Ten minutes after saying hello, Galey Alix is showing me her bedroom — a calming melange of whites and sandy grays that feels like Nancy Meyers’ version of a northern Italian villa by way of Home Goods.
Alix’s two 45-pound boxer dogs follow us around her immaculate, 3,500-square-foot Fort Lauderdale home, which features chairs so cushy her 6-foot-4 boyfriend, the former “Bachelorette” cast member Dale Moss, won’t sit in them because it’s too difficult to extract himself. One dog, Patch, is wearing a diaper. Alix tells me the animal’s first period lasted nearly a month; it was so torrential she made an Instagram reel about it.
Alix is the creator and star of the HGTV show “Home in a Heartbeat With Galey Alix,” which premiered in April and streams on Max. Where most home-improvement personalities keep their personal lives semiprivate, Alix is all about oversharing. Her HGTV deal came about after videos of the house she remodeled for her then-fiancé went viral on Instagram. When that fiancé left her, she dove even deeper into design work, finding purpose in making others happy while maintaining her full-time job as a vice president and regional director for Goldman Sachs in Florida. Her side hustle has paid off; she has 1.6 million Instagram followers, has been called the next Joanna Gaines, and has drawn the attention of Dr. Phil and Property Brother Drew Scott, both of whom tried to sign her to their production companies.
The unique conceit of “Home in a Heartbeat” is that clients have no say in what Alix does; everything is a surprise. Although Alix gravitates toward geometric light fixtures, antique-looking faucets, and mixed woods, she says her aesthetic isn’t rigid. “Every project isn’t going to be shiplap and wallpaper everywhere,” she says. “It’s going to be different.”
Each install happens within a 72-hour sprint with the help of the handymen Jay Delgado and PJ Fetscher and a small team of acolytes turned friends who found Alix on Instagram. Alix says she’s able to devote three days to each project thanks to the 82 days of paid time off she accrued over a decade of not taking vacations at Goldman.
Alix says she often stays awake for the duration of a job fretting about whether she’ll be able to pull it off, pacing around in black Spanx tights and Ugg boots, her elbow-length blonde waves tied back with multiple elastic bands and topped with a baseball hat. When it comes time for the reveal, she changes into one of her many pairs of coveralls, all of which are available for purchase on her website. (Alix believes in consistent branding, which she hopes to one day parlay into an eponymous line for Target.) Watching this woman push herself to extremes throughout the first season of “Home in a Heartbeat,” I felt something the soothing HGTV channel doesn’t typically inspire: pure anxiety.
When the installs are over, Alix says she’s usually buzzing so hard she can’t sleep. So she goes home, fills the deep, white tub overlooking her pool and the landscaping she trims daily, sinks into the water, and cries. “There’s so much emotion and stress,” Alix says. “All the pressure’s on me.”
It’s worth it, she says, for those transcendent moments when the homeowners see their converted spaces for the first time. “I do all this magic,” Alix says. “When people open their eyes and go, ‘Oh my God, you did such an amazing job,’ I feel so loved.” After the first reveal, she asks the family to film their friends’ and relatives’ reactions when they see the spaces. Her clients send her the videos, which she watches again and again — an instant replay of instant gratification.
Alix knows her current pace is unsustainable, and she’ll need to quit her finance job to focus on what fulfills her: validation. “Design isn’t my passion,” she says. “It’s just the emotional high that I get out of it.” But leaving would mean walking away from her Goldman salary, including a few years of unvested stocks. That only makes sense if “Home in a Heartbeat” gets renewed. “The golden handcuffs also are shackles, and they’re platinum,” she says.
Right now, Alix is anxiously waiting to hear whether her show will be renewed: “Am I losing my mind? Absolutely.” If she gets a second season, her life will change — for the better, she thinks, although the way she talks about her calling makes me wonder.
“I’m addicted to it,” she tells me.
Galey Alix Gravenstein comes from a family of overachievers. Her father is an anesthesiologist, as is one of her brothers. Her sister is completing a surgical residency. Her mother was the head of an ICU. But Alix, who uses her middle name as her last name publicly, is the family perfectionist.
In Alix’s first government class at the University of Florida, her professor exempted her from the final exam in front of the entire seminar because she’d turned in every paper early and gotten perfect scores on each assignment. She spent the next four years trying to replicate that moment. She never drank alcohol. She woke up at 4 a.m. to train for track and ran at least 100 miles a week during cross-country season.
During Alix’s sophomore year, her mother took her to see the 2005 film adaptation of “Pride & Prejudice.” On the ride home, Alix turned to her mom and said: “I just need you to know I’m going to do something really good with my life.”
Alix kept up her breakneck pace after graduation, becoming a Goldman VP at 24, selling Goldman Sachs financial products such as electronically traded funds to smaller financial institutions. In her 13 years with the company, Alix estimates she’s brought in $5 billion. (Editor’s note: Although Alix declined to share her age, publicly available information indicates she’s in her mid to late 30s.)
