West Palm Beach

“It’s actually a love story,” Brent begins when I ask him about the couple who reached out to him in March 2022 for help with designing their Palm Beach house—delightfully poetic, no? The couple wanted the house to feel like a livable gallery, where “they could be anywhere in the world,” he points out. Bam! There’s his starting point.

For Brent, scanning the Internet for inspiration can be a slippery slope toward copy-cat design: “You can get online and you can see everything and you can travel the world in 10 minutes, but as a creative, I’m making spaces that really feel original and, more important, personal.” Some things about his process are like any traditional design studio’s—for instance, he gathers materials for surfaces and furniture and upholstery in a tray. But also, he admits that the wall in his office where he pins his inspiration “looks like I’m a serial killer, because it’s my stream of consciousness of everything I’m finding beautiful right now—from images that I pulled to a painting that my daughter made.”

One picture that steered the ship of this Palm Beach contemporary house was of a hallway in Berlin with oxblood walls and concrete floors, the sun streaming through the door. The image, which Brent found online (we never said he was perfect), informed the bathroom’s dramatic palette but also the idea of moody light, a theme that appears throughout the finished home in the form of perforated metal doors and sheer floor-length curtains. “We wanted it to be a space that, even if it was during the daytime, it felt like it had a mood to it, like you were always in that twilight hour.

When the couple came home, there were tears, some dancing, and some drinks—but a designer’s work is never really over. “My goal isn’t to hand people a house that’s complete,” says Brent. “It’s to hand people a house that’s ready to receive them and the rest of their life.”