Between 2010 and 2020, Jeremiah Brent and his husband, Nate Berkus, moved 10 times in 10 years. The thing is—Brent couldn’t tell you why. “Nate and I looked at each other and we’re like, ‘What is happening? We’re broken,’” Brent says. Suddenly, the acclaimed interior decorator found himself fascinated with people who have happily lived in their homes for several decades, despite the financial means to move if they wished. What kept them there?
So, he asked some of his clients and friends—and quickly found out that design was just a small part of it. “Design doesn’t keep you—don’t get me wrong, as a decorator, I have nothing but respect for design,” he says. More often than not, however, it was tied to memories. They spoke of sofas that people piled on, bookcases stacked with their favorite novels, or tables that they danced around with their children. “Most of the beautiful homes that I’ve ever been in had nothing to do with how much money people have spent, but how their homes are really bolstering the moments that matter,” says Brent.
In 2021, it occurred to him that he should turn these stories—and these homes—into some kind of project. Now, two and a half years later, Brent is publishing The Space That Keeps You, an interiors book that explores the deeper meaning of home.
Brent interviewed nine different subjects from nine different places. Some of them are people whose homes he’s decorated, like married couple Michael and Brooke, who have spent the last several years slowly expanding their Greenwich Village one-bedroom. “They are constantly laughing together,” Brent says. “This home makes them feel like they’ll be 21 forever.”
Yet others simply have homes with stories worth telling: there’s Deneen, David, and Coral Brown, who continue to caretake the once-abandoned Napa Valley Ranch bought by their parents in the 1980s. (Now a thriving winery, it is the first and only Black-owned estate in Napa.) Meanwhile, he dives deep into Bianca and Gilberto’s painstaking, meticulous upkeep of a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal. The most notable project featured? Oprah Winfrey’s Montecito retreat. “Oprah grounds her homes in whatever makes her feel comfortable. She doesn’t like more than three colors in a room—four, max. She doesn’t like a lot of bright things bringing attention to themselves. She wants to feel soothed, and she wants her guests to feel the same way,” he writes.
Brent also turns the lens back on himself: after years of being a domestic nomad, he and Berkus repurchased an apartment they once owned on Fifth Avenue. “Our home on Fifth Avenue was a second chance at your first love. It was the first home that Nate and I ever bought together. It symbolized so much about our future and now it symbolizes so much about our past,” he says.
Brent realizes now he always regretted letting it go. Two years after selling, he contacted the new owners to ask them to sell it back to them if they ever moved. Eight years later, he finally got that call. “The home watched us survive a lot. It watched me write our vows in that house. It watched us dream at a kitchen island about starting a family together,” he says. “Now it’s got a whole another set of memories.” Currently, Brent and Berkus are also busy renovating a farmhouse in Portugal. Finally, it seems they’ve found their forever space too.
