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In the glut of interior design inspiration, party tips and overall life hacks that live on today’s Instagram feeds and TikTok For You Pages — swathed in bouclé couches, checkered rugs and knockoff Eames chairs — it can be hard to build a personal style. We have the tools, perhaps too many tools, needed to create a beautiful space. But the result is often a whirlpool of trends devoid of individuality.
The magic that comes with making one’s space into a home is what Bobby Berk has provided as one of the interior design experts on “Queer Eye” for seven seasons, and now the Emmy-winning host is bringing his expertise to his debut book “Right at Home: How Good Design Is Good for the Mind.” It releases Sept. 12 and is now available to pre-order on Amazon.
Berk’s hack for designing a home is to first think about the things in your life that you love the most, and feel the most you. “Like what’s your favorite article of clothing?” he asks over a Zoom call.
“If it’s your worn leather jacket, then you’ll probably like leather accents like a leather note tray or a leather cup. If your favorite article of clothing is a chunky cable knit sweater, then you’re probably going to like cable knit throws or pillows. If that piece of clothing makes you happy and makes you smile, makes you feel safe and secure, those things are also going to work in your home. And it doesn’t matter if those things are cool in a magazine. It only matters that they are sparking joy for you.”
Berk’s fans might be surprised it’s taken so long for the reality show star to come out with his own design book. Most people in his position would have signed a lucrative book deal as early as the Netflix show’s first season but Berk says he wanted to wait until he was confident that it would be a book that could genuinely help people.
“I didn’t want to do a book just filled with a bunch of pretty pictures and of beautiful homes, that can sometimes make people feel worse about their spaces than actually good about them,” Berk says. “A lot of these beautiful, perfectly styled homes are unattainable spaces for the regular person. I didn’t want to do a book that would make people feel bad about their space, I wanted to do a book that would really help people achieve the space that they wanted, and to realize that design is all about happiness, and not about things.”
Waiting to debut his first design book also means he and his team were able to tap into an even larger library of design work. The book features room guides in every chapter, with tips on how to organize specific spaces alongside photos from real projects he helped design in addition to his own homes and those in his circle.
“There’s no stories in the book about a particular space, it’s all about big picture,” Berk says. “We don’t want you to recreate a space that we’ve done — this book is about teaching you the ways to figure out what things in your space make you happy, and do it for yourself.”
Pre-order “Right at Home: How Good Design Is Good for the Mind” below:
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