In his early 20s, Nate Berkus worked for Leslie Hindman’s auction house in Chicago, and quickly learned his strengths and weaknesses. “I was a terrible assistant, so everything I was hired to do, I didn’t do well, but everything I wasn’t supposed to be doing, I did a great job at—for instance, I couldn’t walk onto the sales floor without rearranging the entire thing,” he tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast . Hindman eventually put him in charge of a series of monthly marketplace sales that helped inform his approach to decorating to this day. “When I opened my design firm a year later, [I knew] I didn’t want to be the king of reproductions. I didn’t want to rely on furniture showrooms primarily for sourcing. I wanted to be at auctions. I wante

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