Food Network Host Aarti Sequeira’s Home Is Colorful! Take a Tour of Her Cozy North Carolina House

In season 6 of Food Network Star, Aarti Sequeira blew the judges away with her energetic personality and delicious dishes. The former CNN producer won the competition and landed her own Food Network show, Aarti Party. Now a world-renowned chef and host, Aarti is always crafting up the perfect recipes in her stunning North Carolina home. 

Aarti, born in Bombay, India, and raised in Dubai, grew up with a strong interest in cooking and looked up to her mother who created tasty meals daily. She moved to America in 1996 to study journalism at Northwestern University. It was there that she met her husband, Brendan McNamara, and the pair got married in 2003. The Taste in Translation host landed a job at CNN after graduation which led the couple to move to Los Angeles. 

Eventually, Aarti realized her real passion was cooking. The celebrity chef enrolled in The New School of Cooking in Culver City, California. She launched her own blog in 2008 and an online cooking show before her big break on Food Network Star. The Guy’s Grocery Games judge is a proud mom to two daughters, Eliyah and Moses who were raised in the couple’s gorgeous Los Angeles home. In January 2020, Aarti shared on Facebook that the family would be moving to Raleigh, North Carolina. 

“L.A. was such a gift to us: a first home as newlyweds, career highs and lows for both of us, friends who became family, a baby conceived and lost, two babies conceived and taking their first steps in this apartment, a new career for me, a new church we helped plant … so much,” she shared in the heartfelt post. “We head now to our new home in Raleigh, NC in search of a more peaceful upbringing for the girls. That’s it. No bigger plan than that, and yet I suppose no smaller either.” 

After settling into their North Carolina home, Aarti decided that she wanted to create her dream kitchen, full of pops of color. “I didn’t want people to scroll past my cooking videos on Instagram,” she told Food Network Magazine in 2021 about installing a bright green backsplash. “The color just totally captured my heart.” 

There are so many personal touches that Aarti added to the house to really make it feel like a home, including photos of her mother in the kitchen, and shelves to show off her milk bottle collection. The stain-proof counters and plenty of spots to sit are other great touches added to the room. Attached to Aarti’s kitchen island is a sign that was made by her friends in 2014 to celebrate the launch of her cookbook, Aarti Paarti. Moving from Los Angeles to North Carolina was a big change, but Aarti enjoys the serenity that surrounds her new house. 

“I just moved to North Carolina. In the middle of the woods right by our house, there’s a sweet, babbling creek,” the mom of two wrote in a May 2020 blog. “The water is crystal clear; in fact, you can actually find crystals in its banks! My family loves walking down to the creek and hunting for crystals.”

Keep scrolling to take a tour of Aarti’s North Carolina home.