Ep. 483: Annie Meyers-Shyer & This Oak House

How to Decorate

Annie Meyers-Shyer, former Harper's Bazaar editor and Chanel executive, joins the podcast to discuss her journey from fashion insider to accidental influencer and

Key takeaways

• Annie uses guiding principles like 'Would the original architect have chosen this?' and 'Will I love this in 10 years?' to make consistent design decisions.
• Her fashion background taught her about craftsmanship, composition, and editing—skills directly transferable to interior design.

Main topics

• Transition from fashion to interior design
• Documenting home renovations through social media

Notable quotes

"Take one thing off before you leave the house." – Coco Chanel, referenced by Annie as a design philosophy.

Conclusion

Annie Meyers-Shyer's journey from fashion editor to interior design author demonstrates how foundational

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Welcome to How to Decorate from Ballard Designs, a weekly podcast all about the trials and triumphs of decorating and redecorating your home. I'm Caroline. I'm on the marketing team. And I'm Taryn, and I'm a product designer. I'm Liz. I head up the creative team. We're your hosts. Join the expert team at Ballard Designs for tips, tricks, and tales from interior designers, stylists, and other talents in the design world. Plus, Speaker 2 (0:22) we'll answer your decorating dilemmas at the end of each episode. We love answering your questions, so don't forget to email us at podcast at ballarddesigns.net. Speaker 1 (0:30) Now, on with the show. Speaker 1 (0:34) Okay, our guest today spent years working in fashion as an editor at Harper's Bazaar and as an executive at Chanel until in 1946, Country Colonial in Beverly Hills changed everything. In 2001, she and her husband bought her mother-in-law's house and launched full speed into a renovation. She started an Instagram account called This Oak House to document the project to her family and friends, accidentally building a following of hundreds of thousands of people along the way. This Oak House, her debut book, shares the whole story. Annie Meyer Shire, welcome to the show. Speaker 3 (1:05) Thank you. Thank you for having me. Long-time listener, first-time caller. I am a long-time fan. I love your podcast. Thank you. Thank Speaker 1 (1:15) you so much. Well, we're long-time fans of yours. I mean, obviously, your Instagram account has become such a cult following, and congratulations on your new book. Thank you. Thank you. Speaker 1 (1:30) What I kept going back to while reading the book was that you start, you know, you started as an editor in fashion, Speaker 3 (1:35) despite, Speaker 1 (1:37) you know, kind of going on this left turn towards, you know, accidental influencer, as you call it, an author, interior design kind of expert. But in a way, you're still an editor. Yeah. And that's really, you're so good at kind of. parsing through trends or things out in the interior design world and really dialing in on special pieces that really have staying power. And lucky for us, you share all of those with You know, whether it's the very best bathrobe or, you know, a great candle hurricane and it's kind of all over the map, but you're just such a great editor. And I'm curious if that is something that was inherent in you or if it's something you've been sort of training for and training your eye. Speaker 3 (2:27) Well, I think I've always been a bit of an editor, I suppose. I mean, my training in magazines definitely helped refine that, like without a doubt. I think I learned a lot of the art of editing, you know, like Coco Chanel said, take one thing off before you leave the house. You know, I also did work at Chanel where I learned a lot about craftsmanship and composition and the things that make something special. But when I was doing my house. You know, there's so many choices. There's so many choices. And then you like throw in Pinterest and Instagram. And as soon as you sort of like land on an idea, you're like, wait, maybe I do want a green kitchen. I don't know. This kitchen's great. And you can sort of be pulled all over the place. So I talk about this in the book, but I really kind of gave myself a few guiding principles, things that I went back to over and over again. Would this have been in the original house? Would this have been a choice the original architect would have chosen? And will I love this choice in 10 years? And I think taking sort of those guiding principles, I was able to move through the thousands of choices from, you know, what should the color of the hinge be to do we even want hinges in the kitchen? I mean, there's an endless amount of choices that go from the... mega to the minor. And so I think having a sense of what I wanted it to be, I had an idea like, what do I want this to be at the end? And then pulling myself back to those kind of guiding principles. But yes, I think there's a huge correlation between fashion and interiors. I think you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who has incredible interior style and dresses like a schlub. You know, I think there's, I think there's, there's a compare. There's