Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent purchased their centuries-old farm in Portugal with the dream of spending their summers as a family. After years of renovations, that dream is finally a reality.
The Portuguese Farm
The HGTV couple opened up about falling in love with their 400-year-old property, which the “Queer Eye” star claimed “was a ruin.”
“I won’t get choked up about the inside of this house, but I do get choked up when I talk about the outside,” he told Architectural Digest in a video shared via Instagram last month. “Because when we bought this farm, it was a ruin and everything was really sick and had not been taken care of. We had a friend come back, who actually showed us the house, and he said to us, ‘You brought her back to life.'”
The outlet described the property as a dreamy backyard escape “surrounded by orange groves, fields of lavender, and a checkerboard marble pool reimagined from an old water tank.”
Sheep, goats and peacocks “roam freely” on the family’s European retreat.
Jeremiah continued, “Our family planted a lot of the lavender. Everything in this space reminds me of everything that we’ve put into it. And for whatever reason, everything that we’ve done, everything that we try to achieve for our family, this farm feels like the best representation of that.”
Berkus then introduced the groundskeepers, Nuna and Marta.
“Without them there would be no farm,” he said.
Besides the resurrected nature, one of Jeremiah’s favorite features on the property is the water supply.
“Throughout the property, there’s these old wells. When you take a wood cork out, they actually water the entire field,” he explained. “This one was not being used, and so we created our dream pool.”
He went on to tease his husband who jokingly claimed to have designed the pool himself.
“This was my design too, right? I’m really awesome with outside stuff,” Berkus laughed. “If you guys ever need help, by all means, call me. I have it all in here,” he added, pointing to his brain.
Jeremiah sarcastically agreed, claiming, “He’s great. He definitely didn’t fight me about the pattern. Didn’t fight me about the material. But you know what he does do really well? Enjoy it when it’s done.”
Their Move to Portugal
The pair opened their doors to AD in May for a full tour of the interior, explaining that the move with a lifelong dream.
“I am Portuguese, my parents are Portuguese,” Jeremiah said in a video shared via YouTube. “My mom always talks about stories of coming back here and living here someday.”
Jeremiah ultimately renovated an old bakery on the sprawling property for his mother and her husband to live in. However, Jeremiah and Nate — who share daughter Poppy, 11, and son Oskar, 8 — explained that they will only spend up to four months a year in Portugal, and won’t be moving full time.
“What’s beautiful is hearing my kids run down a pea-gravel path on their way to have a piece of cake warm out of the oven at Gijo’s, which is what they call my mother,” Brent said.
