How to Make Your Home the Right Place for You, According to Bobby Berk

Sara Tramp

For Bobby Berk, interior design isn’t about curating an aesthetic. It’s not about having the prettiest, cleanest, or most luxurious home. And it’s not about what looks best to anyone but you. For the design expert and Queer Eye star, interior design is solely about the way your space makes you feel.

An Emmy-nominated TV show host, Berk also runs his own design firm and has curated a line of home decor, selling wallpaper, rugs, art, and more. This month, he’s breaking into the publishing world, too, with Right at Home: How Good Design Is Good for the Mind, an interior design book that’s so much more than your average coffee table read. Available starting September 12, Right at Home is all about bettering your mental wellness with the art of interior design.

“Often in those books, every picture is so manicured, and so edited and so perfect—no one actually lives like that,” Berk tells Better Homes & Gardens. “You see that and you start to feel like your space is inferior. I wanted to create a book that would help people make their spaces perfect for them and help them know that their spaces can be perfect just the way they are, with a few little edits.”

Right at Home delves into the ways that interior design can be a form of self care. With chapters on color, light, plants, and attention to sensory details, the book makes designing your home interactive, introspective, and truly fun. It asks, “What makes you happy?” and really means it, prompting readers to look inward in order to create a space that’s safe and comforting at the end of a long day.

“If you don’t plug your phone in at night, or if that cord has a short in it, your phone’s not going to get fully charged. And what’s going to happen? It’s not going to