Personal Life
Berkus was born in Orange County, California, and grew up mainly in suburban Minneapolis. He is Jewish and openly gay. He attended Cushing Academy, a boarding school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. He started working in design immediately after leaving high school and interned at Dominique Aurientis in Paris and Sotheby's in Chicago. Berkus graduated from Lake Forest College near Chicago in 1994 with degrees in French and Sociology. Berkus founded the company, Nate Berkus Associates, in Chicago in 1995.
Berkus is related to the venture capitalist David Berkus, architect Barry Berkus, musician/artist Gunther Berkus, Josh Berkus of Software in the Public Interest, casino manager /author Eric David Berkus, and western states lawyer Matt Berkus. Designer Nancy Golden from HGTV and DIY networks is his mother.
In December 2004 Berkus and his partner, photographer Fernando Bengoechea, were vacationing at a beach resort in Sri Lanka when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit. While Berkus survived, Bengoechea is missing and presumed dead. Berkus appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on January 17, 2005, to talk about his ordeal and the loss of his love.
Read more about this topic: Nate Berkus
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“Take two kids in competition for their parents’ love and attention. Add to that the envy that one child feels for the accomplishments of the other; the resentment that each child feels for the privileges of the other; the personal frustrations that they don’t dare let out on anyone else but a brother or sister, and it’s not hard to understand why in families across the land, the sibling relationship contains enough emotional dynamite to set off rounds of daily explosions.”
—Adele Faber (20th century)
“Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are ... it’s what we’ve all made of the world.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)