The Space That Keeps You: When Home Becomes a Love Story

Interior designer and television host Jeremiah Brent explores the emotional meaning of home in this warm and inviting book that illuminates what make peoples’ spaces so personally significant.
For many of us, our houses are more than just where we hold our belongings. They are reflections of who we are and where we’ve been. They represent our aesthetics, our personalities – provide us with purpose and intention, and if we’re lucky, a safe space to live and create. For years, Jeremiah Brent and his family lived in one beautiful home after the next. Yet after a short time, they always felt the pull to move on. Curious to understand why, he embarked on a deeply personal mission to discover what makes a home a space that keeps you.
The Space That Keeps Youisn’t just a study of beautiful interior design; it’s an emotional design book that explores what gives spaces meaning. Through candid conversations with nine individuals and families varying in backgrounds, lifestyles, and geographic locations, Jeremiah reveals how and why the spaces we inhabit come to feel like they truly belong to us—the memories, emotions, and stories that shape what home signifies.
He introduces memorable people like the artist couple James and Alexandra Brown and their children who made an abandoned plot in Merida, Mexico their accidental paradise, and Tracy and Brian Robbins who found refuge during the pandemic in a serene single-story home in Montecito surrounded by fields of lavender. He illuminates a personal side of Oprah Winfrey as she speaks to the importance of nature in her dream of home, and describes the story of Giberto and Bianca Arrivabene, who fought to hold onto their family’s historic Venetian palazzo. Their stories are bookended by Jeremiah’s recollections of his own journey defining home with his husband, fellow interior designer and television personality Nate Berkus, and their two children.
Filled with intimate, meaningful details—from the kitchen that now nourishes the grandchildren of the adoring couple who first cooked there fifty years ago to the beams of one apartment’s walls that are etched with hearts to literally represent the love that fills it—and accompanied by 300 inviting and inspiring color photographs—The Space That Keeps Youillustrates the essence of what makes a house a home. Just like Jeremiah himself, readers will leave this book with a newfound appreciation for the places that connect and shape us.