How to Find Your Personal Design Style, According to Bobby Berk

You can save a thousand perfectly styled rooms to Pinterest and still have absolutely no idea what to do with your own living room… or bedroom, bathroom, patio. Apparently, the problem might be that you’re starting in the wrong place. 

On Girls Gotta Eat, Ashley Hesseltine and Rayna Greenberg sat down with Emmy-winning designer and Queer Eye star, Bobby Berk, to talk about finding your personal design style, decorating on a budget, making a small space actually functional, and what happens when the person you love wants to hang a football helmet in the living room. (BIG no, by the way. Take it from Rayna.)

Bobby has always approached design with the belief that it should be accessible, not reserved for people with massive budgets or a curated vocabulary for their aesthetic. And his advice for figuring out what you actually like is surprisingly simple: stop thinking about the design.

The conversation covers everything from one light bulb temperature Bobby swears by to what furniture is actually worth spending money on. Watch the full episode below as you follow along and steal the tips for your own space:

How to Find Your Personal Design Style, According to Bobby Berk

Before Bobby even joins the conversation, Rayna shares her own rule for decorating: fill your home with things you love and you’ll love your home. Simple and doesn’t require a perfectly coordinated theme!

Honestly, this ends up being pretty close to Bobby’s philosophy, too. Instead of starting with whatever aesthetic trending online for its five minutes of fame, he looks at what someone already loves and works backward from there.

It’s also a much less intimidating place to start if “Fresh Industrial” and “Organic Modern” mean basically nothing to you. (Yes, those are real design styles according to Bobby, and we’ll circle back to that in a second.) For those who prefer to see all the ideas in one place before beginning, you’ll really love our interior design mood board for a little boost of inspiration.

What Is Style in Interior Design?

On the surface, style in interior design is the visual language or aesthetic created by color, furniture, decor, and materials. But here’s what most people won’t tell you: your interior design style doesn’t have to fit neatly in one single category. In fact, Bobby learned pretty early in his career that asking people to name their aesthetic isn’t really even that helpful.

In the first episode of Queer Eye, Bobby asked Tom what his aesthetic was. His answer? “French Industrial.” (Yeah, we said we were going full circle earlier.) Aside from that being super vague, there was one specific problem: Tom didn’t even ACTUALLY know what French Industrial meant. He’d heard the phrase once and went with it. 

Bobby says that’s common, and you’ve probably seen it or done it yourself! When people don’t know design, they generally just toss out a term because they feel like they’re supposed to have an answer. So instead of making someone between traditional, mid-century, coastal, Scandinavian, or whatever else is out there, he asks completely different questions. 

That’s where things get interesting.

How to Find Your Interior Design Style

If you don’t know your design style, fight the urge to scroll Pinterest, pick up every paint sample at Home Depot, and study furniture shapes. According to Bobby, he’d much rather hear about your dream vacation, your favorite show, and what you’re passionate about.

Ask What You Love Outside of Design

Think about the places you want to travel, the clothing you love wearing, the books you can’t help but to binge-read, or the TV shows you turn on at the end of a long day. Stick with us, we’re going somewhere with this. 

Bobby once worked with a young bachelor who couldn’t tell him anything about design, so he asked about things the bachelor did know the answer to. His dream vacation was Havana and his favorite show was Mad Men. Bobby took those two answers, ran with them, and created a mid-century home with banana-leaf wallpaper in the bathroom and a Havana mural in the living room.

Ashley immediately starts applying the idea to herself and lands on Greece: lots of white, natural stone, and a little blue. Naturally, you can imagine what Bobby’s response was. Your favorite place, outfit, movie, restaurant, or hotel might tell you a lot more about your design style than a trendy quiz asking whether you’re “modern,” “traditional,” or “Utopian Scholastic.” (Yes, again, that’s a real design style. No, we have NO idea what it actually means.)

TL;DR: As Bobby puts it, your home should recharge you the way a full night of charging recharges your phone.

Design Around What Makes You Happy, Not What’s Trending

If Bobby has one place he doesn’t recommend starting, it’s with what’s currently trending. He points out that you can walk into a room and immediately tell when it was decorated because one trend immediately took over. Even Ashley compares it to seeing a wedding on TikTok and instantly knowing what year it happened. You know the videos. 

And yes, Bobby also brings up millennial gray. Gray walls? Fine. Gray carpet, gray wood floors, gray cabinets, and gray everything else? That’s where he has to draw the line.

Don’t get it confused: you don’t have to ditch something you genuinely love the second the internet declares it “out.” Later in the episode, when Ashley brings up the white-and-neutral look that still has a chokehold on plenty of millennial homes, Bobby’s answer is simple: if you like it, do it. 

Basically, your home isn’t required to participate in the trend cycle. And it’s not required to skip out on a style you love because it IS trendy. If decorating around what makes you happy sounds familiar, there’s a whole design movement built around that idea. Here’s what dopamine decor is and why people love it.

