by Nate Berkus
As for the other pieces grouped above the sofa, trying to curate that collection was Steve’s biggest design challenge. “Do you hang the stuff you most identify with, or is it all about the scale of the different pieces?” he would ask me. I urged him to just experiment, but he kept saying, “I’ve only got three walls in the living room, so there’s really nowhere to mount a TV, or position bookshelves. I have to be really mindful of what I put up.” In the end, it was me who did the putting up. When you’ve got my hair, you can’t afford to have the guy who cuts it distracted—so I grabbed a hammer and we got the job done.
He found the black-and-yellow German poster that advertises an art exhibition sticking out of a trash can in front of the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce Street. The icy blue abstract of sailboats is by New York artist Mitch Ferrin. Berg has a real affinity for the sun and the water. I always relate to that. The tramp art three-dimensional eyeglasses on the wall are very idiosyncratic and they’re very Berg.
That graphic landscape to the right of the tramp art is also very Berg—literally. He made it himself using white charcoal over black acrylic paint. It’s both dramatic and delicate. It’s also proof that while he may identify himself as a hair and makeup guy, Steve Berg has the soul of an artist. As a child growing up in Commack, Long Island, Steve’s dream was to become a fashion illustrator or a cartoonist. “As a kid I was constantly drawing on my bedroom walls. Some guys had that poster of Farrah Fawcett in the bathing suit hanging in their bedroom.…I had a Farrah poster on my wall, too, but it was a sketch I did myself, and I put her in a peasant dress. When it came time for my Bar Mitzvah, I knew we’d be having a lot of company over and I wanted to spruce things up a little bit, so I painted a two-tone, high-gloss stripe in chocolate brown and tan all the way around my room, just like the one I’d seen on Welcome Back, Kotter.” I wince at the thought of it but Steve assures me things could’ve been much, much worse, “My parents’ bed was made out of almond-colored Formica with a strip of mirror trimming the base and an 8-track tape player and speakers built right into the headboard!” As if the Farrah thing hadn’t made it perfectly clear, he adds, “I’ll always be a child of the ’70s.”
And he’ll always be driven to design. In fact, every few weeks, Steve and a couple of friends get together for something they call “art night.” “Instead of meeting to dissect a book we’ve all been reading, or play a few hands of Texas Hold ’Em,” Steve explains, “we put on some music, open a good bottle of wine, and just go for it—we paint, we draw, we sculpt, we doodle, we create.”
Steve is the guy who’s out there finding rocks and shells to glue onto place mats for his friend’s wedding on the Long Island Sound. He’s the guy who grabs a Sharpie and some spray mount to dream something up for a vintage frame he’s found for six bucks at the thrift shop he scours a couple of times a week. He’s the guy who studies the geography of a face and knows exactly how to design a haircut that complements it, and he’s the guy who understands that in order to feel creatively fulfilled he has to set a night aside every now and then to make something beautiful happen.
He’s made his kitchen beautiful by keeping it very simple. The stainless-steel cabinets and appliances would’ve looked good twenty years ago, and they’ll look good twenty years from now. I also like how he’s put everything in the kitchen on one level, which makes for a very clean, utilitarian line. When you’ve got only a single shelf in your kitchen, you damn well better decide what kind of stuff deserves to be on that shelf. In Berg’s case, it’s a vintage Danish creamer with little cups and their original wood saucers. Also sitting on that shelf is a vintage photograph, a little bit moody, a little bit desolate, that Steve calls “Serial Killer/Lake House.”
He’s a huge fan of photography and he’s got two more eBay pieces from the 1950s hanging in his bedroom. Both shots are black-and-white and both are in thrift shop frames that he paid next to nothing for. One picture shows an Airstream trailer hitched to a car on the edge of a lake. “I’d never want to own a trailer like that, but I wouldn’t mind dating somebody who’s got one,” he says. The other photo depicts a middle-aged couple surveying the wreckage of a tornado or a hurricane or some sort of disaster that has clearly leveled their home. You can see the flood waters rising as they hold hands in stunned silence. To me, the shot is brimming with sorrow. But that’s not what Steve sees when he looks at it. “There’s sadness but I also think there’s something a little hopeful about the scene. I always imagine them starting the next chapter of their lives together.”
The photos hang over a very simple drafting table made of wooden easel legs and a narrow glass top. There’s a fantastic vintage lamp on the desk, very organic-looking, with a driftwood base that’s been treated with a resin technique that was popular in the 1950s. He pays his bills at that desk, while sitting in an old schoolhouse chair. On the other side of the room is a round mid-century modern wood mirror and another painting by Mitch Ferrin: In this one a blonde in a bikini looks toward the horizon as swimmers splash in the waves. “Ferrin’s work has a paint-by-numbers quality that takes me back to my childhood,” he says. I’d say there’s a pretty decent chance that Steve was a Santa Monica surfer dude in a previous life. He’s even got an old Hawaiian skim board leaning against the wall. “It doubles as a TV tray when I treat myself to breakfast in bed,” he tells me. And speaking of the bed, it’s a platform upholstered in sand-colored linen and it used to belong to me. I kept it in my guest room but when I moved into my current place, I decided that I didn’t need it and Steve did.
