Bobby Berk Remakes Himself at Home
On a Monday morning in September, Bobby Berk is primed to do the most. When we meet for the first time, at SPY’s New York offices, it marks the start of a jam-packed few days and a new era for the interior designer. Best known as a co-host of Queer Eye, Berk is on the cusp of adding the title of author to his resumé with his debut book, Right at Home: How Good Design Is Good for the Mind (September 12, Clarkson Potter). I am his first stop on his first press day in New York.
The weather is less than ideal. It’s sticky and sweltering, like you’d need to swim through the air to get anywhere. But Berk looks crisp, dressed in head-to-toe Todd Snyder (a yellow-and-brown merino wool polo and brown chinos) and white, squeaky-clean Bally sneakers. He greets me breezily, with a hug. As he settles in, perched casually on a couch in a green room, he reads as a person whose social battery is fully charged. And, lo and behold, when we start discussing Right at Home — a stylish but approachable coffee table book that centers on interior design as a tool for improving mental health — it’s the concept of charging that Berk employs to describe what a home should feel like, ideally.
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“Your home is like your phone charger,” he says, his pale blue eyes lighting up. “If you don’t get plugged in at night, just like your phone’s not going to make it through the day, you’re not [going to], either. Think of your home as a space that needs to recharge and renew you — one that keeps you powered up to make it through the rest of life outside.”
Long before Berk became a public figure — in 2018, when the first season of Queer Eye premiered — he used interior design as a calming, grounding force. Now 42, it was a childhood experience that planted the seed. When he was around six years old, his mom decorated his bedroom entirely in fire-engine red. “I felt like, ‘Oh, red does not make me feel good,” he says. “There was something about it that gave me anxiety, even though I couldn’t articulate anxiety at the time. So I saved up my little birthday checks that I’d get from my aunts and uncles. I bought a blue bedspread and blue curtains, because I just knew that blue made me feel better.” (Yes, shades of blue pop up frequently in the interiors in Right At Home, too.)
Beyond color, a cornerstone of Berk’s own home design is organization, a topic that also gets significant airtime in Right at Home. “I have ADHD,” he says. “So, when I’m surrounded by chaos in my home, it really makes my ADHD — and the chaos in my mind — worse.” When asked how he spent money when he first earned some disposable income, Berk name-checks organizational tools or storage solutions that keep his spaces clutter-free.
I joke that as a Virgo — a sign famously prone to orderliness — this resonates with me. Berk says he’s one, too, though he doesn’t exactly buy into astrology. “I really don’t know anything about [astrology] — just my own,” he says. (Also a Virgo trait, perhaps, but we’ll leave that one to the experts.)
“I grew up very religious, and so I was forced to believe a lot of things that I now just think are insane,” he continues, referencing his Christian upbringing in conservative, small-town Missouri. “I think I’m at the point now where I just don’t believe in anything, including astrology. But for me, I’m like, actually, [my sign is] pretty spot-on.”
Instead, he gets personal, asking about favorite movies, dream vacation spots, et cetera. For example, Berk says, one client on Queer Eye said he loved Mad Men (Berk chose mid-century modern furniture) and dreamt of traveling to Cuba (Berk included a mural of a picture of Havana, as well as banana wallpaper in the bathroom and breakfast nook). The approach was a success. “[The client] was like, ‘I’ve never imagined that a space could feel like something in my head, but this does. I feel like I chose all these things. How the fuck did you do that?’ The things you love — those are the things that, when you walk in your home, are going to make you smile.”
When Berk works with clients, his instincts — of what they may want and need — must also be spot-on. His getting-to-know-you process is twofold. The first step is observing the client’s home to glean information about them: “There have been many times when I’ve walked into a space and there are telltale signs of depression [for the inhabitant],” he says. “I see those piles of laundry in the bedroom; I can see the dishes stacked in the kitchen. I feel like those are the things that we just put off — like, ‘I’ll get to it. I’ll get to it.’ We’re saying we’ll get to it because we’re mentally overwhelmed with so many other things. There are literally physical signs that a person is struggling.”
But no matter a client’s starting point, Berk decides on a path forward by asking what they love and cherish — by asking questions that have absolutely nothing to do with design. “When I ask clients about design, they either don’t know [what to say] because — no knock on them! — they’ve just never thought about it, or they’ll make something up because they don’t want to sound uneducated on the matter. That isn’t really an insight into what they like. And then, of course, you follow that, and it makes a space that’s not right for the client.”
It’s easy to understand why people open up to Berk. He’s bright-eyed and quick-witted. His exuberance is disarming; at one point in our conversation, he leaps up to mime celebrities dabbing their sweaty armpits with tissues before being photographed on the Emmys red carpet — an awards show for which Queer Eye scored six nominations this year, the most of any reality television show.
The topic comes up because I ask Berk how his life has been affected by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes that have rocked Hollywood this summer. He says the strikes haven’t affected unscripted shows, like his, that much, with the exception of the Emmys moving to January of next year. “But time will tell,” he adds.
Berk also is prepared to dish out both a compliment (my eyes stand out against my dress, he says) and a light drag at any moment. (At one point, he tells an unsolicited story about a close friend who is also a Virgo but has a messy home, though he says not to name her on the record. “I’m not going to throw her under the bus!” he says, dissolving into laughter.)
This friend eventually learned some tips from him — as did Berk’s Queer Eye co-host, hair stylist Jonathan Van Ness. “Jonathan used to struggle with messiness,” Berk says. “But when we were filming our first and second seasons together, their apartment was not done up — they didn’t worry about it. It wasn’t done cute. But after they saw how changing people’s spaces really did affect their mental health, before we even left filming, they hired a designer friend to do their apartment. They were like, ‘I understand now how important it is to come home to a place that inspires you.’”
As we head out into the photo studio for the accompanying shoot, a member of Berk’s team remarks that the bright colors of his shirt might be too much against the backdrop we’ve set up: a vibrant illustration of a living room drawn on Tyvek, a synthetic material that’s ubiquitous in construction, by New York-based artist Rachel Lee.
Berk doesn’t skip a beat. “Or we’ll just embrace maximalism,” he says, and grins for the camera.
Editor-in-Chief: Andrew Burmon
Writer: Avery Stone
Photographer: Tyler Schoeber
Backdrop: Rachel Lee
Grooming: Jennifer Brent
Grooming (On-Site): Francis Rodriquez, The Wall Group
Stylist: Todd Snyder
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