Spend on What You Actually Touch, Save on Everything Else

Not every piece of furniture deserves the same chunk of your budget. For Bobby, the distinction comes down to how much you actually use something. 

A sofa, for example, is worth splurging on because you’re sitting on it constantly, and buying a cheap one that falls apart really just means buying another sofa sooner. The same logic applies to the furniture you physically use all the time. The decorative places you’re not sitting, sleeping, or living on? That’s where you can save.

Rayna is totally on Bobby’s side here. She said her couch is where she’ll spend the most money on, but she’s found plenty of the rest secondhand or for less. If you’re in the market yourself, her advice is to head to Facebook Marketplace and Google Image search. If you have Rayna’s luck, you may be able to find pieces you’ve been eyeing for months but simply can’t justify. 

And if you own your home and are thinking bigger than furniture, Bobby says kitchen and bathroom upgrades are the place where you’re more likely to see that investment reflected in the home’s value.

Make Lighting Your Secret Weapon

Bobby is serious about lighting, and after hearing him explain it, it’s hard not to start mentally auditing every bulb in your own house. 

The color temperature he swears by is 2700 Kelvin. That’s the warmer, softer light that feels closer to golden hour or, as Bobby explains it, an old-school incandescent bulb. Around 5000 Kelvin, on the other hand, starts to make the area feel a little more like an operating room.

Beyond the bulbs themselves, Bobby likes light coming from different heights throughout a room. One ridiculously easy trick is putting a light at the base of a potted plant and letting it shine upward. Rayna immediately notices the effect as luxurious, which is exactly why this feels like one of the easiest tips in the episode to steal. 

Bobby is also a fan of dimmers. As the night winds down, lowering the lights creates a softer environment instead of keeping your entire home blazing bright until the second you get into bed.

Fortunately, good lighting doesn’t necessarily mean buying a new fixture or hiring an electrician. Sometimes, it really is as easy as swapping out your bulb.

Make Small-Space Furniture Do Double Duty

Bobby’s rule is that furniture in a small space needs to work harder. More specifically, one piece should really serve two purposes. 

For example, storage cubes can become a coffee table, extra seating when people come over, or chairs around a small dining table. A bed can have drawers underneath or enough clearance to slide storage bins beneath it. And then there’s the furniture we keep because we think a home is supposed to have it. 

Ashley points out that she and her husband barely use their dining table, which leads to one of the more freeing parts of the conversation. If you have limited space and don’t use a dining room, you don’t need one. Design for the way you actually live, not for the imaginary style you think you’re supposed to have.

Personalize a Rental Without Losing Your Deposit

Bobby has never let renting stop him from making a place feel like his. One of the best places to start? Light fixtures. These are the easiest changes in a place you feel like you can’t truly customize. Swap out the one you have, keep the original somewhere safe, and put it back before you move. Paint is another option (if you’re willing to repaint later).

Don’t feel like painting again? Fortunately, we now have the luxury of peel-and-stick wallpaper, which Bobby loves enough to have his own collection. It can work especially well in bathrooms because the walls are painted with a glossier finish that makes removal easier.

Bobby has also taken the rental makeover philosophy pretty far himself. Years ago, he redid the flooring, kitchen cabinets, lighting, and walls in a Denver apartment. When the building manager brought in the owner to see what he’d done, the owner wanted to know how much it would cost for him to do the other apartments!

So yes, asking your landlord first is certainly an option. Bobby’s also a fan of asking for forgiveness.

Merge Your Style With a Partner’s Without a Fight

And now for the relationship portion of the interior design episode: what happens when your partner brings their stuff into your beautifully decorated home? Rayna’s been there, football helmets and jerseys specifically. 

Bobby jokes that whoever has the best taste should win, but the actual conversation lands somewhere around compromise. If one person deeply cares about design and the other genuinely doesn’t? That can actually be the dream scenario. If both people have opinions, things get trickier. 

For something like a signed sports jersey that your partner truly loves, Bobby suggests making it work with the room instead of automatically banning it. Have it professionally framed and matted so it looks more like art and less like something carried over from a college apartment. 

Compromise home decor-edition, but make it aesthetically acceptable.

How to Find Your Interior Design Style Starting Today

The takeaway from Bobby Berk is that you already have a personal design style, you just have to translate it. Stop scrolling for what’s “in” and start with what you love: the places you want to be, the shows you rewatch, the colors that make you happy. Fill your home with those things, spend where it counts, get your lighting right, and let the rest be affordable and secondhand. 

For the full conversation with Bobby, plus the parts where Ashley and Rayna go completely off the rails (in the best way), watch the episode on Girls Gotta Eat and catch up with the show on YouTube. And if this sent you down a decorating rabbit hole, dig into the rest of the Dear Media Network, home to over 100 top-rated pop culture, entertainment, and lifestyle podcasts hosted by today’s most talked-about celebrities and creators.