“Seeing something new and innovative in a space that feels old, seeing people live a life that’s modern by definition in a space that isn’t, is riveting to us both.”

“The house is still moving around. We created spaces based on moments that we imagined and then we moved in here and realized we’re not having the moments in that space,” says Jeremiah Brent. Sometimes, we need to live in a home for a bit to really understand the space’s true potential and what changes can be made to live our best life between its walls. This is a beautiful truth that highly revered interior designers recognize—like two of my dearest friends, Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent. In addition to having the most impeccably curated, well-traveled, and soulfully executed taste level, they have been a sounding board throughout my own design evolution.

Entering the home, the layers unspool before me—each room, each vignette is a tour de force of texture, emotion, history, and most important, the personal. You feel it in every vessel, string of beads, and tactile woven textile, a testament to Jeremiah’s love of ritual and Nate’s lifelong love of travel. During a trip the two took to Venice in 2017, Jeremiah fell in love with a friend’s library strewn with books, objects, worn sofas, and even a veneer of dust. They came home with an epiphany about their dining room. With its grand oak millwork, the formality of the space felt incongruent to the way they live. “We never had one dinner in there,” remembers Jeremiah. They realized that the intimacy of the built-ins, however, and the enveloping wood would make for a rich and cozy library, while a transitional room nearby could act as a lively dining room for entertaining guests. The overhaul of these two rooms took on a fever pitch, and consequently the rooms burst into life. Their dining table and incredible set of twelve Jacques Adnet chairs were reinvigorated under the elaborate coffered ceiling of the new dining room. The library, where they now read to Poppy before bed, is the most layered room in the house. It boasts Nate’s voluminous, color-coded, and categorized book collection and Jeremiah’s crystals and devotional beads. It has become the melding repository of their most personal interests and objects.

While their library celebrates the personal, their living room could be a case study in harmonizing contrasts. This is what they do really, really well. Four distinct areas coalesce not through style, but color. At the heart of the room, a 1970s Afra and Tobia Scarpa sofa faces 1940s club chairs. To the left of the fireplace, a marble-top table is flanked by English highback nineteenth-century chairs. A Louis XVI–style daybed is centered under the expansive windows, while an English bench is offset by a midcentury Italian sconce. It is a dazzling display of aesthetic eras and textures, yet they live in harmony, like the range of notes in a symphony. Nate and Jeremiah harness these disparate elements by employing a controlled color palette; nearly everything is cream, black, white, or some gradation therein. Color is a masterful peacemaker. The array of aesthetic influences used in one room parallels their belief that a room should serve more than one function.

Throughout the home, patina is everywhere. “We always reach for what the old way of doing an installation is,” says Nate. This is evident in the hardware throughout, which Nate hand-foraged at a local vintage hardware shop, and in the chalky veneer of the fireplaces, which are lined with old Belgian roof tiles cut on the bias. Patina is also an integral factor in the way they contrast the ornate and the gritty, the polished and the worn.

In contrast to the patina is the feeling only a fresh, light-filled shade of white can convey. They knew from day one they wanted a clean canvas on which to arrange their rich layers of furniture and objects. White also brought light and air into the home. We wanted the lightness of the space to match the soul of it,” says Jeremiah. And, in turn, the home evolved. “She opened up every day in a different way. It was crazy.” Nate and Jeremiah’s home is a contrast of all these things—of freshness and patina, of light and mood. It is masterfully composed and artfully intimate. It celebrates that life is comprised of moments, and that embracing a serendipitous design journey is essential to creating an authentic home.

“We always reach for what’s old, for what’s timeworn.”

“I like at least a minimum of two different moments in any room.”