation through a staircase topped with block letters reading, “Your Day Will Go the Way the Corners of Your Mouth Turn,” which ushers her into a beautifully organized office.

  When most of us hear office, we turn a little schoolmarm-y. We think, I must have a grown-up desk. And I need a serious lamp. And even I will invest in a chair that twists and turns and puts people on hold while notarizing forty-six documents and making lunch reservations. It’s like we believe that installing ma
jor office furniture communicates gravity and purpose. I love Kelly’s workspace so much because it encourages pure play and genuine creativity. Stones and gems and bead-filled glass jars and shallow bowls, multicolored spools of thread, and wall hooks filled with rings and garlands are all there for the taking. It makes me want to become a jewelry designer in my next life, or maybe even later in this one, but at the moment, I feel like I’m inside an amazing retail store where I just want to buy everything I see.

  A pretty white chair covered with another sheepskin is Kelly’s command central, and to circumvent the built-in concrete columns, and with an assist from IKEA, Kelly installed custom-cut white countertops along one wall. On another wall is a shelf lined with silver reindeer that sit beside yet another mannequin (this one is wearing sound-blocking gold earphones), a beautiful black-and-white shot of Kelly, and several very graceful hand mannequins pointing and gesturing as if they’ve been possessed by Vanna White. Another wall is devoted to books and white filing cabinets, along with a vignette that includes an Asian basket, a painting of a dog, and a worn-looking octopus with four stringy red legs. Yes, a child could have made it, but it’s actually a Kelly original, created from an old skirt and a little imagination. “I call it ‘Glamour Monster,’ ” she says.

  My favorite thing in this room has to be the tall, skinny theater marquee signs Kelly found in a Broadway Dumpster, presumably after the show in question had closed. One reads “ ‘Devastatingly Funny!’—The New York Times” while another reads, “Frantically Cheerful!” She found the signs on her way to a job one morning, and arranged to store them there until she could find a pal with a truck. Forget remembering birthdays and sending chicken soup when someone has the flu, real New Yorkers understand that lugging theater marquee signs from Midtown Manhattan to Williamsburg is the mark of a true friend.

  Give your space personality! I can’t tell you how many times those words show up in TV shows and magazines dedicated to design. The thing is, a lot of people take that as a signal to start poring through catalogs, scouring online websites, and incorporating the latest trends. We forget that personality means “us.” It turns out everybody’s mother was right when they said those three little words, Just be yourself.

  Which is one reason why the stuff Kelly has chosen to bring into her home is so inspiring to me. I mean, c’mon, a gazelle named Fiona? A sculpture that could’ve shined down on Liza as she discoed the night away at Studio 54? Candles and beads, bangles and bows, belts and medallions, a jawbone downstairs, a longhorn upstairs, and thick swatches of sheepskin almost every place you sit? By stocking beads in clear jars, hanging hooks on the wall to display her latest inspirations, and looping tangled lengths of chain wherever it feels right, ideas leap into being. Kelly’s work and her surroundings are so magically aligned, I can almost guarantee she never has to work a day in her life.

  How many people can you point to in your life who really get you on a deep, spiritual level? I’ve been fortunate to make a few friends who have no particular agenda, who love unconditionally, who are happy to celebrate when things are going well, but manage to stick around for the dark days, too. No doubt about it: Having somebody who understands what’s truly in my heart is an incredible gift—but having somebody who understands my head of hair … well, that’s a miracle!

  Steve Berg has been cutting my hair for the better part of a decade. On days when I was in front of the camera hosting my talk show, Steve was there, brandishing his brush and flat iron the way a gunslinger wields his Smith & Wesson. Together we’ve seen our share of snowed-in airports and greasy fast food joints, but every now and then we pulled into a new city with a little extra time to kill. And that’s the moment Berg and I would hit every vintage store, antiques mall, and flea market within a thirty-mile radius. The secret to our shopping success? We never reach for the same thing.

  Because his one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment is so small—maybe 450 square feet—Steve has to be exceptionally careful about the stuff he buys, which is my definition of both a blessing and a curse. Mick Jagger said it best: “You can’t always get what you want.” But the flip side of Steve’s limited space is that it has forced him to become a ruthless editor, which means he has created a home that holds only the things that really speak to him. And two things that speak volumes to Steve Berg are surf and sand.

  Steve may be a New Yorker through and through, but what he values above all else is nature, and it shows in nearly everything he owns. His stuff is rustic, textured, and earthy, and it would look every bit as good in a Montauk beach shack (which is where I suspect he’ll eventually end up) as it currently looks in his Manhattan co-op.

