Celebrity Style
See Diane Keaton’s Dream Home In Her New Book, The House That Pinterest Built
Published on November 22, 2017
Much like her iconic, offbeat style in Annie Hall, Diane Keaton’s home is entirely her own — even though it was “made from the gifts of other people’s addictive yearnings for the perfect home,” she writes in her latest book, The House That Pinterest Built. In it, Diane chronicles the journey of building her dream home, and shares the images that inspired her every step of the way.
After three-and-a-half years and countless pins, Diane transformed a 38,000-square-foot flat pad into an 8,000-square-foot structure with the help of Cynthia Carlson, her associate Toben Windahl, from DCM Designs, and her friend and designer Stephen Shadley. Together, they created the industrial, pared-back space of Diane’s wildest Pinterest dreams. Click through for a look inside.
Diane dreamed of having a brick house ever since she was five, when her mother read her The Three Little Pigs. “No matter how hard the Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed he couldn’t blow down the third little pig’s house. It was made of bricks. I knew I was going to live in a brick house when I grew up,” she writes.
Disappointed with the living room plans, Diane took to Pinterest, and stumbled upon a photograph of “The Long Room” at The Trinity College Library in Dublin, built in 1732, which houses 200,000 books. “That was it. That was the solution. Duh! The living room should be a library, a Living Home Library,” she writes.
In the Living Library, the entire wall around the fireplace is clad in white-painted brick, an idea that came from Diane’s lifelong co-designer and friend, Steve Shadley. The idea for the black factory pendants came from an industrial kitchen she pinned from Bloglovin.com.
Nancy Meyers originally introduced Diane to Pinterest. “In less than the instant it took to click… I was hooked,” she writes.
“There are over 50 billion pins on Pinterest. It would be safe to say that at least 200 hundred million focus on bathrooms,” writes Diane. When looking for bathroom inspiration on the photo sharing app, she suggests breaking it down into categories to save time, such as storage, shower, bath, toilet and lighting.
An oversized poster of Diane’s book, Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, is propped against the wall in her office. “When I began my search for office spaces on Pinterest, I typed in “Artists in their Studios” then “People at their Desks.” Once there, I saw Francis Bacon and Georgia O’Keefe at their most engaged. I saw students bending over their homework. I saw scientists with bubbling jars, designers with their swatches, carpenters in their work spaces,” she writes.
Diane fell in love with an image of a kitchen on Pinterest with reclaimed wood beams and sky-lit steel casement windows. “An expansive skylight means one thing; it means light, ever-shifting, always moving, variable light all day long. What could be more magical? And impractical too?”
A dining area off the kitchen is striking in its simplicity. “All I can say is, for better or worse, in sickness and health, our kitchen was built in honor of the beauty of light, sometime laced with shades of gray, sometimes blinding as it came down on us, sometimes too little light, sometimes star filled, sometimes dreary and grey, even dull, but, always, light.”
© Lisa Romerein
© The House That Pinterest Built by Diane Keaton, Rizzoli New York, 2017
Cynthia Carlson and Toben Windahl of DCM Designs, Stephen Shadley