definitely like a, the Venn diagram between those two people has a big, big. Speaker 3 (4:17) You know, I think there's a lot between those two, I would say. Speaker 2 (4:21) The number of details that you go through in the book is just really impressive. And I think even your team of designers and the contractor and everyone that you got the opportunity to work with on your home definitely says that, you know, you were diligent in cataloging everything. And that's apparent. And I found that that's so helpful. When reading through the book and thinking about my own renovations and how this is so helpful. So talk us a little bit about how you cataloged everything. So Speaker 3 (4:57) I definitely wasn't cataloging it. I mean, my nature is to deep dive, right? So I want to learn all I can. Why is this marble better than this marble? What are the different, you know, options on, you know? the grout choices and all of that. You know, I like to deep dive and especially when it comes to the architectural. choices in a house, things that are going to last in a house even longer than you might be living there. So I sort of felt like I'll go do the deep dive and do all the work. And then I was posting sort of in real time the things I was finding or why something worked. And I mean, speaking of grout, you know, I picked a grout color and then we started to put the grout in and it didn't look at all like the color. And we found out that our water was very acidic here and it was changing the color of the grout. So we had to bring in distilled water and, you know, posting sort of the triumphs and the tribulations of this whole project. So I was cataloging it more like in real time on my Instagram. And then when the idea of the book started to percolate, I definitely at that point started to take notes and try to come up with a framework around how could I write this into a book? What would that look like? And then how could I make this feel like a real extension of my Instagram, which I think is definitely part. tips and tricks and helpful information, but then also beautiful things and inspirational pictures and all that kind of stuff. So that's the reason I've divided the book into two parts, which is house and home. House being kind of the what to expect when you're expecting renovation guide, and then home being maybe what you would find in a traditional coffee table book, you know, the beautiful editorial photography. But it was very important to me that like anybody could enjoy this book. So at the end of each chapter in part two, I have a takeaway for anyone who basically lives in a home, how to style a bookshelf or a favorite family recipe or things that really I think anybody can use. I've said this before, but my hope is that people dog-ear my book. Like, I want them to come back to it. There's a book that I love by Christopher Spitzmiller, and he has his favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. Like, I go to that book. It's not a one-time read. It doesn't just sit on my coffee table. So that was really my hope with the book. And for sure, as soon as I knew I was writing a book, I became more diligent about it. keeping track. I also do these weekly AMAs on my Instagram and I get the same questions. So I have been able to refine and hone my answers to certain things. Like, you know, I have found my favorite light bulb. Like I know my sort of certain favorites. And so I was able to really highlight those. And now everything is in one place, which is a great thing. Speaker 1 (7:35) Let's back up a little bit to the genesis of all of it, which is really the house. I love the picture that you paint in the beginning of the book about, I think you were like doing dishes in the kitchen or something and your husband was on the phone with his mom. So tell everyone about that and really kind of your initial thoughts on not only moving into a new house and embarking on a renovation project, but taking over a home that. Yeah. You know, was the family members. For sure. Speaker 3 (8:07) So we had been looking to move for quite a while. So that had been kind of like part of our plan and we hadn't found anything. And it was, we were kind of post-pandemic and my mother-in-law had moved to her summer or her weekend house, I should say, in Montecito at the beginning of the pandemic, just to sort of get out of LA, which made a lot of sense. And I think she fell in love with her community there and she really wanted to stay in Montecito. She didn't want to sell the LA house, but she also didn't want to live in it. And so my husband was sort of like this really naive, like, well, what should we do? I was like, huh, well, we're trying to move. She doesn't want to live in her house. It seems kind of like a no-brainer. And it was a lot of conversation among us for a long time. It was not a quick decision. You know, this is a family home. It's my mother-in-law's home. I want to honor her, honor the house. You know, it was an unbelievably generous thing for her to do. Speaker 3 (9:01) And we, the house functioned for a single person. She lived here alone. And so it had a big closet. It had all these things that worked for a single