Jeremiah Brent Is More Than Meets the Eye
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There’s an early sentence in Jeremiah Brent’s new book you just have to push past. “The idea to write The Space That Keeps You was born in Oprah’s dining room in her home in Montecito,” the designer writes in the introduction.
His “dear friend Oprah” opens her estate, nicknamed The Promised Land, to Brent and readers a few pages later. It’s one of 11 homes featured in the book—but unlike the typical designer monograph, he didn’t work on all or even most of the projects therein. Instead, The Space That Keeps You is an exploration of how a person settles down, rendered through a collage-like format of old and new photos, doodles, handwriting, and detail shots. Getting it published was a fight, he says.
“Very controversial! Everybody wanted me to do a coffee table book of my images, but that wasn’t what I wanted to put out there,” he says. Instead, his goal was “to shift the narrative around home, and how we create home, and what we bring into our spaces.”
The writing process has had a radical effect on his design philosophy: Call it feelings before form or function. He points to an example from his own New York City home, in which he reconfigured an utterly unused formal dining room around a significantly more relaxed, pillow-covered banquette that he and husband Nate Berkus collapse on each night to discuss their days—and which reminds him warmly of a similar spot in one of their first homes together. “It shifted the way that I create spaces. It’s all emotionally driven now,” he says.
Brent seems exhausted by the usual conversations around interior aesthetics, instead directing his laser-like focus on the mindset of “letting go of all these pretenses around what good design is or isn’t,” he explains.
But it can be difficult to drop the pretense of Jeremiah Brent. There’s that unspeakably beautiful face, to start, and his equally gorgeous husband, Berkus, who was introduced to America by Oprah more than two decades ago. Together they’ve hosted Nate & Jeremiah by Design and The Nate & Jeremiah Home Project, among other shows; on his own, Brent operates a design firm with offices on both coasts, runs the retail and lifestyle brand Atrio, and hosts a popular podcast, Ideas of Order, with California Closets. This year brings the book and, more fantastically, his joining the cast of the Netflix smash Queer Eye.
He knows how many of his peers see him and that they may not consider him a peer at all. “Designers on television think the design industry is uptight; the design industry thinks designers on television are not real designers,” he says simply. “There is this funny stigma, and this is the place I’ve always lived in between.”
And then there’s the idea that he’s ridden his husband’s coattails into the spotlight. “I met my husband when I had $2 to my name and had just started my firm. I lived off the Jack in the Box dollar menu,” he says. Berkus, meanwhile, “had just finished his talk show. He was ‘America’s decorator.’ And I struggled for a long time.”
He’s handled the chatter by keeping his head down and his design firm completely separate from Berkus’ business. “I wanted to really earn my position in this industry. I wanted to work really hard. I never asked for help. I did it all on my own, which is probably why I have some gray hairs,” he says in one of many camera-ready cracks. “But I figured it out, and I’m glad I did, because I didn’t sacrifice who I am along the way.”
Brent was raised in Modesto, California, one of the Central Valley towns Joan Didion once described as seeming “so flat, so impoverished, as to drain the imagination.” It’s the tract houses Didion decried that he’d walk through as a child with his single mother, Gwen, as a weekend pastime. "I used to sit there fantasizing about what I would do for people and how I would create a life that was so much better than what was in there now, and what the materials would be,” he says. “I would think about how I could dream up a bigger dream for people than they dream for themselves.”
As a game, Gwen would ask him to find and describe the most beautiful items around them. His juvenile forays into design were less than beautiful. “I had to redo my room constantly. I’d save up every penny I had—I had to pay for it, always—and repaint my room. I must have repainted it 30 times,” he says. “And I bought a black futon, [which] I thought was the height of luxury, but really just looked like a ‘70s porn.”
He was still a teenager when he moved to Los Angeles, where he flipped Goodwill furniture for friends and briefly lived in his car while looking for a job in the fashion industry. His break came through reality TV, when he appeared as a styling associate on Bravo’s The Rachel Zoe Project.
“When Jeremiah walked into my office 15 years ago, there was just something about him,” Rachel Zoe tells House Beautiful. “He was young, and green but he had such great energy. Although he was selling himself on fashion, his passion was really interior design—I knew immediately that he had such a good eye and I wanted to give him a chance. Truthfully it was love at first sight and we really connected.”
