There’s no point in beating around the bush. Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent want you to know they’re embarrassed. Chastened. “Humiliated!” says Berkus.
Seated in a pair of armchairs in front of a blazing fire in their new West Village town house, the married designers look content and perfectly at home—if a little sheepish. After all, it seems like just yesterday when they moved into what was supposed to be their dream home, a nearly 9,000-square-foot Spanish colonial in Los Angeles. Fans of their TLC show, Nate & Jeremiah by Design (and readers of AD’s January 2018 story), witnessed the couple gushing over the house’s sun-drenched rooms, wrought-iron balustrade, and 200-year-old oak tree in the backyard. The house, they proclaimed, was where they and their then-two-year-old daughter, Poppy, would “put down roots.”
Ruh-roh. Now, just two years later, they’ve sold the house, edited down their belongings, and booked it back to New York, the city where the couple started dating and first made a home together. “One thing I can promise you,” says Berkus, leaning forward in his chair, his blue eyes twinkling, “is that I will never again tell a publication that a house is my ‘forever home.’ ” “We learned our lesson,” chimes in Brent. “We shan’t be saying that again!”
The photogenic first couple of TV home makeovers had originally moved West following the death of Berkus’s father in 2015. Berkus, who was born in Orange County but mostly raised in suburban Minneapolis, wanted to be closer to his siblings out in Southern California. “And we were ready for a new adventure,” he explains. During their time there, they filmed three seasons of their show, welcomed the birth of baby Oskar (now two), and continued to grow their separate design businesses. (Berkus’s headquarters have always been based in Chicago; Brent kept his New York practice going, and also opened a Los Angeles office.) But almost immediately, Brent missed the energy and street life back East. “I felt untethered in Los Angeles,” he says. “It didn’t feel like us.” He also became convinced that Poppy, now five, and Oskar would have a richer experience growing up in the urban density of New York. “I realized that Poppy talked to the same 11 people every day,” he says.
Berkus (eventually) came around, too. “I realized that New York would never get out of Jeremiah’s system,” he says. And he knew that he personally would be just as happy either way. “Jeremiah always says, ‘It’s either the place or the space that holds you.’ For him it’s the place,” he says, gesturing toward the windows and the city beyond. “For me it’s the space.”