Photography courtesy of Bobby Berk Interiors + Design and Coastal Shower Doors
As Queer Eye’s resident designer, Bobby Berk’s warm aesthetic is the perfect ingredient to the positive and uplifting tone of the series, resonating with a new audience not only inspired by his eye for design but also his empathetic approach to it. “It’s so much more of an emotional journey than I expected,” says one-fifth of the Fab Five, the nickname for the stars of the Emmy-nominated Netflix reality series, a reboot of the beloved 2003 Bravo hit. “I thought we were going to make a pretty makeover show, and it turned out to be a lot more than that.”
On episode five of season one, for instance, the redo of a father of six’s house that was in total disarray resulted in a particularly heartwarming reaction: He said “The new space allows me to be happier and focus on being a better father and husband because I don’t have that constant reminder that I’m not doing a good job,’” remembers Berk. “I never expected to get so emotionally involved in such a short amount of time.”
Berk mixed organic materials with clean lines in two homes in the Nova Ridge neighborhood outside Las Vegas.
Besides Berk’s innovative, budget-friendly design solutions, his charismatic and compassionate personality has made him a fan favorite. That’s in part because his road to celebrity wasn’t an easy one. Wanting to escape his small hometown of Mount Vernon, Missouri, he left at age 15 for the “big city” of Springfield, Missouri, couch surfing and sleeping in his car in back alleys while doing double shifts at Applebee’s to make ends meet. After a brief stint in Denver working at the Bombay Company, he headed to New York in 2003 with only $100 to his name. Without any formal training or even a high school diploma, the then 21-year-old Berk cut his teeth as a design manager at Restoration Hardware before moving on to home furnishings brand Portico, where he rose up the company ladder to creative director, building out its ecommerce. When the company shuttered in 2006, Bobby Berk Home was a natural progression—and a job fix for the time being—selling a mix of his and others’ wares online, but also offering design services to clients. Success followed, as did a call from his former boss at an Italian furniture manufacturer who suggested Berk buy him out, which he did, even though he took on debt to do so, allowing Berk to turn his brick-and-mortar store in Manhattan into home base for his growing brand.
Other stores followed in Miami and Atlanta, but it wasn’t until 2014, when Builder Magazine asked the now Los Angeles-based Berk to be the creative director of its 2016 Show Home (his design took top honors) that his career took off in several new directions. Despite a steep learning curve (he watched YouTube videos to master floorplan software), “I realized that being a designer is something I could do, and I started pivoting toward that side of the business,” which led to Queer Eye. After his publicist got him an audition, a process he jokes was “kind of like American Idol [meets] The Hunger Games,” he wound up on one of the most influential unscripted TV series in recent memory.
The Berk Oak door for Coastal Shower Doors features an applied light wood grain frame set under full panes of tempered glass for a modern, Scandinavian-inspired look.
With no signs of slowing down, he’s currently juggling 15 residential projects; recently collaborated with Coastal Shower Doors, which yielded the galactic-informed Constellation collection and the Berk Oak door, paying tribute to the silhouette of the company’s Gridscape series; and is launching a new furniture collection early next year. He’s also taping the third season of Queer Eye near his hometown in Kansas City.
“What keeps me passionate,” he says, “[is] that I’m able to affect people’s happiness with design. You might think the sky is falling and the world is ending, but tomorrow is a new day.” That outlook seems to be working. Nearly 20 years later, the Springfield alley he once called home, is now behind a store that carries some of his products.
