A couple moonlight as home designers in ‘Making Modern’
He’s into form.
She’s about function.
Together they’re a husband-and-wife team that’s “Making Modern” in a home design series upcoming on discovery+.
Premiering Friday, Sept. 10, the halfhour streaming series follows Brooke and Brice Gilliam as they create beautiful and functional living spaces for their Nashville clientele, who typically are looking to add a little panache to a newly purchased home, be it with a new bathroom, a remodeled living area or just better-configured storage spaces.
And this is a couple with complementary skills, as Brice, who by day is an orthodontist, has an eye for design, while Brooke, who holds down a job as a pharmaceutical rep, has the construction know-how. Together, they own and operate a burgeoning design business that they hope one day will become their fulltime gig.
“He’s very modern but not cold and sterile,” Brooke Gilliam says of her husband’s design philosophy. “He likes to be able to bring in a lot of Southern hospitality with patterns and colors and then different textures and he really just wants to make sure at the end of the day he is designing a space to be custom for the family.
“So sometimes people will ask us, ‘How should I arrange my furniture?’ And his first question is always, ‘How do you all spend your time as a family?’ Because if people are around the TV the whole time, he’s going to obviously set up the design around the TV. If they never turn the TV on and they function totally different, then he wants to make sure he’s making the space exactly what they want. So it’s just all about customization.”
The couple has been working for clients for the past two years after building their own house and neither has any formal training. Brooke, who grew up in Kentucky around handy relatives, learned by doing while Brice has always had an innate eye for design, which Brooke says is also present in his day job.
“He has to visualize what someone’s smile will be as a final result before he ever starts,” she says, “and that’s how he has to learn to – you know, where to place the brackets and what to do with the wires and all that stuff that I don’t understand. And so he says it’s similar. It seems like it’s very different but he says it’s similar and so I guess he has it. So he’s not formally trained but it definitely comes naturally to him.”