Nate Berkus admits that one of the greatest loves of his family is traveling. His 8-year-old daughter Poppy has essentially run out of pages in her passport. As parents to two young children, Poppy and 5-year-old Oskar, Nate and Jeremiah Brent want to instill that sense of adventure and wonder that only traveling can give them.
Which is why it makes sense that he is teaming up with Great Wolf Lodge to design the outdoor areas of their much-awaited high-end villas exclusively to the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, location of the huge family-friendly resort chain. Nate has also been busy designing the pool cabanas that will line the outdoor pool of the resort, which will be thoughtful and serve as way more than just chill-out places for families.
“I always think about those little moments in between. Those are where the memories are really made,” he told Mom.com on a cold March afternoon in New York City’s Home Studios, where the Great Wolf team is unveiling the beautiful and totally genius designs of the outdoor areas. “So I just kept trying to envision the entire time, like, what are those moments going to be?”
The inside of the villas connects loosely with the outdoor areas
“There’s a relationship, but I definitely wanted to do sort of my own thing,” Nate told us. “I pulled some of the palette from what the inside of the new villas will look like. It’s all fairly neutral and it’s really sort of nature. It’s very well suited to the Poconos and that really was, I think, the inspiration behind the villas interior and the exterior and the cabanas. There’s no better source of inspiration than the natural environment that surrounds you.”
The outdoor areas are equipped with furniture and amenities to encourage both rest and fun: a family-size dinner table that easily turns into a ping-pong table (with really chic leather netting), side tables that double as tic-tac-toe and checkerboards, and an inviting fire pit, which will be child-proofed with glass.
Nate and Jeremiah’s kids were part of the inspiration
Well, sort of.
“It’s not in terms of the actual like fabrics or the the furniture, but the practicality of it was definitely inspired by our family,” Nate says. “Like I know my kids would play checkers on that table, I know they’d push it out and play for hours in their bathing suits. And so it really wasn’t like a direct inspiration from them, it was more about experientially, as a dad. Having traveled with two kids under 10 to all these different places really helped me think about things like, what was missing [from our travels]? What could’ve made it better? What would’ve made it a little bit more luxurious or a little bit more thoughtful? So that’s what I tried to build in.”
This was actually a full circle moment for Nate
“My family used to actually own and operate a summer camp in the Poconos, like a million years ago,” Nate told our group at the NYC unveiling of his designs for Great Wolf Lodge.
Now that he’s a dad and has so much experience traveling with kids, he says the project is more meaningful.
“You know, I’m not designing the water slides, I’m not designing the wave pool,” he tells me with a laugh. “I was tasked with doing something totally counterintuitive to a resort, which is making people want to spend time in their rooms, in their living ares. And my answer to that was, I don’t remember the fancy vacation to Hawaii. I remember the moment where my son was so exhausted that he fell asleep on my chest. Those are the moments that we remember, and that’s what I am trying to create.”
You can watch Nate and Jeremiah on The Nate and Jeremiah Home Project, now in its second season on HGTV. Nate’s designs will be coming to the Pocono Mountains Great Wolf Lodge in October 2023.
