What Interior Designers Really Think About Nancy Meyers
The 'Something's Gotta Give' filmmaker is the mother of cozy living spaces.
Hi friends,
For the uninitiated: Nancy Meyers is the writer-director behind beloved big-budget comedies including Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, which showcased middle-aged women as sexy and vibrant, a rarity at the time those films were released during the 2000s. Her bougie leading ladies, echoing Martha Stewart, Ina Garten and Nancy herself, dressed almost exclusively in breezy linen, cozy cashmere and tasteful turtlenecks. None of that is overtly erotic!!!
But in the well-appointed world of Nancy Meyers, a woman’s clothes never distract from her inner beauty. And, of course, her heroines have fantasy rom-com jobs. Meryl Streep’s pastry chef Jane Adler bakes croissants (and gets baked) with Steve Martin, while Diane Keaton is playwright Erica Barry, a lovable neurotic who charms Keanu or rather the younger doctor that he plays. Sure, the actors give winning performances, but over time, I dare say that the movies’ true star has emerged, eclipsing the collective shine of Meryl and Diane and Steve and Keanu. That star: Nancy’s set design.
Arguably no other filmmaker besides Wes Anderson wields such influence on interiors. Nancy sets were Pinterest boards come to life, and she meticulously staged her characters’ homes as if they were her own, nary a tchotchke out of place. Her style: warm, serene and nest-like, coastal grandmother with a touch of French countryside. Impervious to trends. A place to take a load off, pour yourself a nice glass of Sauvy B and watch Downton Abbey.
Nancy, like Anderson, is a full-on lifestyle brand and social-media phenomenon, with an aesthetic all her own. Her fans ogled Erica’s Hamptons beach house and Jane’s Spanish hacienda-style bachelorette pad, and sought to replicate their spacious kitchens. They still do! But some interior designers have had it up to here.
The other day, my friend Alicia Rancilio sent me a TikTok where a designer went off on The Nancy Meyers Aesthetic.
“Design professionals in the actual interior design industry do not use the term ‘Nancy Meyers Aesthetic,’” Minneapolis-based Karli Jelen griped. “It is a traditional aesthetic, a beautiful aesthetic. … Obviously, the phrase became very popular on TikTok, and now it’s probably every video you see when you open up the app. But, it is so overdone. In my head, anytime anyone says that they want a Nancy Meyers Aesthetic, I think, ‘Oh, you went on TikTok in 2024.’”
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While sitting in a room with white furniture and sporting a beige jacket, Jelen continued, “At this point, it feels cheugy. It feels like a checkered rug. It feels like a chevron rug. Like, can we all just stop? Can we all just have a little bit of originality?”
Jelen’s fellow TikTokers did not take well to her exasperated, snobbish commentary.
“‘Have a little originality and personality in our own spaces’ that is literally the Nancy Meyers aesthetic,” one woman wrote, while another remarked, “Most designers begin with a mood board. Often, they have a vision that is either inspired by a previous work or based on a specific design created by someone else.”
In other words: Nothing is new, and everything is borrowed. I remember talking to a shelter magazine editor a few years ago, and she similarly lamented Meyers’ outsized effect on consumer tastes that overlapped with the popularity of Modern Farmhouse Decor, which has soft colors and fabrics, white kitchens and natural woods, and a vibe of homey minimalism. (Wild and whimsical wallpaper and art need not apply.)
“Maybe the backlash is more against the Modern Farmhouse than it is against Nancy Meyers,” California interior designer Kari McIntosh told me last week, explaining that the neutral-toned sensibility first arose as a reaction to 1980s excess. Now it’s taking over her neighborhood in San Mateo.
“What I see in my neighborhood is when a developer comes in, they buy a perfectly fine house, but it's kind of small on a great lot,” she says. “They knock it down and then they just put up this square box building, paint it white with black accents to appeal to the widest market possible to drive the price up. And it makes me crazy because then I feel like, ‘Well, the personality of the neighborhood is gone.’ We have this beautiful mix of homes here in San Mateo Park that were built all early-1900s to the 1950s, and they're all very different. It's not so homogenous, but now it's becoming more homogenous because it's just a lot of Modern Farmhouse — or sometimes people call it Modern Craftsman, but it's all basically the same.”
While McIntosh prefers bold, exuberant color, she thinks Nancy’s cinematic “interiors are pretty layered, and they're kind of more Maximalist, even though it's all-white. There's lots of copper and baskets. I love that.”
(“All-white” also applies to the lack of diversity among Nancy’s actors. BD Wong, an Asian American actor, portrayed Martin Short’s assistant in Father of the Bride, but he did not get top billing in the film she co-wrote and produced.)
As part of my survey of pop culture-savvy designers, I also reached out to
, the West Coast creative director who crafts the dreamiest mood boards you’ll ever see. Per our exchange via Google Docs, she says:In a lot of ways, I think what people are connecting with when they picture the Nancy Meyers aesthetic goes beyond the decor itself. I can’t picture a Nancy set without seeing Diane Keaton chaotically waving her arms around in a moment of panic or Natasha Richardson pacing her walk-in closet with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth [in The Parent Trap]. It’s impossible to separate these charming, messy, lovable characters from their homes. Maybe there’s something to the association we have with a fallible character who might not have it all together, but has a beautiful space they can call their own that feels like a safe place to exist.
Or, maybe it really is about the literal decor of it all, and people just want to capture that feeling of effortless warmth Nancy does so well. I agree that the woman on TikTok blaming anyone seeking the look for themselves is putting her blame on the wrong party — the real problem is that you can’t bottle up and sell that feeling, and a lot of designers, retailers, real estate agents, and more are trying to anyway by watering it down to the same few elements: white cabinets, slipcovered sofas, rattan patio furniture…
It’s actually the job of an interior designer to understand that feeling their client is after and, if what the client loves is a traditional aesthetic, to find a way to translate it into a space that reflects them and their real life. A good designer will say, “You love the Nancy Meyers aesthetic? Let’s find a way to understand exactly what you love about it and interpret it in a way that feels like you.”
