CLEAR VISION
By Blake Miller; Photography by Cat Wilborne and Wanders Studio
This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Home Design & Decor’s Triangle edition.
A gut renovation gives designer Anna Sheppard the blank canvas to create her dream home.
Anna Sheppard of Anna Elizabeth Interiors had been dreaming about her home for quite some time. Having lived in California for ten years, the designer’s penchant for a laid-back, modern, West Coast aesthetic blossomed. “I mostly lean European-modern-meets-California-relaxed with earthy organic and vintage elements,” she says. “But I never had a space that was my own to pull it all together. I’d been visualizing it for what feels like years. I knew all the pieces and the parts I wanted in my home—I just needed to find it.”
When Sheppard moved to Raleigh in January of 2021, she began a painstaking home search during the post-pandemic market boom, and eventually found the one. “It had everything I wanted,” she says. “I love an open floor plan, but I still wanted individual rooms, and for each room to have its own moment and personality.”
Built in 2000, the home was chock-full of opportunity, with great bones and nearly 1,000 square feet of unfinished attic that took up most of the second floor. “Anna has a tendency to see things that the average person can’t envision,” says David Myrick, president of Heritage Construction, who worked on the project with Sheppard. Imagining a more open floor plan with intimate spaces throughout coupled with loads of natural light, the designer sketched out her plans and set the wheels in motion.
The plans included gutting the home down to the studs, save for the original brick wall in what is now the dining room—“it’s one of my favorite details,” says Sheppard—as well as stripping the exterior. Even the existing landscaping was removed so that a more streamlined look could be achieved from the outside in.
The design was completed in three stages, and began with renovating a small bedroom and bathroom space above the garage so Sheppard could live on the property while the main house updates were in progress. Another several months were devoted to phase two, which consisted of adding a new kitchen, converting the dining room into a home office, and transforming an un-air-conditioned sunroom into the dining room.
Once construction commenced on the third phase—completing the upstairs attic space into a casual lounge—Sheppard dug into her collections of antiques and vintage pieces as well as materials she’d been saving for just the right moment. “I love using natural materials the earth gave us, like copper gutters and copper flashing, natural quartzite, marble, and soapstone. Tumbled brick or white oak on the floors. Materials were easily the most crucial pieces to each room’s design,” says the designer. Tongue-and-groove ceilings complemented by white-oak wood beams define the family room, which is layered with vintage art Sheppard has collected over the years, including pieces by her mom.
One of the most important additions for Sheppard was the plant room. “I’m a massive plant girl, and I wanted to create a wall with shelving for plants and add grow lights that can’t be seen. This planning took some deep thinking, but David figured it out, and it’s by far one of my favorite spaces in the house.” Drenched with natural light from the skylights above during the day, at night, the wall of live plants glows with a moodiness that’s relaxing and alluring at once. “Every design I dreamed up, David figured out how to execute it perfectly,” she says.
When the opportunity arose to finally enact the vision she’d had for her home, it was difficult for the designer to pump the brakes. “My creativity is vast,” says Sheppard. “I have lots of ideas and wanted to create. Trying to limit those was hard, narrowing down and not going overboard.” But in the end, Sheppard struck the ideal balance of simple but layered, earthy and organic, timeless and collected. “This was a chance for me to be really creative, and I think I achieved that.”