Why the Fashion Set Is Going All-In on Designing for Home

“We’re applying the same skill set of fashion to furniture design,” Oliver says, “There are different logistics to shipping a dining table than a blouse, but 12 years of operations has us troubleshooting every possible outcome.”

Arjé is only one of many fashion industry alums flexing their style sense into the home. Beverly Nguyen, the founder of Beverly’s, now parlays years of styling Hollywood clients for the red carpet into running homeware shops at Rockefeller Center and the recently-opened Nordstrom Home in New York City. “I coordinate editorial shoots with 900 pieces for a 10-page story,” she says. “That’s a time-management skill I use to switch modes into home shipping, sourcing, and delegating.” Like the Corrals, Nguyen emphasizes her world of fashion coexists with and depends upon the spaces she curates. But for a long time, she pushed back on broadening her medium.

“I appreciate the loyalty of perfecting a singular trade,” Nguyen says. “I had a stay-in-your-lane mentality. But I needed to create a sense of home for my community—fashion people, artists, interior stylists, and architects who feed energy into their surroundings.” The inventory at Beverly’s is deeply personal, inspired by Nguyen’s grandmother’s former store in Vietnam. At Nordstrom, pegboards and tables display comforting, functional kitchenwares and tools, spider ladles, and linens. “Being in a physical space to wrap up a purchase, sharing the intimacy of home and entertaining with someone is ceremonious to me,” she says. “This was never, ‘Interiors are popular now, I’m moving into that.’”

The new era of environment-as-lifestyle can be traced in part to the influence of Eye Swoon creator Athena Calderone. (If you’ve arranged a tablescape or composed an Ottolenghi-worthy plate of roasted vegetables in the social media age, chances are you’ve been inspired by Calderone’s platform.) After a self-taught career in interiors bloomed into a melange of projects and content creation spanning the worlds of entertaining, culinary, residential design, home decor, and product development, she has persuaded even the most staid of industry traditionalists, and a new generation of decorators, to look through a fresh lens. The multidisciplinary concept is personified in her podcast More Than One Thing, in which she interviews a variety of luminaries on the numerous creative territories they explore professionally.