By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
April 18, 2000
When Katie Brown turned 11, her parents didn’t take her to a toy store to pick out a present. They gave her a wallpaper book and some swatches of carpeting and let her redecorate her room.
Small wonder, then, that she grew up to be Gen X’s answer to Martha Stewart, the hostess of the Lifetime Channel’s No. 1 show, “Next Door With Katie Brown.”
“My tastes have improved a little since then,” says Brown, 36. “All us kids would get excited around our 11th birthday, ’cause that’s when our parents would let us redecorate our rooms. My sisters picked beautiful antique furniture, floral prints, and really tasteful pieces. I had the worst taste out of all of us. I chose yellow shag carpeting and white modern furniture.”
Laughing, she adds, “But do you know what? Shag carpeting is making a comeback. Think about it–what feels better than shag under your feet when you first get up in the morning?”
Perky and cheerful, Brown looks every bit as youthful in person as she does on TV. Brown, who also is a spokeswoman for Lenox china, recently signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins. Her first lifestyle book will be in stores in October.
Born and raised in Petosky, Mich., Brown graduated from Cornell University with a degree in art history. She moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. After landing spots in commercials for Kodak, Saturn and AT&T, Brown opened a popular boutique cafe called GOAT.
The shop’s high profile led to an audition with Lifetime, which was looking for its own down-home guru.
“When I think about it, I guess I grew up doing the things I do on my show,” she says. “I grew up in a small town with 32 first cousins and 14 aunts and uncles. It really was Mayberry.”
The second of four children, Brown is the only single one. She says that for a long time, she felt that she couldn’t buy nice china or furnish her house “like an adult” because she wasn’t married.
“Generation X are late bloomers,” Brown says. “I certainly am. But I also think that we’re taking our time and looking at our options. But even though we own our own homes, a lot of us don’t own nice things like our parents did. It’s OK to buy yourself china.
“In fact, I think women–and men–who are waiting to get married should register for china and flatware so that every birthday, your best friends will know that they can add a piece to your collection. It’s silly at our age to use disposable dishes. You don’t have to wait anymore. It’s time for us to grow up a bit.”
And while some people like to leave their work behind once they leave the office, Brown, who has homes in both New York and Los Angeles (where her show is shot), says that she loves entertaining. So much so that when she returns to Michigan to visit her family, she cooks for them.
“I don’t view cooking or decorating as a chore,” she says. “People say that I seem like a very happy person. I’m obviously not happy all the time, but for the most part, I feel grateful to be paid for doing a job that I love. It’s so much fun coming up with new ideas–finding ways to make old things work.”
Part of Brown’s charm is that she doesn’t make her viewers feel bad if they don’t know the difference between all-purpose and cake flour. Her theory is to work with what you’ve got.
“You can’t work like we do every day and still have a beautiful home and make fresh herbs and all that,” she says. “I encourage shortcuts. You can use a store-bought cake and decorate it with beautiful organic, edible flowers, and lend a little bit of creativity to it. I’m not my mother, who makes her own buttermilk. But I can still find ways to make something generic a little bit more special.”
