In the present day, in fact, Brent walks shoppers by way of a lot bigger tasks (with a lot bigger budgets) in trendy areas like Montauk, New York, and LA’s Hancock Park, and on tv reveals just like the Emmy-winning House Made Easy and The Nate & Jeremiah House Undertaking, together with his costar in work and life, husband Nate Berkus. The rooms he’s well-known for—an clever and ethereal Park Avenue domicile curated to point out off sculptures of the household’s matriarch; a daring kitchen with bronze cupboards in a Beverly Hills home by Paul McClean—are definitely knowledgeable by minimalism. “My private design aesthetic is monastic,” he laughs, “however clearly, we don’t do exactly that with the agency.”
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This 12 months, Brent celebrated his tenth anniversary by becoming a member of the AD100 listing and opening a brand new workplace on every coast. He left his Twenties French Normandy–type workplace for a three-story home of glass and lightweight in Santa Monica. “Individuals desire a delicate place to land at residence,” he says, “and I feel they need a delicate place to work as nicely. I like the concept of shoving work life right into a residential house.”
Brent’s new 4,000-square-foot Greenwich Village HQ is equally sunny. “I’d not seen something like that in New York Metropolis, so simply…sun-drenched,” he says. “I’m a tactile individual; I have to see issues up on a wall and construct out and collage issues.” The bottom-up location was simply the form of clean slate he wanted. “They’re elegant areas,” he says, and with groups of a dozen or so understanding of every location, they’re homey sufficient to make everybody comfy. “As we’ve grown, I’m actually attempting to guard our integrity, and [create] the chance for everyone to have a seat on the desk. The 2 areas lend themselves to that mantra.”
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Talking of development, this fall Brent will level-up earlier experiences in retail (the designer has devised furnishings traces with Residing House and Pottery Barn Children) with Atrio, a retailer all his personal in LA’s Culver Metropolis. The store takes its title from Brent’s Portuguese grandmother. “She was not heat by nature when she was youthful,” he says, “however when she bought older, she was very delicate and candy, particularly with me. And her greenhouse atrium, together with her furnishings and the ceremony she had in going on the market each morning, that was the primary house I’ve ever been in the place I understood house can describe you.”
He teases the Atrio idea as “three thousand sq. toes of magnificence, designed across the 5 senses.” Prospects can anticipate every part from olive oils and different pantry objects to bathtub wares; there’ll even be a floral store. The hope, Brent says, is that guests can come into the shop and develop into part of the scene: “You possibly can stroll in and take as little or as a lot as you need, however you’ll know the belongings you deliver into your house are considerate.”
Atrio is the fruit of years of collaboration with artists and designers all over the world, which required a belief Brent needed to study. “I’m a little bit of a management freak, creatively,” he admits, “which is enjoyable for me, however not for anyone else. However a part of rising and evolving a agency is letting go. You recognize, at the start of your profession, you don’t have a lane. Or each lane is yours and you must drive throughout and do every part you may. However as you develop, it’s all about creating lanes for different individuals.”
It’s an apt metaphor for the person who, a decade in the past, offered his personal automobile to start out his enterprise. “I simply hope that 10 years from now,” he says, “I’m nonetheless sitting round a desk fascinated and grateful that I get to work with these superb individuals, creating areas that make individuals really feel one thing. It’s the most effective job on the earth.”