When she got engaged in 2017, Alix says she put the same level of energy into becoming a perfect wife. She tells me she met her former fiancé, who worked in tech, during a business trip to New York. They fell in love and after a year of dating, he proposed and asked her to quit her Wall Street job. Alix didn’t want to leave Goldman. She countered: What if she commuted from Florida to Connecticut every weekend until the wedding, then resigned? He agreed.
That year, in between the 104 flights she took, Alix dedicated her time to decorating each room in the 10,000-square-foot Westport, Connecticut, mansion her fiancé bought. She had no previous design experience, but she couldn’t find a contractor who would work every Saturday and Sunday while she was in town. So she rented a truck on the weekends and drove from Home Depot to Target to Home Goods, figuring it out as she went. Alix’s fiancé would go to bed at 11, and she’d stay up all night converting their basement into a “magical theater room with fairy lights” or their garage into a boxing gym. “I wanted to surprise him,” she says.
Every time she revealed a space, she would cover her fiancé’s eyes and film him so she could relive his approval. She also posted the videos to Instagram, establishing the Galey Alix look: clean, modern spaces; muted tones; accents of greenery, and, most importantly, no orange, yellow, or red ever. “Red and yellow I equate with stress and anxiety, caution, slow down, stop, you can’t go,” she says. “I think without realizing it, subconsciously they bring stress into the house.”
At the same time, Alix felt completely out of control in a life that was focused on gratifying her partner. She started to restrict how much she ate. She felt light-headed all the time but couldn’t make herself stop exercising. Eventually, the extent of Alix’s deprivation started to scare her. “It really got to a point where it was deadly,” she says.
She didn’t want to keep secrets from her soon-to-be husband. And, more importantly, she needed help. So on the last trip to Connecticut, right after quitting her Goldman job, Alix told him about her eating disorder. He accused her of misrepresenting herself and gave her 90 minutes to leave the house. Because she was too unwell to fly commercial, he put her on a private plane back to Florida.
The next day, Alix sought professional help and deleted the Instagram app from her phone. She didn’t check the platform during treatment, which included going to therapy and hiring a dietician. “I had to walk through the grocery store with a 22-year-old nutritionist telling me, a grown-ass executive, how to make basmati rice and why I need carbs in my diet,” Alix says. “It was so humbling. I was scared of rice.”
I had to walk through the grocery store with a 22-year-old nutritionist telling me, a grown-ass executive, how to make basmati rice.Galey Alix
She told her former boss at Goldman what she’d gone through and begged to rescind her resignation. He agreed. Her ex-fiancé moved another woman into the house Alix had redone and proposed to her a few months later.
When Alix logged back on to Instagram, she had tens of thousands of messages from people around the world — from Australia and London to India, Puerto Rico, and Wyoming — asking for her design help: “Hey, I just saw this video of you doing this thing to this house. Can you do it for me?”
“It was an out-of-body experience,” Alix says. “The more I dove into the DMs, the more I started to feel like I was watching a movie about someone else’s story and seeing how it all started.”
The first client Alix took on was Carrie Calloway, who’d reached out to ask her to restyle the Florida home she shares with her husband, Mac. They agreed on three things: a budget, that it would be done in one weekend while the Calloways went to Orlando, and that the family would have no input. The Calloways handed over their credit card for supplies and left Alix to, in her words, “plan the shit out of this.” They stopped telling people about the arrangement because everyone’s response was the same: “You’re crazy.”
“We really were not nervous at all until we left the house,” Calloway says. “I remember I couldn’t sleep those nights. And I started thinking, ‘What if I don’t like things?'”
Alix got to work with Jay Delgado, remaking Calloway’s blank white box into a Galey Alix take on a rich person’s beach house. When she finished, she realized her work on the Calloways’ home was everything she’d been trying to create for herself back in Connecticut. She stood there “sobbing, looking at this dream home and this family life that I might not get to have,” she says. “And I also felt, in a way, like I’d gotten it back because I created it for them.”
The Calloways were thrilled. “You’re like, this can’t be the same room!” Calloway says. “It’s still an incredible feeling.” They posted the finished result on Instagram, and the response was overwhelming. “People were knocking down our door to be like, ‘How do we get Galey?'” Calloway says. The renovation got 30 million views on Instagram.
Gradually, a team began to coalesce around Alix. Lauren Parker, an ER nurse, reached out to Alix on Instagram after seeing her post about her mental health in November 2020. In April 2021, Parker, who had no renovation experience, offered to help Alix with an install. Parker estimates she’s done 15 or 20 since.
“Design is not really my thing,” Parker says. “But I would do absolutely anything to see one of my best friends win, to see her succeed, to see her dream come true. And most of all, to see her affect the world and affect others in such a positive light.”
