Letters from Jeremiah Brent, Essay Two

I left Modesto when I was 17 for college in San Francisco, where my plan was to major in Psychology. To make my tuition, I got a job as a sales associate at Abercrombie & Fitch. I was good at it—even then I loved fashion—and eventually I became the manager of the store. But after a couple of years…or months… I realized college wasn’t for me, so I headed to Los Angeles. Why L.A.? Why not. It seemed like the place to be. I found work at a smoothie shop, where I became the top seller. Best of all, I landed a studio apartment. It probably wasn’t much to most people—it was in a run-down stretch of Hollywood, right across from Covenant House, a place for teenagers without homes—but I loved it.

Yes it was tiny, and yes the guys in the house next door to me sold drugs, but I treasured every inch of it. And even though I had no money, that didn’t keep me from making it a home. I carried the lesson I learned from my boyhood in Modesto: I put all of my self into it. Somewhere I have photos of it: my one chair—a brown love seat in my bedroom—and the one wall that was all oxidized copper. (It was the early 2000s—trust me, copper and turquoise were big then.)

Life moves in funny ways, though. I got fired from the smoothie shop when my boss realized I was giving away smoothies. I wasn’t doing it in a sneaky way, mind you. I was just trying to promote good among my regulars. You know—kind of my own version of a loyalty-rewards program. For some reason my boss didn’t exactly see it that way. He fired me the second he noticed and with a straight face told me, “You’ll never work around here again.”

I did, though. I found a job as a server at a cocktail lounge called East-West, a bar in West Hollywood that was meant to be a place where gays and straights came together. But let’s just call it what it was — simply, a gay bar. I left my studio and moved in with some roommates. I bounced around like that for a while. It seemed like anytime rent was due, I’d move. Then, I met a guy and he asked me to move in. I was so happy living with him but, as I said earlier, it all fell apart. At the time, he was in the closet and maybe he just got overwhelmed by everything, or maybe he just wanted to move on from me, but one day he came home and told me he couldn’t continue with our relationship and said I had to leave.

That’s when I ended up in my Jeep Liberty. It was a dark time for me. But one good thing that came out of it was I met a group of women who took me in and who are now my best, closest friends. (We named ourselves The Dots after a boozy night that turned into matching tattoos — a simple line of dots, one for each of us.) They helped me get on my feet and after awhile I found a job as a bus boy at a club where I worked my way up to being a doorman (I hated it) and one night I met a woman named Amanda Demme. At the time, she was the impresaria behind a lot of the hot clubs in Los Angeles. I was fascinated by her. Everyone was. She wore all black, down to a big fedora, and had her signature scent, patchouli. This was the early 2000s and no one looked like she did. She was just so insanely herself. Eventually I got to know her. One night, she told me she was opening a new club, H Wood, and asked me if I wanted to work with her design team and help on the place. From that moment on, my life was never the same. I was all in.

I learned so much from Amanda, beginning with the fact that the “talent” I had developed as a boy—rearranging my bedroom over and over—was actually a great skill to have as a nightclub designer. Every night, Amanda would force me to re-arrange the floor plan for the entire club, to find new compositions for the lounge areas, new ways to set the furniture. She told me, “I want the place to be an entirely new experience every night.” Her challenge validated my instinct that it was good to experiment, to take chances. That by asking “What if?…” you might find a great new idea. It was thrilling to re-do a space thirty-seven times—especially because she had acquired amazing pieces for us to work with.

Through Amanda, I began to learn about designers and provenance and periods. I learned details mattered, too. And that you could find material anywhere. I couldn’t believe she salvaged old windows from Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York and used them for the club’s exterior, along with bricks she scrounged from an old naval base. It was the first time I’d met someone with such a strong, distinctive, pure aesthetic. She made me think about lighting and shadow and the importance of creating a mood in a room and why it mattered. There was no detail she didn’t notice or care about. She even dictated what the servers at the club wore each night, down to how they tied their shoes. (And yes, I didn’t just learn about interiors from Amanda. If you know me at all, it’s pretty clear her style—and her commitment to a signature scent—made a small impression.)

After the club opened, I took a job as salesperson at a furniture store. Sometimes it was slow so I did what, by now, you might expect me to do: I passed my time rearranging the furniture on the sales floor, creating different vignettes, experimenting. The owner, who was so talented and patient with me, looked at it all and said, “Do you want to do more?” So he let me design furniture and he’d develop it. I couldn’t believe his faith in me, and how he pushed me creatively. That feeling I had when I saw him turn my sketches into reality? It’s one I can only hope to pass along to someone else.

Pretty soon clients were asking me if I could design furniture specifically for them, so I did. And then people started asking me “Maybe you can design a room, too?” I learned to say Yes to anything that anyone offered, like designing the room to hold the launch-party for the movie Wolverine. And if someone offered me something I didn’t know how to do, I said Yes, too, because I figured I’d figure it out as I went. This is something, by the way, that I still do. Because I believe work is like life—you’re never fully prepared, you never have all the answers. Not knowing how to do something is part of learning. And to me, learning is life’s greatest gift. My philosophy now is the same as it was when I was barely starting out — say Yes early and often. Trust yourself to find solutions. Even the smallest project will teach you something if you allow it to. It’s best to say Yes and see where it will take you rather than let your fear hold you back from who you just might become and say no.

Around this time, a friend invited me to dinner and by chance we were joined by her friend, Rachel Zoe. I knew nothing about her or who she was. All I knew was what I saw: she was another person like Amanda—so free, so herself. We hit it off. A few days later, my friend said Rachel wanted to meet with me—that’s when she asked me if I wanted to be her assistant. At this point I didn’t even know she had a television show. All I knew was she was in fashion and I liked fashion so I said, Sure! So that’s how that happened. Completely random.

It’s funny, most of my friends told me not to take the job with Rachel. They said, I’d finally gotten on my feet thanks to the job at the furniture store, and this would be chaotic and disruptive. They said the job was a big turn from what I was doing and I’d regret it. I didn’t see it that way. I felt in my bones I should do it and I’m so glad I did, even though it was stressful and all-consuming—especially when I realized I was basically going to be learning the job while being filmed. But I learned a lot of professional maturity and working with her forced me to step up my game. The truth is, working for Rachel was intense and 24/7. But there were days that she surprised you, like the morning she and I were in her kitchen on Canon Drive and she said to me, “You really should not be a stylist.”

All I could think was, “Is she firing me?”

Let me back up. A few weeks earlier, she asked me if I would design her house. It was another moment that changed my life. You know how sometimes in order to use your talent, you need someone else to give you permission, or to encourage your talent? A person who sets you on the course of your dream? Rachel was that for me. Like all great bosses she had noticed potential in me for something more, something different, and she generously pushed me towards it. She has an ability to spot in people what their true talent is, what their real potential is. When she asked me to decorate her house, I’d never done anything like it. But she trusted me. All she said was, “You’ll figure it out. I know you will.” And in that moment—I remember it to this day—something shifted in me. Working on the house felt so instinctual.

But standing there in her kitchen, all I could think was “I guess I didn’t figure it out.”

And then she said, “It’s so clear to me that you should do interior design. I think you could have a huge life doing it, and be very successful. It’s what you are passionate about, so it will never feel like work.”

That night, as I sat in my one-bedroom bungalow—by now I’d found a new place in my old Hollywood neighborhood—all I could think was, “She’s not wrong. Interiors are all that I want to do.”

Coming in April — The Early Days of Jeremiah Brent Design, What I Look for When Hiring, and Signs You’re Heading in the Right Direction.