person, but not for a family of four. The bedrooms weren't connected. You'd have to go downstairs and then up the main stairs to get from bedroom to bedroom. It was just, it worked great for a single person. So what I thought would be a modest renovation turned into something much larger. But she was on my mind during the whole thing. I wanted her to feel proud of what we did. I wanted her to feel. Like we honored what she originally loved about this house. I didn't want her to come in and be like, what is this place and feel like it was something different. So the house functions like a new house, but feels like an old house, which I think is a pretty winning combo. Speaker 1 (9:47) First off, I love the format. You know, you kind of mentioned that you broke it up into two parts, but you also inserted these wonderful interviews throughout, which were. Speaker 1 (9:56) so sweet in some cases, like with your mother-in-law. And also, you know, really instructive, like with the architect. Speaker 1 (10:08) And I was curious, like, you know, this renovation was such a big project. And were you, you know, where did you start? You know, obviously with the architect and what you wanted, but were you nervous at all? Had you ever done any renovation projects before? Never done a Speaker 3 (10:27) renovation. I was not nervous. No, I felt capable. I felt like I could do it. I knew what I wanted the house to be. I had a vision. And I hired really well. I hired people who were much smarter than me in their department. Speaker 3 (10:43) I worked with people I absolutely loved, and I never shied away from sharing those people on my Instagram. You know, I shared my meetings with my interior designer. I was very clear I didn't design this house. It was a collaboration. I worked with an amazing contractor, and I'm still very close with everybody I worked on. This was a collaboration of a lot of people. My architect was a genius. Speaker 3 (11:07) you know, I didn't understand a lot when we started. So I wasn't nervous, but I didn't know how to read floor plans. And he'd show me a section of a room. I'm like, what's a section? Like, I didn't understand. I was looking at it from the side. There were things I didn't understand in the vernacular. You had to, I had to really like, it took me some time. Everybody was patient with me. And, you know, you can see in the book, there's a lot of hand sketches, right? And I remember in one of my early meetings with my architect, I was like, how will I know what this looks like? This was before AI and renderings were still not great. He said to me, don't worry, you'll know what it looks like. I was like, okay. And he was right. I mean, he did these gorgeous hand sketches that are in the book and you could really get a sense of what the rooms look like. So I wouldn't say I was nervous. Honestly, I trusted myself. I knew that I could shepherd us all the way and I did. And I loved it. I loved it. I loved coming here. I loved seeing the progress. What I didn't love were the things that went wrong. I didn't love the emails of the invoices. I didn't love, you know, what I didn't love how what it did to my marriage. Like, you know, my husband and I have two young kids. So any free moment was a conversation of, have you seen that email? Do you want to put in the cork floor? What do you think? It was just like a constant talking about the house. Like we became just people who were talking about a house all the time. You know, there was no longer like we were just like. Do you need to go look at the paint sample of the shutter is up? Have you seen it? It's just like there was no time or space for us to have anything outside of that. So those are things I didn't love. And I was happy when it was over. Very happy. Good to Speaker 1 (12:45) enjoy it now. Speaker 3 (12:45) Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:46) Well, one of the I think it was Mike Moser, the interior designer, but I believe he he mentioned about how. thorough and detailed you were in your research process. And I wanted you to, obviously you shared so much of your findings in the book, but where did you, you know, where would you start when you were delving into something that you were unfamiliar with? What questions did you ask yourself? Where'd Speaker 3 (13:13) you Speaker 1 (13:13) turn when you weren't getting the answers you wanted? Well, it Speaker 3 (13:17) depends. I mean, there's so many different parts of a project, right? I think like the first place I started was just like a master list of everything that I knew that I wanted for the house, just like an actually written list on like a shared Google Doc. I knew that I wanted to have one dishwasher or I knew I wanted to have, you know, screen doors, whatever the things were that I knew I wanted. And I sort of went room by room on the things that worked in my old house and didn't work. I knew that I needed to have a plug near my sink for my electric. toothbrush. I knew that I needed to have a plug in a drawer for my hairdryer. And so I just went through sort of room by room with, it was like a really just any and everything I thought of. And then as a companion piece to