Step Inside Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent’s Freshly Renovated Fifth Avenue Family Home

There’s the old saying, taken from the 1940 Thomas Wolfe novel of the same title that “you can’t go home again.” But diving into the latest chapter of Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent’s search for where to put down roots, one is inspired to learn that while returning home may be incredibly difficult to pull off, it’s not impossible. And for the Brent-Berkus family their reunion with their Fifth Avenue apartment has been made all the sweeter by the realization that this particular address, more than any of the others, is an essential and ongoing part of their love story.

For those who have been following this couple and design duo extraordinaire through the years, their new Greenwich Village home may look oddly familiar. This is because the “new home” is in fact their old home; they actually lived here from 2013 to 2016, and its first iteration graced the cover of AD in October 2015. Since then we’ve seen them travel across the country to Los Angeles, where a sprawling Spanish Colonial villa in Hancock Park received a typically breathtaking Brent-Berkus makeover (AD, January 2018). Then, after three years of West Coast living, the pair realized New York City was where their family (which includes son Oskar, now four, and big sister Poppy, now seven) belonged, and they decamped to the West Village, lovingly renovating an 1899 town house (AD May 2020). Although the two declared in that interview that they would never again call a place their “forever home” in a publication, one couldn’t be blamed for thinking that… perhaps this was it?

Yet here we are, back where it all started, where the designers lived together when they first began their lives as a couple, before their marriage, before their kids.

How, then, did they end up back here? When plotting their return to New York City the AD100 talents tried contacting the original Fifth Avenue buyers to see if they might possibly be interested in selling. Unfortunately, no dice. Berkus, who describes himself as someone who philosophically “doesn’t hold on to real estate,” was at peace. “I could live in a studio apartment, and as long as I was surrounded by things that matter to me, I would feel like I was at home.” But for Brent, this apartment “was always the one that got away.” And even though Berkus was content with where they landed, ultimately, there was something undeniable about the pull of their first home together.