Details matter to Annie Meyers-Shyer, down to the oil-rubbed bronze knobs and shade of white Farrow & Ball paint in her living room. It’s something she learned from her mother, the filmmaker Nancy Meyers, who meticulously curated every aspect of her sets—even matching the paint in Natasha Richardson’s foyer to Lindsay Lohan’s hair in The Parent Trap, which Meyers directed and Meyers-Shyer’s father, Charles Shyer, produced. Meyers-Shyer is now 44, and this attention to detail fuels her popular Instagram account, This Oak House, where she shares every step of a major home renovation with her 130,000 followers.
The genesis for This Oak House came four years ago, when Meyers-Shyer; her husband, the attorney Robby Koch; and their two young children moved into a historic Pennsylvania Dutch home in Los Angeles, which had belonged to her mother-in-law.
She knew that remodeling the house would take some work but didn’t originally grasp the project’s full scale. “When it’s for your family, nobody cares as much as you do,” says Meyers-Shyer, who became deeply involved in every aspect of the renovation.
She started This Oak House at first just to share progress updates with friends and family. “I am the absolute accidental influencer,” she says, laughing.
It was Lands’ End bedsheets, of all things, that made This Oak House go viral—in June of 2023, four months after she started the account. Within 48 hours, Lands’ End e-mailed, saying that she had sold the sheets out entirely.
Meyers-Shyer grew up in Los Angeles, moving East in 1998 to attend Washington, D.C.’s American University. She then spent over a decade in New York, where she worked first as an accessories editor at Harper’s Bazaar and then in public relations at Chanel.
Her background in fashion carries over to her detail-oriented design instincts. During her home renovation, “I fixated on my range hood. I fixated on my shower doors. I fixated on the pendants over my island,” she says. “Paint almost hospitalized me.”
She found a talented team in the architect Brian Covington, the designer Mike Moser, and the contractor Brian Blythe. But her greatest influence and collaborator remained her mother. “I didn’t make a single choice without showing my mom,” she says. “She’s an amazing sounding board. She’s so devoted to me and my thing. She is in it with me.”
Meyers-Shyer finally moved into her new house in early January of this year, just as Los Angeles’s devastating wildfires began and mere weeks after she lost her father, who died at the age of 83. “The loss of a parent is so big, it’s almost hard to reconcile that it’s real,” she says. Pieces of her father’s legacy now live in her new house. A painting from Father of the Bride hangs above the fireplace. “When you have something with history, it jumps off the wall at you.” His penholder and pens sit on her desk. “Every time I look at it, I think of it on his desk. ”
Finally settled in, “I’d like to be a person who lives in this home and doesn’t just work on it,” she says. “Enjoying my spaces, using my outdoor area, watching my kids swim.” And while she’s been quieter on Instagram in the wake of her father’s death and the fires, the two tragedies have given her a renewed perspective on the sacredness of her home and the value it brings to others.
“I’m going to continue to share it, and I’m going to continue to share my sources, but I’m going to figure out what feels right,” she says. “That’s the way I’ve done it since the beginning.”
Nadine Zylberberg is a New York–based writer and editor