If you’re looking to Do It Yourself, you can study your favorite Nancy movie (in LaBelle’s case, The Parent Trap) and “pick apart the elements of that set that made it so special — the moire wallpaper in the bedroom, the gallery wall up the winding staircase, antique Victorian furniture… Use those elements as your guide to reflect that home’s aesthetic into your own,” LaBelle tells me.
In a 2009 profile of Nancy, The New York Times Magazine reported that the director had built her “dream home in the Pacific Palisades” after divorcing Charles Shyer, her husband of 18 years. (Shyer, who died late last year, directed the films Father of the Bride and Baby Boom based on screenplays they wrote together.) The property was inspired by a Provencal farmhouse with a tile roof. Nancy searched far and wide for the best shade of beige to paint the walls, sourcing the color in Australia. Her interior decorator, James Radin, worked on that house as well as on Something’s Gotta Give, modeling Diane Keaton’s kitchen after Nancy’s.
“Nancy’s own home feels like an amalgamation of all the sets she’s designed, and I think it sort of transcends any one time or place, which is what makes it so special and uniquely her,” LaBelle says, adding, “It’s the home of someone who spends time on both coasts, who travels to Europe often, who reads and writes and cooks and entertains, who goes to the farmers market and always has fresh bread on the kitchen counter. So I don’t know that I associate Nancy’s aesthetic as a whole with a coastal California aesthetic as much as I associate it with a life of leisure that all of those women live — something I think a lot of us would love to embody ourselves.”
Coincidentally, Nancy is being celebrated this week at Legends, the Los Angeles design festival, where she took the stage alongside daughters Hallie and Annie Meyers-Shyer to “unravel the alchemy behind the ‘Meyers Effect’ — that elusive blend of light, linen, and longing that has inspired a thousand Pinterest boards and nearly as many renovation projects,” organizers stated.
Though a vocal contingent of the design world might love to hate Nancy, they must begrudgingly concede that she turned the industry on its head and created a visual language that’s too big to ignore. It is criminal that popular romances conceived by men — Moonstruck, Shakespeare in Love, Silver Linings Playbook, the list goes on — have earned awards recognition, but Nancy did not receive a single Best Director nomination during her heyday. Did Hollywood write her off as middlebrow, or mid, or cheugy? (Yes, definitely.) Will The Criterion Collection finally include her work in its famed library? (It’s only possible if her idol and mentor, the late Billy Wilder, haunts Criterion staff and forces them to acknowledge her contributions. Hey, that would be cool!)
Nancy grew up in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, in an idyllic home with a swimming pool in the backyard and a basketball hoop over the garage, foreshadowing Father of the Bride. She adored her parents, Irving and Patty Meyers. Irving worked for a company that manufactured voting machines and Patty “enjoyed dabbling in interior decoration,” Nancy’s sister, Sally, told The New York Times. “It was a project house.”
Patty frequented flea markets and antique shows, scouting furniture to strip and refurbish and suit to her tastes. Her daughter watched and learned and went on to build dream homes for herself as well as Diane, Meryl, Hallie, Annie and you.
A PERFECT ROMANTIC COMEDY
You don’t have to be a hardcore Romance reader to enjoy Set Piece by Lana Schwartz, whose debut with 831 Stories is warm, witty and wonderful. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my friend! Set Piece tells the story of Jack, a movie star, and CJ, the production designer on his new project, an adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Before writing the novel, Lana had listened to podcaster Karina Longworth’s series on Polly Platt, the fierce but largely forgotten force behind A Star is Born, Terms of Endearment, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon.
“I was so captivated by her and the way Karina tells her story, and I was like, ‘Polly Platt was this production designer who knew what she wanted, who was so smart, but all these men she worked with were in love with her,’” Lana says. “I just like that idea of being able to take someone like her and make her story a little happier, or give it that Hollywood ending.”
The Hugh Grant-Julia Roberts classic Notting Hill offered further inspiration, especially the bond that Grant’s bumbling bookstore owner shares with his best pals.
“That's one of my favorite parts of the movie: Just the way he feels kind of anchored through his quirky group of friends,” Lana muses. “Who you are is who your friends are. So you want to feel like you're getting a sense of that character and how they treat other people through their friendships.”
When casting the film adaptation, Lana would choose Kate Berlant for CJ and possibly Paul Mescal or Josh O’Connor for Jack. Those are solid, spicy picks.
You can buy Set Piece HERE, and follow Lana on Instagram HERE.
END CREDITS
Thanks to Alicia Rancilio for the Nancy newsletter idea! Alicia is a superb journalist at The Associated Press, where she covers television and recently interviewed Lovie Simone, Kate Hudson and my girl Keira Knightley.
On Substack, I’m loving
’s Oh, Shut Up! and ’s Threads of Individuality.Monday’s Met Gala did not disappoint, with guests fully embracing the theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” and doing it right. I thought Colman Domingo (in Valentino) and Joey King (in Miu Miu) were the Best Dressed of the night. If you missed them on the carpet:
Thanks for reading! See you next time.
Yours in “What’s with the turtlenecks?,”
Erin
This is such a fun and creative idea and excellent deep dive. And not the point but I will never understand why Diane picked Jack over Keanu who was so nice to her. It makes no sense! But yes the interiors! (Colman was my fave too)
It is all the STORAGE. The absolute dream