There are two areas of the apartment that we haven’t talked about. The first is Steve’s hair salon. It’s a very compact station in the entry, consisting of a mirror with lights running down each side, a drawer that comes out of the wall underneath the mirror, and a vintage chair he found at a garage sale.
The other space serves as Steve’s oasis, his lounge, his backyard, his veranda, his porch, his patio, his campsite—or, as it is known in New York City, the fire escape. “I keep a window box out there, so I can always have something leafy around. I watch the shadows and light change all day long. It’s shockingly peaceful out there.”
Actually, his whole place has a certain serenity to it. There’s something to be said for not painting, for the purity of dark wood floors and white walls; Steve doesn’t have to reach for a color to tell his story. And while he lives with a lot of things, his place never feels overwhelming; almost like a Joseph Cornell diorama, where nothing is extraneous. For a man who is forever searching websites and antiques shops, tag sales and flea markets, this home is as much about what he’s left out as what he’s included. There is no flash or noise here. What remains is vintage Berg: mirrors that reflect back like the water, a few pieces of driftwood, melancholy old photos, sun-drenched paintings, and a fantasy of someday catching the perfect wave.
(Illustration Credit 7.1)
Chris Gardner bought his very first home just a few years ago, at the age of 53. For the two and a half people left in the world who haven’t read his memoir, The Pursuit of Happyness, or seen the Will Smith movie based on it, Chris may have taken a longer journey than others to come home—but he finally got there.
Born in a rough North Milwaukee neighborhood, he eventually found his way to the West Coast, where he began working as a medical supply salesman. One day in 1980, he saw a cherry-red Ferrari pulling up in front of San Francisco General Hospital. Chris, who as I pretty quickly found out isn’t shy about talking to strangers (strangers aren’t shy about talking to him, either), asked the owner two questions: “What do you do for a living?” followed by “How do you do that?”
He soon became a brokerage trainee. But when his ex-wife left him with sole custody of their 18-month-old son, he found that his training stipend couldn’t cover both the cost of daycare and a place to live. While he saved up money for a place, Chris and Chris Jr. spent the next year surviving on the San Francisco streets. By day, he’d make two hundred cold calls fr
om his desk at work. At night, he and his son sought refuge in homeless shelters, public parks, under Chris’s desk at work, and even inside a locked bathroom of the train station connecting San Francisco and Oakland. None of his colleagues had any idea.
Somehow they survived. And in 1987, seven years after first catching sight of that Ferrari, he founded his own brokerage firm, Gardner Rich, which today has offices in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. He’s become a symbol of power and success, ambition and accomplishment—a CEO, entrepreneur, philanthropist, inspirational speaker, and internationally bestselling author (to date, The Pursuit of Happyness has been translated into forty languages).
So there’s the ninety-minute Hollywood version of Chris’s life, but behind that is a self-made man who has seen and thought about home from every conceivable angle, and who decided to trust me to design the place where he would be putting down permanent roots. I took that responsibility very seriously.
I’d never designed a home for a person who’d been homeless, though I did have an idea of what it might be like to watch your world disappear right before your eyes. When I traveled to New Orleans with the Oprah crew after Hurricane Katrina, I met people who had lost everything. They were carrying around the few pieces that were salvageable—clothing, a photo, whatever else they managed to grab before the storm hit.
After the tsunami in Sri Lanka, I knew what it was like to have absolutely nothing, albeit briefly. I had no clothes, no toothbrush, no wallet, no wristwatch, no soap or towel or pillow, no ID, and no access to any of those things. I didn’t have a dollar to my name in any currency. Somebody lent me a pair of shorts to put on after several hours of walking around stunned in my underwear. For a person who rejoices when people surround themselves with objects that have meaning, I understood for a short, terrible period of time what it felt like to have nothing—and it changed my perspective on the importance of “things.”
Before he bought the apartment, Chris had been living in a dark loft in an industrial section of town, with nothing more than a mattress and a pair of speakers as tall as he was. He wasn’t used to having furniture or a proper dining room. He’d eat at the kitchen counter without giving it a second thought. “I felt like Batman,” he told me with a laugh. “But as you let go of certain parts of your life—that darkness, that sense of not wanting to be social—you start to come into your own. Leaving that place and finding this one was like coming out of the dark and into the light.”
After a lot of long conversations with Chris, it became clear what I didn’t want to create: a house that was trendy or transient or in any way unfinished. This new apartment had to have richness and it had to have weight. I needed his new home to feel grounded and comfortable for him, a place where he could put his feet up and unwind. My goal was to build a road map—an object-filled landscape that would help him tell his story in the most beautiful way possible. That means we had to plan out the “why” and “what for” of each space and every single piece.
This was going to be Chris’s home, filled, for the first time in his life, with stuff he could choose. He wasn’t bringing anything with him from his old apartment. He’d given the very few things he had to the Salvation Army and Goodwill. The only thing he’d never part with was a favorite black-and-white picture of his late mother, Bettye Jean.