It was Zoe who, witnessing his predilection for interiors, told him to make the business switch, and he launched his firm in 2011.
The following year, he met Berkus at Zoe’s birthday party in New York City, and they married in 2014. Their business empire and fame rest on their taste and talent, yes, but it’s likely their good looks, undeniable charm, adorable family, and Oprah’s support that have made them your mom’s favorite designers. Brent has referred to their draw as “digestible gays.”
“We feel a tremendous amount of responsibility to continue to move that needle,” Brent says. He hopes that window of digestibility is shifting, and it’s one of the reasons he’s thrilled to be joining Queer Eye, where one of the Fab 5, Jonathan Van Ness, dons dresses and buoyantly shares their pronouns with the week’s subject. “It’s not that complicated to tell somebody that you care enough to call them by what they want to be called,” Brent says. “I want to be part of the advocacy, of growth and evolution and change.”
Brent is set to start filming the Netflix juggernaut days after he chats with House Beautiful—and weeks after an investigative exposé alleged tumult on the set, which seemed to explain the departure of the show’s previous design expert, Bobby Berk. Brent is, of course, ready to address the report.
“I’ve got to tell you, there’s no drama with any of us. We’re all in a group chat. We’re having the time of our lives,” he insists. “Everybody’s heads and hearts are in the right spot. It’s really healthy right now, and I think we’re all really excited about this season.”
He’s just as game to handle the wild workload. It’s a running joke among Queer Eye viewers that while the other experts get away with an hourlong shopping trip or a heart-to-heart conversation, Berk routinely seemed to gut-renovate homes in a single segment. “I love an install. I love the stress. I love the pressure. And this is not my first rodeo—I know what I signed up for,” Brent says. “There is an amazing art department and team behind the scenes that are working hard around the clock. I’m excited to get in there, roll up my sleeves, earn my keep, and hopefully show people some really beautiful designs.”
Again, it’s that work ethic that he nestles into despite any doubts elsewhere in the industry. “You know what? I am. I am very ambitious,” he says. “As I grow, it’s not going to slow down soon, because if I have a day off, I start to get itchy and stressed out. There’s so much to do, and I don’t want to waste any time.”
His children, Poppy, nine, and Oskar, six, force some grounding. “They offer this instinctual balance. I make sure I’m there for dinner every night. I cook breakfast for everybody. I walk them to school. I don’t miss anything, and I never sacrifice being a parent,” he says. “That gives me a balance that I’m not sure I would be able to provide myself without ‘em.” He finds time for himself in the wee hours, before the rest of the house wakes up. “I can have coffee and shop online, or I can work, or I can listen to a song or watch the new Ariana Grande video that everybody’s talking about,” he says.
The kids have already started asserting their feelings about style. “Everybody in my house has opinions, which is a pain in my ass,” he says. While his daughter has picked up Brent’s tenet about “conflict” within design and likes to pair a leather jacket over a ballerina dress, Oskar prefers soothing consistency. “He wants things exactly the way they were. If an ottoman gets moved or we move something, he puts it back,” Brent says.
His new costars are helping him lighten up too. “I haven’t laughed this hard in a long, long time,” he says. “In some ways, Queer Eye is connecting me to a part of myself that I had left behind, because I’m in dad mode and I run a business. With them, I get to be a little bit more free.”
Later this year, Brent turns 40, and it’s the reminder of this fact that finally sends a cloud across his golden facade. “Why would you bring that up? That’s the meanest thing you said to me in this whole interview!” he says, joking again. “Show me the birth certificate!”
It’s a wild milestone, he says, because he remembers his mother’s fortieth so distinctly. “She had a birthday party in our backyard, and I was like, How embarrassing,” he says, imitating a withering tween tone. “Then you blink, and holy shit, you’re 40.” But he counts off the blessings of this age, from his children to the husband he’s “still obsessed with, despite his best efforts,” to his staff of 30 people and the work he adores.
The Space That Keeps You also ends with his mother. In 2022, Brent and Berkus purchased a 17th century farm down a mile-long dirt road in Portugal, and once they fix up one of the homes on the property, they’ve invited Gwen to reside there. “To see somebody like my mother, who sacrificed so much for everybody else, and to be able to give her a break and say, ‘Here’s an opportunity to go find beauty’—it’s a real gift,” he says. “It’s a bigger life than I ever imagined for myself.”
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