I would do absolutely anything to see one of my best friends win, to see her succeed, to see her dream come true.Lauren Parker, Galey Alix team member
With the exception of Delgado, Fetscher, and team member Kay Marryshow, who is proficient with electrical, drywall, and painting work, none of the crew has experience in interior decor or renovation. They all have day jobs: Fetscher is a teacher; Marryshow is an attorney. In the early days, only Delgado and Fetscher were getting paid — everyone else was working for free. “Every single one of these people proves they’re here for the right reason,” Alix says.
Parker says working with Alix inspires an intoxicating feeling: “I wish I could bottle it up and have you experience it for yourself.”
She and the rest of the crew have absolute faith in Alix, even though she herself admits she’s fallible. “I still mess up every single install,” Alix says. “Death, taxes, and Galey messing up on install are the three guarantees in life. I will cut a piece of wallpaper with too dull of a blade, and it frays, and I have to load a new blade and recut an entire panel. Or a piece of furniture I ordered is cracked in the back, and I didn’t catch it during our unboxing a week earlier, so now I have to come up with a quick fix at 4 a.m. the day of our reveal.”
As Alix’s social-media following grew from 2,000 in August 2019 to 500,000 in December of that year, people like Dr. Phil and Drew Scott got in touch. But Alix decided to sign with a smaller production company, Rabbit Foot, where she had more control. They filmed a sizzle reel in December 2020 and a full episode that they pitched to HGTV and Netflix in April 2022. Several months later, HGTV bought “Home in a Heartbeat,” a name suggested by Alix’s Instagram followers.
The show was picked up for one eight-episode season, which was filmed in eight months. Alix has continued to work until 7 or 8 p.m. every weekday at Goldman, and she still receives an internal list every morning and evening ranking her against her colleagues. Alix still checks the list, but it’s not as important to her as it once was. “If I’m not at the top of the ranking, that doesn’t change my self-worth because I just made a family cry,” she says.
At the “Home in a Heartbeat” premiere in April, Alix looked at her mom, who was sitting next to her in the theater. “This is what I was telling you about,” Alix thought, remembering what she’d told her 18 years earlier. “This is the big thing.”
Realizing that she’s achieved what she’d been chasing all those years still hasn’t quieted the voice-over rolling in Alix’s mind: I’m not enough, I’m not doing enough, the show isn’t going to do well enough, I’m going to let my team down, I’m going to let HGTV down, I’m going to let Goldman down because I’m not taking enough meetings because I’m so focused on the show.
When Alix tells me this over salad in her flutey voice, her face hidden by her omnipresent baseball hat, the concern I felt watching her on-screen returns. She’s spent many hours in therapy figuring out how to deal with her anxiety. But hearing her describe her internal monologue, it’s hard not to wonder whether becoming even more famous will make her life correspondingly more stressful.
I ask Moss, who now works as a documentary producer, about what it’s like to watch his partner in her one-and-only mode: killing herself to achieve. He says they keep an “open dialogue” about balancing hard work and mental health. “When you’re really, really passionate about something, you put everything into it, and sometimes there’s that fear of losing it,” Moss says. “Because of that fear, we often try to control every aspect. But the reality is you can’t, and if you do, other areas of your life start to suffer.”
Moss has helped with installs but stayed off-camera until he was cajoled into appearing on the last episode of the season. He and Lauren Parker insist Alix is OK because she’s able to ask people like them for help without fear. “I can show him my crazy,” Alix says of Moss, “and he’s not going to put me on a plane back to Florida.”
The people closest to Alix know she thinks in black and white — that landing in a gray area makes her feel like a failure. But design itself falls in that gray area. It’s subjective, something Alix succeeds at by peeking into people’s drawers to understand how they might want to feel in their homes; by taking on clients who seek her out instead of trying to convince them she’s worthy; by letting her relentless, ceaseless judgment help her find faults in a room she can fix, and not faults in herself that she can’t. “I’m going to keep betting on myself,” Alix says. “But I still get nervous on every reveal day. I’m shaking.”
While we talk, one of her dogs keeps begging for attention, messing up the placement of a chunky white bath mat every time she galumphs up to Alix. I count as Alix moves the rug back into position with her French-tipped toes: once, twice, three times, four, five, making it perfect again and again.
Photo Credits:
Art Direction: Rebecca Zisser, Crystal Cox
Photography: Sonya Revell
Photography Assistance: Lock Denis
Styling: Anna Ruiz Represented by Agency Gerard Artists
Styling Assistance: Ester Gattuso
Hair and Makeup: Susana Betancourt
Clothing (in order shown): Hot-pink dress by AKIRA, pink lace-up stilettos by AKIRA, light-pink feather top by Miss Circle, brown leather skirt by Alice & Olivia, black jumpsuit by Nadine Merabi, green dress by AKIRA
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