Fans of Jeremiah Brent and Nate Berkus know that the interior design power couple lives an enviable, stunningly beautiful life filled with perfectly tailored peacoats, angular cheekbones, adorable children, Mario Bellini sofas, and Italian marble kitchen islands.
More of their charmed life and the charmed life of their friends — including Oprah — is on display in Brent’s new coffee table tome, “The Space that Keeps You: When Home Become a Love Story” (Harvest Publications).
In it, Brent explores the notion of “home” not as a perfectly designed space but rather one that is truly special and exerts an emotional pull on its occupants.
“I wanted to understand what it takes to fall in love with a space because my fantasy was to truly come home,” Brent writes. He goes on to look at unique dwellings from the east coast of Sicily to Mérida, Mexico.
The idea of the book came, in part, from Oprah — as things often do.
Around the dining table of her Montecito mansion, which is profiled in the book, she, Brent, and Berkus got to talking about what makes you truly connect to a place and never want to leave it.
For Oprah, it’s the trees around her Montecito abode.
For others in the book, it’s the light or the artwork.
For Brent and Berkus, it’s the fact that their West Village apartment sits on the top floor of a building on Fifth Avenue, a symbol of hard-earned success at once part of and above the city.
The duo sold the apartment in 2016 and moved to Los Angeles, but Brent never felt at home there and missed the sense of community of living in New York.
They moved back east after a couple of years and eventually had the opportunity to re-purchase their old apartment.
They jumped at the chance.
“It was like the love that got away,” Brent writes.
These days, NYC is their primary residence, but the couple is busy creating another special space for the family.
They’re renovating a seventeenth-century, 17-acre farm in Portugal that they bought in 2022.
“My intention is for my children to have it, and for their children to have it,” Brent writes. “It is the ultimate fairy-tale ending.”
