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Designing Dream Homes For The Screen

Designing Dream Homes For The Screen

"It's Complicated" starring Meryl Streep, above, will screen at The Moviehouse in Millerton, N.Y.

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The interior decor of the rich and famous can fascinate us as much as the interiority of their lives — think of Brook Astor's Sister Parish chintz-covered home, Jackie Kennedy's Georgian-style 1010 Fifth Avenue apartment designed by Rosario Candela, Gwyneth Paltrow's potentially fake Ruth Asawa sculpture, or the monastery blankness of Kim Kardashian's mansion with its Isabel Rower sculpture room.

Perhaps only one film director has truly ignited the collective imagination and awakened dream home yearning through her characters' meticulously crafted interior design preferences, and that's Nancy Meyers. On Saturday, Sept. 9, The Moviehouse in Millerton, N.Y., is paying tribute to her impeccable taste in set decoration with a screening of her 2009 film, "It's Complicated," with cocktails and discussions with designer Vicky Charles of Charles & Co. and Hammertown Barn's design director, Dana Simpson.

Architectural Digest has published multiple rundowns alone on Meyer's 2003 film she wrote and directed starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, "Something's Gotta Give" — although the focus is rarely on Keaton's Academy Award nomination. The eye is on her house. Aging but successful playwright Erica Barry's (Keaton) beach-side shingle-style getaway on Meadow Lane in Southampton, N.Y., is cream-colored bliss floating on a striped dhurrie rug. Mimi London fabric on the chairs; soapstone counter tops in the kitchen; beach apropos art by R. Kenton Nelson. Production designer Beth Rubino, who won Academy Awards for "The Cider House Rules" and "American Gangster," has revealed several times over the years that what makes the Nancy Meyers homes so enviable… is that they are entirely fake. Those perfect off-whites, warm grays, inoffensive yellows, and barely there blues are paint colors designed for the camera, for rooms built on sound stages, flooded with artificial coastal light. These are swatches forever out of reach. Some interiors can exist only in the movies: "INT. Kitchen."

Alexander Wilburn

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