Before she chooses a single material for the room on set, Nancy Meyers is notorious for drawing the floor plan for her films. That's before we get any cream-white kitchen, any linen sofas, or any copper pots to hang; with the confidence of a Michelin-star chef, she builds the floor plan. Meyers herself says that she sketches her interiors even before production design begins, thinking first about how her characters will move through these spaces. The rooms become accomplices, ushers, if you will. They have to give someone room to cross, be a marker for them to know where to pause or where to pretend to be busy to avoid a conversation while still being nosy.
In film, this is called blocking. It's the silent choreography that determines where a body enters a scene, stops, who it faces, and how it exits the frame. Interiors need this kind of consideration and motivation as well. A scene becomes terrible when we can tell there's no natural place for a person to go.
The Kitchen Is the Only Room That Doesn't Ask You to Stay
Dinner parties and general hosting of friends and family can suffer from the same disease if you're not considerate. Most homes are designed to collect objects more than they're designed to support the flow of the people in them, or their guests when they arrive. That's why everyone ends up in the kitchen. The kitchen is like a built-in cheat code for the home. It's one of the few rooms in a home that can encourage and support several behaviors at once. You can stand in the kitchen without coming across as restless. You can sit in the kitchen without having to commit to staying in the kitchen longer than you want. You can cut some fruit and then just leave. You can just refill your water, wash dishes, lean against a counter, take that 13th look in the fridge for peace of mind; you like it, the kitchen loves it. You don't have to force intimacy in the kitchen. The kitchen can even give you an alibi; you're not leaving that dry conversation in the living room; you're looking for the wine bottle opener.
Austrian-born architect and Berkeley professor Christopher Alexander understood this long before open-plan kitchens became the thing to request or show off in your interior design lifestyle photography. In his book A Pattern Language, he argues for rooms capable of containing both the group and the individual. He warns that "No homogeneous room, of homogeneous height, can serve a group of people well. To give a group a chance to be together, as a group, a room must also give them the chance to be alone, in ones and twos in the same space." Any half-aware person knows this innately. A group is always breaking itself into pairs, threes; you have some wanderers who join, observers who lurk together, and the occasional exiles who float between a few different pods of people. Good rooms absorb that instability and help to guide it and encourage it comfortably.
Our Living Rooms Have Forgotten How to Host
Our modern living room today acts more like an extremely strict restaurant Maître d. Sit here. Face here. Look at all of these things. Don't look at those things. See my giant TV? We've restricted these rooms to one or two sofas, a coffee table, one television, and everything else is centered around this. There's no room to hover, no room to temporarily dissociate without having to stand out because you're doing that; if you leave the couch, you're announcing to everyone you don't want to be a part of the group anymore. You know how awkward that is? But then, if we look in the kitchen, people are comfortably gathered in the area, doing their own thing with no pressure.
Meyers's rooms almost never make these mistakes. If you look closely, you'll notice all of her interiors have a secondary destination, whether that be a desk, a stool, a window seat, or a chair slightly off-angle from the main conversation; all of these act as places where people can be in a scene without being swallowed by the scene itself. In Something's Gotta Give, Erica Barry (played by the beloved Diane Keaton) has a kitchen that works because, while yes, it looks glorious, it also allows for two people to completely occupy the space without being forced to acknowledge each other. The architecture dilutes the intensity just enough for intimacy to become possible.
A Bedroom Should Be Somewhere You Can Be Awake
Bedrooms have almost the exact opposite problem of living rooms. They're usually reduced to just a monumental bed, two disciplined nightstands, and maybe a bench if you're feeling fancy, but really just need another place to pile clothes you don't want to fold. It's hotel brain. We've somehow adopted this idea that the bedroom should photograph better than it accommodates the person who uses the room. A Meyers's bedroom is tailored to the character it's created for. Erica Barry writes in hers. There's a desk, a chair, somewhere to be conscious and introspective without needing to do that in bed. Can you do the same in yours? Can you be awake in your room without having to be in bed?
The larger point not to stumble over is that rooms need plurality. The biggest critique of her famous aesthetic is that most people can't afford it, which is true to a degree, but that's getting sidetracked. In her rooms, you can have more than one mood, more than one posture, more than one kind of conversation, more than one kind of expected outcome. Someone can read in the room while the other talks. Someone can cook in the kitchen, and another can watch without encroaching on their sacred space.
Nancy Meyers Always Gives Her Characters Somewhere Else to Go
Alexander's genius was in understanding that scale matters less than differentiation within a space. A studio with enough room for one or two chairs can do more work to induce socializing than a 500 sq ft living room in a 4,000 sq ft house. A breakfast nook can become a dining room, work desk, family command center, or in-home confessional to cry out to the Lord. It's not space as much as what you do with the space and what inhabits it.
Nancy Meyers understood this. The best rooms understand that human beings are social animals with highly developed escape instincts. When you're hosting over the next few months, don't be offended if everyone wants to crowd around the kitchen instead of staying in the living room. Your guests will drift to spaces that demand the least of them. Living rooms tend to demand attention. Dining rooms want perfect posture. The kitchen just gives someone somewhere to lean. And everyone, eventually, would like somewhere really comfortable to lean; added bonus if there's food within reach.
The interiors and films referenced in this essay are the work of filmmaker Nancy Meyers and their respective production design teams. Residence Supply does not own the rights to the images featured in this story. All imagery remains the property of its respective copyright holders and is presented for editorial reference and commentary. This story is part of Residence Supply’s The Nostalgic Edition, a creative exploration of the spaces, rituals, and familiar comforts of the 90s that make a house feel like home.
