Queer Eye’s Bobby Berk on designing for Japanese homes - ALeesha Institute

Best interior designing course in chennai -Aleesha Institute

The newest season of Netflix’s Queer Eye has the Fab Five bringing their joyful brand of self-love and wellness to Japan, joined by stars Kiko Mizuhara and Naomi Watanabe to act as local guides. In the four-part miniseries, the show handles language barriers and cultural expectations with a refreshing thoughtfulness, and each of the experts in food, fashion, culture, grooming, and design bring new perspectives to help their Japanese heroes, which is what the show calls its makeover subjects.

We caught up with the show’s design expert Bobby Berk at Adobe Max, where he gave a talk on how he balances running his own interior design business while juggling Queer Eye. Berk, who essentially transforms entire houses in the span of a week, truly shines this season given the challenges of working within the space limitations of Japanese apartments. He shared his thoughts on having not one, but two TikTok accounts, designing for Instagram, and the iPhone 12.

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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What are some things you had to take into consideration when you were designing for a Japanese home, compared to homes in the US?

The apartments in Tokyo are very small, it’s the biggest city in the world. Of course, it seems like the bigger the city, the smaller the apartments. So I had to really take in consideration the size. Also, rental apartments, they don’t let you paint anything on the walls or change the flooring, so we had to get creative by building out furniture. We had to build up, instead of out. So really just utilizing the space from top to bottom, left to right.

Just thinking about it culturally as well, it’s more minimalist, which is my personal aesthetic, so I loved it.

Speaking of minimalism, did Marie Kondo come up at all during the season?

She’s the sweetest, most lovely woman ever. She was nominated for an Emmy as well, so we got to hang out at the Emmys. I quote her all the time, because I really like her term, “If it sparks joy.” People always ask me, ‘what trend should I worry about?’ and I’m like, ‘you shouldn’t worry about any trend, you should worry about what sparks joy.’ If you see something and it’s a creepy clown collection, but it sparks joy? Then keep it! Don’t just do something because a magazine told you to do it, do it because it’s something that you really love. When you surround yourself with things and spaces that you really love, it helps you recharge more.

What stores did you get the furniture from in Japan?

We had to build creative spaces, so a lot of it we built ourselves with our local Japanese crew. But a lot of the other furniture that we did get, we got from Nitori. They’re all over Japan, it’s kind of like an Ikea meets Bed, Bath and Beyond, meets a Target, like they have everything for the home.

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