“Will Smith told me that if you don’t protect your private life, chances are good you won’t have one,” Chris explained. “I’m in an airplane seat more than half the year. So coming home matters to me probably more than it does for most people.” In the end we created a flowing, light-filled, opulent, modern, refined bachelor pad, filled with vintage leather chairs draped in African throws, souvenirs from his many travels, and photos marking the highlights of his extraordinary life. The apartment may float high over Chicago, but I wanted the objects in it to convey substance, stability, and masculinity.
Probably more than any client I’ve ever worked with, Chris fully embraced what we were trying to achieve. “You really got me. I mean, you really understand me,” he said when we were done. It was one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.
The light in the apartment streams in from a ten-thousand-square-foot balcony—the largest private balcony in the United States. For Chris, that terrace sealed the deal. The balcony looks out over the whole of Chicago. And when I say Chicago, I mean skyscrapered, Mrs.-O’Leary’s-cow, I-want-my-porterhouse-steak-blood-rare Chicago! Directly ahead stands the looming Jeweler’s Building, with its oversized clock; the story goes that Al Capone once ran its restaurant as a speakeasy. To the left is the city skyline, with Lake Michigan beyond it. Twenty-nine stories below you can see North Michigan Avenue, the Chicago River, and the 1920s-era terra-cotta Wrigley Building. But despite all the street-level hustle, the only sound you hear at this altitude is the lake wind ruffling the grass.
Normally, when I’m working for a client, I present the design for four or five rooms at a time. But not with Chris. He needed to see a single finished room before he could proceed to the next. Part of my challenge was to keep reminding myself that change can be overwhelming and a brand-new home represents a giant change for anybody, let alone Chris. He needed to acclimate to his stuff, and I needed to make sure I wasn’t rushing him. This is a guy with very strong opinions. (I always find there are two kinds of clients—the ones who ask no questions at all, and the ones who ask the right questions. Chris knew exactly what to ask.) He needed control over the process, which meant taking life one room at a time. Because Chris’s world revolves around his work, we began with the smallest room in the house, the library.
The library had white walls, a wood floor, and the flimsy French doors typical of new construction. It was way too cookie-cutter to be Command Central for Chris Gardner. But what if we created freestanding bookshelves with bronze trim, I asked Chris. “What if we found a metal desk for you—say, iron, with a hand-tooled leather top, imported from England, a modern variation of an antique partner’s desk?” I had him at “iron with a leather top.”
I’d come across a tortoiseshell wall covering a while back and decided to hang on to it for just the right client—Chris was definitely the one it was meant for. Tortoise is a great pattern, just as classic as zebra and leopard (think of all the old books you’ve seen bound in that pattern), but a little more unusual. I used it to cover the library walls and give the room character.
Then I got rid of those standard French doors and replaced them with floor-to-ceiling metal ones. He wound up loving their heft, and the handles set into their own metal frames. And in the end, those doors convey permanence—even majesty.
In The Pursuit of Happyness, Chris writes about the role that quiet has played in his life. “Stillness has always been my refuge and my defense,” he explains. “Even later, as an adult, I would cope by being still. Very still. It’s where I go whenever there’s too much chaos around me.” Chris’s library exudes luxury, order, and that necessary stillness.
Even here Chris questioned me about every design choice. Why sconces on either side of the bookshelf? Why not something heavier? I explained that we needed a more refined touch to balance out the weight of the bookshelves; otherwise, I told him, the place could end up looking like a restaurant.
Two years earlier, unbeknownst to me, Chris had asked one of his heroes, Dr. Maya Angelou, If you could read only a hundred books your whole life, what would they be? “She wrote me out a list—and every book on that list is on the bookshelf behind my desk. The day I got that box of books, I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I was.” The black bookshelves also hold vintage and first-edition volumes ranging from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. “The funny thing is, the first three books on the list she gave me were written by her. ‘Hey,’ she told me, ‘I started alphabetically!’ ”
In the course of the decorating process, Chris bought an eight-foot-long chocolate-brown leather sofa he wanted to place across from his TV. We
had a few back-and-forths about the sofa, but Chris told me it was a nonnegotiable point—“This area is college football central,” he said—I took a deep breath and worked around it. And the truth is, I eventually came to respect and, okay, even like that sofa. It’s extra-deep, and we made pillows out of vintage Mexican textiles for it.
This football-watching zone is next to Chris’s state-of-the-art kitchen. The kitchen walls are painted British royal navy blue, which makes you feel like you’re in the hold of a great clipper ship. Chris’s daughter, Jacintha, who’s an interior designer, came up with the color. Chris remembers, “When Jacintha first used the name British Royal Navy Blue, I said to her, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ But I absolutely love it.” The dark blue is both surprising and restrained. It absorbs and deflects the hot-and-cold extremes of a Midwestern climate, and also complements the starburst fixture overhead, the bronze rectangular table, and the sculptural 1970s floor lamp. Keeping an eye on the kitchen from a red alligator frame is a foot-high black-and-white photograph of Chris’s mother, the one he took with him to this new home. A white shawl covers Bettye Jean’s shoulders. Her glance is direct and knowing, and she’s smiling.