feature || design
Nate the Great Interior designer and Oprah protégé Nate Berkus gets ready for his own stage. | BY ALYSSA FORD
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Artful Living: So let’s talk about The Nate Berkus Show. What’s the formula going to be? Nate Berkus: The show is going to be a hybrid. Celebrities will be a part of the show, but it will be more pops of celebrities, rather than celebrities coming on to promote their movie or their clothing line or whatever they have going on. It’s going to show sides of them that we haven’t seen before. For instance, Julianne Moore is booked on the show, and she’s super passionate about design. She’s going to share some of the principles that guide her when she’s decorating her homes for her family, for her children. It’s a side of Julianne Moore she’s never talked about publicly. Same with Jamie Lee Curtis, who is obsessed with home organization and has a million tips. Who would have thought? Another segment we’re doing is called “Newsmakers,” and it’s going to be very fresh and topical. We have one very compelling
84 Artful Living
| Autumn 2010
Artful-LivingMag.com
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF 2010 SONY PICTURES TELEVISION
ate Berkus lives one of those fabulous jet-set lives: a pied-a-terre in Milan with ex-model and designer boyfriend Brian Atwood, a stunning condo in Chicago where he runs an exclusive interior design firm and a Manhattan pad that is now home base more than ever. But the thing about Nate Berkus is that he doesn’t come off as a jet-setter. There’s something about his boyish exuberance, his goofy grin that seems almost, well, Midwestern. Like those years of hanging out on Lake Minnetonka and hoofing it to class at Hopkins High haven’t completely faded. Maybe that’s what Oprah viewers have picked up on for the past nine years: a fancy interior designer who never got too big for his britches. It’s that amiable connection that Berkus is really counting on now as he prepares to premiere The Nate Berkus Show on NBC this fall. He even went on a listening tour across the Midwest this spring to eat banana bread and drink coffee with the kind of women he hopes will be as firmly attached to his show as they have been to Oprah’s. “I feel a lot of anticipation, but I’m not nervous,” he told Artful Living. His schedule, though, is insane: meetings and shoots scheduled to the quarter-hour. Still, Berkus took time out to talk to Artful Living about his decorator mom, where to find the best antiques shopping in Minnesota and which celebrities are nuts about interior design.