In his early 20s, Nate Berkus worked for Leslie Hindman’s auction house in Chicago, and quickly learned his strengths and weaknesses. “I was a terrible assistant, so everything I was hired to do, I didn’t do well, but everything I wasn’t supposed to be doing, I did a great job at—for instance, I couldn’t walk onto the sales floor without rearranging the entire thing,” he tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. Hindman eventually put him in charge of a series of monthly marketplace sales that helped inform his approach to decorating to this day. “When I opened my design firm a year later, [I knew] I didn’t want to be the king of reproductions. I didn’t want to rely on furniture showrooms primarily for sourcing. I wanted to be at auctions. I wanted to use antiques and brown furniture, and all of the things that I knew someday would still retain a value,” he says. “That’s still a foundation of my principles, 30 years later. That still matters to me.”
After starting his Chicago firm in the mid-1990s—at the age of 24—Berkus quickly drew the attention of Oprah Winfrey’s production company, Harpo, which catapulted his career via guest spots on her show and eventually led to his own talk show, bringing him numerous book deals, endorsements and product licenses. “I gained a reputation among all these ad buyers and big brands that I was somebody that would maintain my own authenticity and fight for my own editorial control,” he says.
Berkus maintains that authenticity to this day, especially with social media and brand deals, which he attributes as key to his long-running success. “You have to work to be authentic, because there’s so many opportunities to not be,” he says. “Everyone’s an influencer. [Companies] want your followers, and they want to link everything to a direct sale, and you as the brand have to protect the information that you’re giving to your followers. You can’t just give them everything. You have to use your social media as almost your own magazine [to make sure] you’re allowing in the pages of that [magazine only] what you feel is really good for those people who follow you to know. You cannot take every deal. It’s your job to figure out what is going to be exciting and ahead of the trend curve, or ignore the trend curve, and that is a responsibility at 53 that I think I’m pretty good at now.”
Crucial insight: Berkus’s secret to crafting timeless spaces is steering away from the new and now. “I’m vehemently anti-trend. Even now, all the curved sofas and the moody fabrics and everything on Instagram—it’s beautiful, but I don’t do that on behalf of my clients. It’s too ‘of the moment’ for me. I don’t want a timestamp on any of the rooms that we do,” he says. “What I’ve always tried to do is assemble a collection of things that the client really loves, and then bring in color, texture, substrates and textiles and boost that to whatever they want it to look like now.”
Key quote: “My advice to all these young designers who are starting out, who built this amazing Instagram feed, or are graduating from these great schools like RISD and NYSID: Be the person that when someone sees your name on the schedule that afternoon, they don’t want to die that they have to spend four hours with you. They see your name, and they know they’re going to have a really nice afternoon—productive, but a nice afternoon. Because everybody just wants a nice afternoon.”
This episode is sponsored by Loloi and Hector Finch. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
The Thursday Show
Host Dennis Scully and BOH executive editor Fred Nicolaus discuss the biggest news in the design world, including price hikes from Ikea, furniture from Quince, and a look at why design might be moving on from the straight line. Later, Havenly founder and CEO Lee Mayer joins the show to discuss her company’s new AI design tool.
This episode is sponsored by Chelsea House and Newport Brass. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
