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Jun 23, 2023

Inside Whitney Port’s Serene and Stylish Home Office

By Rachel Davies All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

By Rachel Davies

All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Home renovation is unavoidably annoying. There are permits to secure, tough style decisions to be made, and snags to iron out along the way. Whitney Port has spent the past three years learning this lesson again and again as she’s finessed her home office into exactly the space she wanted it to be. To help her with this process—which she documented on YouTube in a 24-part series with her husband, Tim Rosenman—Port teamed up with Amazon Home to furnish the space. Below we talk to the influencer and fashion designer about her journey over the yearslong renovation, decoration process, and favorite finds that she snagged for the workspace.

The home’s living space is used as a meeting space.

AD: What were the most important changes that had to be made so the home would work as an office for you?

Whitney Port: We thought about it long-term, because we were looking at this property as an investment property as well. We wanted to make sure that when we were renovating, we were keeping it true to it being a house eventually. We made the primary bathroom really beautiful. When designing the kitchen, we made sure that it had everything it needed for a young family to come in.

That was the general vibe around it, but then I knew that the primary bedroom was going to be my office, and I wanted to make sure that I had different zones set up for all the different aspects of my career, which is partly just working at a desk, being on my computer, but part of that is sitting in a cozy area recording my podcast. Part of that is having a pretty wardrobe to have everything that I need organized and styled out and set up. And part of that is having a beautiful bathroom to get ready in, and just really creating a calming atmosphere that could feel like a cozy home that I could be inspired in. It doesn’t feel like a stark office.

A look at the shelves inside of Whitney’s offices

A detailed wallpaper was added to a bathroom.

What are your favorite pieces you found for the home?

What was so great about Amazon obviously is that they literally have everything and when I was approached about this partnership, I was just so excited because I wanted to show how you can create a beautiful calming curated aesthetic within your home on Amazon, which I don’t think a lot of people know. One of the standout things is the tile. In the main bathroom I use this really beautiful ivory travertine subway tile and then I paired it with these little black squares of ceramic tile that are all on my storefront as well, making this really pretty grid pattern.

My living room couch is amazing. We’re using the living room as this lounge communal workspace. So, whether it’s a waiting space when someone’s coming into a meeting, or whether we want to have a team meeting, or maybe we’ll even use it to record our reaction videos on. But we got this awesome cream bouclé couch. There’s so much good stuff. My sisal rug, the natural fiber area rug in the living room—I feel like that is just a really good, clean, basic essential rug and I think people can get intimidated by rugs and you get sick of them quickly. The house is was built in the 1920s, and it’s traditional Spanish so we wanted to keep the integrity of that, but obviously bring in our own modern touch to it.

A lot of your followers love your fashion sense. How do you think that that informs your interior design style?

It’s completely related. My style has evolved and I think that what people are very used to seeing from me is lots of color and pattern and mixing prints and very feminine and I think as I’ve gotten older, while I do love color, and complementing color and complementing prints, I’ve found that in order for me to create, I really need a relaxing, calming environment. Since I made separate mood boards for each room and I was able to utilize Amazon’s different features, like “Discover Rooms” or “Showroom,” where you can actually put your room digitally in the space and then pop in the products. I am not tech savvy at all, but obviously being able to see all the textures together, all the colors together, that is how I think my fashion sense is mirrored in this by really making sure that everything is complementing each other.

A quiet, calm corner in the home

By Katherine McLaughlin

By Katherine McLaughlin

By Katherine McLaughlin

On your YouTube show you talked about the nervousness of not seeing the products in person before getting them. What was it like finally seeing it come together?

Totally. I took this project on with [Tim Rosenman, my husband, and Annie Cartwright, my director of operations]. I don’t have any interior design experience—I’ve done a little bit of our current house, we renovated some bathrooms and a kitchen, but we worked with an interior designer. This was really the first project that I did on my own with me leading the way. It was tough, I measured things wrong. I would say measuring things and making sure that you’re ordering everything in the appropriate sizes is one of the most important things when shopping online.

If I’m being perfectly honest everything that came was better in-person than it looked online, which I was so relieved about. Because, yes, when you’re designing a space and you’re going to live with these items forever and you’re investing in these pieces, you want to make sure that you really love them. But I think technology is so great now on Amazon, it just has so many tools and shows so many pictures and has so much information, you’re really able to know what you’re getting.

Totally. What was the process like sharing with the renovation process with your audience in real time online?

That was really fun and that was something that Timmy really wanted to do, because we want to get everyone invested and involved. And we wanted to show how much things actually cost, and all of these little detailed annoyances with permits and stuff that we all deal with renovations that are not necessarily fun, but we felt like if we showed them in a funny way that people would find them entertaining. Also with being a quote-unquote influencer, I am able to work with companies like Amazon, and I wanted to show a little bit of the behind-the-scenes of that process. I think that’s important to show, to give that clarity because you don’t want to be lied to.

We also allowed people to chime in. At the end of the day, we always did what we wanted, it’s our house, but it was really fun to have everybody involved, and we want to do it again. Hopefully Amazon wants to do it with us again, but we really feel even though it feels like it’s taking so long and in the moment, you’re like, “I’m never going to do this again.” It’s the same thing with pregnancy. You have this amnesia after it’s done and you’re like, “Let’s try the next one.”