Inside Taniya Nayak’s Penthouse Where She’s Plotting ‘Rock the Block’ Revenge

As a designer of home interiors and culinary hot spots, HGTV and Food Network star Taniya Nayak aims to make every space she touches more hospitable—including her own home just south of Boston.

The 53-year-old “Rock the Block” star and founder of Taniya Nayak Design purchased and moved into the Milton, MA, penthouse in 2007, just four years after launching her longtime run on renovation reality TV.

Since then, Nayak has shared her interior decorating expertise on shows such as HGTV’s “Battle on the Beach,” Food Network’s “Restaurant: Impossible,” and “The Rachael Ray Show.”

Her storied career, she reveals to Realtor.com® in the latest installment of Celebrity Sanctuary, has led her to help craft the abodes of some “pretty cool clients,” including Aerosmith lead guitarist Joe Perry, former Boston Bruins center Patrice Bergeron, and entrepreneur Ayesha Curry, wife of NBA star Steph Curry.

Nayak’s work recently earned her an honorary doctorate from Boston Architectural College, the school where she committed to following her current passion after first pursuing a completely different path.

“I always wanted to be a designer as a kid, but I steered away from it,” explains Nayak. “My dad is an architect and he, from a small-business owner perspective, sort of pushed me out of it and said, ‘Maybe you should go to school for business.’

“So I did my undergrad in business marketing, worked a bunch of jobs that I was terrible at because my heart wasn’t in it, and then I went back to school for interior architecture at the Boston Architectural College.”

Over the years, the Boston-based creative has expanded from designing residences to restaurants, a shift that allows her to work more closely with her husband, restaurateur Brian O’Donnell.

“We’ve designed about 25 Ruth’s Chris steakhouses. Now we are working on Fleming’s steakhouses. We’ve done restaurants all across the country, so it’s become a huge part of my business,” reports Nayak.

Designing for entertaining is a skill that served Nayak well when she competed alongside Drew Lachey of 98 Degrees on the latest season of HGTV’s “Rock the Block,” which took place in the entertainment capital of the world, Las Vegas.

Though Nayak’s “classy, Vegas-forward” competition house with an aesthetic she labeled “livable luxe” didn’t come out on top, the “Rock the Block” first-timer dishes she’s carefully reviewed her and Lachey’s performance and is already cooking up plans to go back on the series for seconds.

“A redemption season would be the best thing ever because I feel like this first time around being—no pun intended with the boy band thing—but, a new kid on the block, now I have a little bit more of an advantage. I know what they’re looking for. I understand the timeline and the pace a little better. So, hell yeah, bring it on,” she states, before admitting she’s still simmering down from the excitement of the most recent contest.

“It’s just been so fast and furious. All the emotions you can imagine. I’m still kind of coming down from the energy and the high of it all,” she says.

For now, Nayak is happy planning the next course in her career from the comfort of her custom condo, which she shares with O’Donnell and their English bulldog, Flynn, who she says “runs the house, literally.”

In this edition of Celebrity Sanctuary, Nayak gives the scoop on the three-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom, 2,600-square-foot domain. She also points to two special spots she considers to be the best seats in the house for supporting her through the ever-changing seasons of life.

We chose this home because my husband and I are both from the South Shore, so it felt very much like home for both of us. We both also love the water, and we’re nestled right on a river, so it’s just very calming. Literally every single one of our windows overlooks the river, from the bedroom to the dining room to the kitchen to the living room. We have a beautiful view, which is very calming. 

It was turnkey. But being a designer, my husband will laugh that it probably didn’t need anything, but we did everything. We upgraded the kitchen by knocking down a wall and making it more of an open floor plan kitchen. 

We’ve been here a long time, so now we’re on our third round of redoing the floors. We added a built-in wine fridge system. We’ve updated the fireplace, all lighting. We’ve changed out tile. Literally everything. I can’t even think of one thing that we haven’t touched. 

We completely redid the kitchen a couple of times. We’ve already updated the bathrooms, but we’re redoing them again as we speak. We’re in the process right now.

We have a very neutral palette, but there’s a lot of texture. As you look through the space, there is movement. We painted the frames of our window black to really frame out the beautiful view. We have a textured concrete wall that has a little bit of movement; but it’s concrete, so it’s still neutral. 

I say neutral, but it’s not a bad thing. Our kitchen, our furniture, everything has sort of that neutral in a really exciting way throughout the space. 

I have two areas that are my sanctuary. I have one that is right in front of our main window that overlooks the river. We’ve got two chairs there, a small little pedestal table, and it’s just my spot in the morning to have coffee. Or throughout the day if I’m working from home—I’m standing in front of it right now—it’s extremely calming.

Because we’re in New England, it’s like a piece of art that keeps changing. Right now it’s lush and green, and [in] the winter, it’s a lot of gray and white with the snow. In the springtime, we get the flowers. Autumn is beautiful with the colors, the leaves changing. It’s always changing; it’s always so pretty.

My second sanctuary is my bedroom. I neglected it for a very, very long time. It’s a classic case of the designer who doesn’t have time to design their own space, and I finally made the effort. I told my husband, “This is crazy. We should not be living like this. We do it for other people all the time, and I just want to put my energy into updating the bedroom.” 

I did a beautiful, beautiful custom built-in. We love watching TV in a bedroom. It’s not a big favorite of a lot of people, but I always fall asleep when I’m watching a movie, so I’d rather just be falling asleep in my bed. 

We had a local mill worker. He’s really an artist with wood. His name is Mark Brunke. He and I designed this piece together and it looks like there’s piping on it, like you’d see on fabric on a chair, but it’s wood. It is so beautiful. 

We did a tambour wall behind our bed. We updated the furniture. We changed the floors; we did a herringbone floor in there. And I just have to say, every time I walk in that room, I feel so calm and relaxed. 

My dad, he was an architect, but he’s an artist that paints. He loves to paint with watercolor and sketch and draw, and so one Christmas, he did a painting of me. It is incredible, the detail. I hosted a show called “The Great Christmas Light Fight,” so he took a photo from one of those shoot days where I had a knit cap and a pompom on the hat and you can see every fiber of the pompom in his painting. It is amazing, and so that’s very sentimental to me. 

I also have our wedding photo in there. We have a little painting of Flynn. Just things that make me smile when I wake up. 

I finally took over our third bedroom since it’s just the two of us. We turned it into an office since we both started working a lot more from home.

I painted it black. I made it moody. I made it Zoom-worthy so that my backdrop looked good. I made sure I had the right lighting. Now I can actually sit in the office [and] shut the door. If I have a meeting, if I need quiet, I get completely focused in that space and then when I come out, it’s as if I’m not at work anymore. Just creating a specific zone for work has been a game changer for me.

My home [is] my oasis. Walking in the door, when I come home, I can breathe.