  Take the skeletal dolphin tail hanging in his living room. “I found that in a thrift shop on the Outer Banks of North Carolina,” Steve tells me. “Then I started to worry: Are they killing dolphins for their bones now? I asked the woman behind the counter. She looked at me like I was some kind of tuna-boycotting city slicker and explained that nobody was out there hunting for Flipper. It turns out her husband found it one morning when he was walking their dogs along the beach. And that was that. My theory is, if something actually washes up onshore, then it was meant to be.”

  The piece hanging directly beneath the dolphin tail is a beautiful bleached-out wood frame that Steve filled with a mirror. “The bones of this apartment don’t have a lot of character; they’re not particularly homey, so I had to find ways to create some warmth,” he says, pointing to the old frame holding the new square of glass. The mirror is anchored by a mid-century modern walnut dresser. It’s one of those classic Danish pieces on hairpin legs that looks a lot more expensive than the $400 Steve paid for it at a giant warehouse in Stratford, Connecticut, that’s filled with booth after booth of great stuff. “Every time I check that place out, I feel like I’m taking a tour of somebody else’s life. It’s like visiting a great museum.”

  Steve has instinctively learned a design lesson that a lot of people seem to struggle with: When an item can be old, go ahead and let it be old, but if you can’t get your hands on the right vintage piece, then it’s perfectly fine to buy something new. His sofa, in a quiet oyster-colored linen, is new, but it’s got a wonderful worn-in quality and a timeless style that makes it seem like it’s been part of his life forever. It’s also a really good size. “I frequently feel like my sofa is just too big but I’ve got to have comfortable seating when friends come over—it even functions as a twin bed when someone needs a place to crash for the night. I’ve gotten a lot of people through a lot of bad breakups on that thing. Besides,” he adds, “one day it dawned on me that having a small space doesn’t mean all of my furniture has to be small.” His cable-knit sweater pillow is something I designed a while ago, and Steve had two black ikat-print pillows made from fabric I brought back from Thailand as a Christmas present for him. My thought was that this fabric would fit right into Steve’s space because, like everything else at Château Berg, it’s understated yet intricate, classic yet cool, restrained, charming, and always slightly unexpected.

  As you can see, Steve has a very refined sense of what he wants in his home. I admire that. Like me, he’s drawn to worn wood and tarnished metal and natural fibers. Some people have a fear of flying, some fear heights, and even Superman was pretty uncomfortable around Kryptonite. I’m guessing the thing that would totally freak Steve out—his Kryptonite—is patent leather. He just can’t deal with anything too shiny or plastic-y. The Danish bench, with its original black woven leather top (nothing patent about that leather) works as either a great little coffee table or a place to put your feet up and read the paper. He uses the teak bar cart next to the sofa as an end table. It took a while to find one that he both loved and could afford, but he managed with a little help from eBay.

  I love the juxtaposition of his vintage brass stool next to the woven rush chair. The white rubber dining chairs are Italian, from the early 1970s. Steve paid $140 for the set of four at the same place in Connecticut he g
ot the Danish dresser. Notice the way he’s paired them with his glass-and-chrome dining table—they balance each other perfectly. I also love that Steve doesn’t use his dining table strictly for dining. When space is limited, it helps to have stuff that serves more than one purpose. He’s got books, shells, starfish, a wooden vase with a rich grain, and a vintage desk lamp on his table. He’s also got a couple of wood rings that look as if they came straight from the 1950s. The truth is, they came straight from West Elm.

  Above the dining table is a photo that Steve came across on a shoot with me at Parsons School of Design. “The students are tremendously talented but their work is still very affordable. This is a shot of some old junkyard and I guess I was drawn to it because it’s such a nice combo platter—very urban, but there’s a lot of nature there, too.”

  The black kilim rug with cream and gray stripes pulls the entire room together. He found it on a website and bought it on the spot. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a serious enabler—I can always make a case for something beautiful—but as far as this rug was concerned, he really didn’t need a push from me. Steve has always been careful with his money, but when something is absolutely right, he doesn’t hesitate. I learned that the hard way one day when I made a rookie mistake and momentarily forgot what I’ve been preaching for years: Antiquing is not a team sport!

  You know how early in the chapter I said Steve and I never reach for the same stuff? That’s what any shrink worth his prescription pad would call “denial.” That amazing triangular mirror above the sofa? Steve says he falls in love with it over and over again—which is exactly what a good piece of art should make you do. The mirror is ceramic, although it reminds Steve of whale bone; it might have been done in the 1930s or, for that matter, maybe the ’50s or ’60s. It could be that some wildly talented person took an art class in Aspen and had it hanging in an upstairs bathroom. Or it’s possible that an artist created the piece and it sat in a Chelsea gallery filled with showier stuff that eclipsed its subtle beauty. There’s something very romantic about imagining the origins of this mirror, but the truth is, I don’t have a clue who made it or where it came from. All I know is that Berg got to it before I could, which, let me tell you, made for one very long and extremely quiet car ride home.…