Traveling Through with David Prior · Thursday, July 16, 2026
Interior designer Nate Berkus shared the deep emotional and empathetic impact of experiencing the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka, where he lost his partner Fernando. He recounted how, despite the immense grief, the experience fostered a profound sense of empathy that reshaped his perspective on people and places.
“On his travels, Nate collects objects and mementoes with a rare intention, constantly adding to a living archive that follows him through his homes, projects, and family life.”
“The grief that followed might cause others to retreat from the world. Instead, Nate took away a deep sense of empathy from that experience, one that changed his approach to people and places in a deeply sincere way.”
“But I say that it taught me a lot about hospitality because the Sri Lankans, even though they had such incredible devastation losing their homes, losing their loved ones, losing their children and their elders and their husbands and their wives and their partners and all these things, they were so concerned with the expats that were there.”