Inside the Set of Netflix's 'Bridgerton' Season 3 | Set Tour | Architectural Digest

My name is Allison Gart Shaw and I am a production designer for

season

3 of Bridgeton. I'm here to show you some of our sets today. AC, okay, let's cut, so here we are at Bridgeton's iconic lounge and morning room. The space we have used for all three

season

s is a classic set for us Bridget, the living room and morning room were designed in season 1 by Will and Gina, as you can see in the space right now we have a lot of decorations floral. We are in the process of dressing this set to film in a couple of days for a particularly special scene.

Here we worked on the color palette particularly to reflect the warm and friendly nature of Bridget and her family. It's a lovely space to be in kind of. of space you would like to come and sit and have a cup of tea with Lady Bridgeton, what about the Duke? The Duke hasn't proposed M, so when we started designing this setting in series 1, we looked at a lot of

architectural

references. of stately homes we knew we were going to use the gamekeeper's house in Greenwich for the exterior location, so we had to match the sequence of the windows to the location and chose the columns to give a nice wide arch so we could have the morning room and lounge in the same space, so we had the separation of the arch to delineate the two spaces, so when we think about designing a space for a show like Bridgeton we have to take the entrances into account. and exits for the action, so we have two entrances here in this set so we can get the flow of characters moving through the space.

The spaces themselves are so big that we don't really need to have camera traps or moving walls, which helps. us with our dressing room so we don't have to constantly take walls in and out. Jeff jur, the show's lighting designer, designed the light box system for all of our sets. We always have the same light box in the center of the space to illuminate. generally most of the space and then the rest of the lighting is done with lights, we have to change elements on the set from time to time when the script demands, for example, at the beginning of this season we had to have a portrait of Violet and her husband specially commissioned it and hung it above the fireplace, as mentioned in the script.

We currently have our locker room team. Right now we're working in progress, as I say, for a specific scene that we'll be filming over the next couple of years. of days, as you can see, we have a lot of cake toppings. Our local economist makes the cakes, they are always fake, you can't actually eat them, they usually have a poyene base, but all the decoration you see is handmade. fondant icing and real sugar craft. She is incredibly skilled, as you see, they are beautiful things. The piano we have here is an original Forte piano. It's very old, it's very delicate.

It needs to be constantly tuned, so every day we have to photograph someone playing the piano. I have to have the specialized tuner so it can be played because it is so delicate that it loses its tone so quickly. Enough, I beg you, Bridget and the spaces are quite iconic spaces. We use the same moldings on all of our sets for the Bridgeton house. If you look at all the runners we have, they all look the same and it gives us a visual clue that we are in the world of Bridgeton. Same with color palettes, all spaces will have roughly the same color palettes just to help. the viewer knows that he is in the Bridgeton house, there are also small details that our wonderful dress has put in and our set decoration department has created, for example, in Bridget and spaces in which you will always see some shells that you don't know if you have Realizing that, here we are in Kate and Anthony's new apartments for season 3.

We haven't seen these sets before. This is Kate and Anthony's room and for this set we obviously wanted to stay in the Bridgeton world because we're in the Bridgeton house, but since they got married, Anthony became the new Earl Vic and of course they are now technically the head of household so we felt like they needed a fresh new space so we created something we thought of. it was within the British world, but it was a little livelier and a little younger. We had a scenic artist who painted our wall panels. He made one of each piece of the set and then we recreated it and reprinted it graphically to go through all the spaces.

This is a living area for Kate and Anthony and then we have the bedroom, so predominantly here we have the Bridgeton color palette, which is the classic Wedgewood blue with cream, but we introduced a slightly warmer tone, cream, slightly peach. cream actually for Kate and this whole space is about Kate and Anthony's family combining, so it's Bridget meets India. We've brought back some of the warmer TOS we had for Kate and Edua last season and married them together with In the Bridget and Classic palette, we also have pops of purple in the wall graphics and the deeper pinks that were done reference in her wardrobe last season, so the bed is obviously a classic English bed, but we've played around with the fabrics a bit.

We have the paisley fabric again, classic Indian and then some of the details on the canopy, we specifically chose some of the trims that we felt reflected Indian culture quite well without being too over the top. It had to be a subtle reference, really so obvious. We have a dog bed here which of course is for Newton, our favorite Corgi dog, who is Kate's dog, who he loves very much. There are touches of India in the decor. We have elephants. Ivory, a lot of brass that you wouldn't normally have for Bridgeton. It's quite a feminine space, I suppose, because Kate is quite a strong feminine character, so we felt that really her bedroom could reflect that more than Antony's very masculine character and this way we have Kate's study and dressing room, so that the colors here are even warmer.

Using the same palette, but we have reversed the colors on the walls, the peach orange color is more predominant than the Bridgeton blue. Kate is now the head of the Bridgeton family, so she has to have her own workspace, which is her desk, of course, ma'am. Violet hasn't come down yet. The photos, especially in the studio area, which you will notice, are all scenes from India. We have made reference to horses, she loves to ride horses and here we have new things and, of course, the dog that was commissioned especially for us. as a portrait, this is Kate's desk and one of the things a lot of us spend a lot of time doing is charting, it's all written in calligraphy, if she's working on her accounts, we have a lot of pages of accounts that you should read.

It would be fine for the Graphics Department to spend a lot of time referencing period ephemera and making sure everything is correct - a lot of it is actually in print, Ed - but when we need to write something by hand and see it in action, we have than to get calligraphers. and they have to be body doubles for our actors, of course, because they have to match, it has to look perfect as if the actor was writing the script, but it's very skilled, very difficult to do and there's not many people who can really pull it off. the fluidity. that you need for those writing scenes, so the curtains in Bridgeton are really important to us, everything is historically accurate.

Decorator Natalie Peppa Georg Adis spends a lot of time decorating and researching and paying special attention to all the window treatments and curtains that are there, like In a big part of any room in Bridgeton we have to make sure the color tones are right for our palette. The way light reflects off a fabric is really important to us. A lot of fabrics look pretty dead and dull on camera when they're lit, so we try to stay away from anything like that and choose fabrics that are slightly shiny and have a sheen to them so the light catches beautifully and helps sculpt the space, so when we read the script, obviously, you know.

Bridgeton, you will know that there are quite a few intimate scenes throughout the series and I don't want to give you any spoilers, but we always have to make sure that where we have those intimate scenes, the furniture will hold up to the job, can we say? We're here at Bridget and set in the new CA set for season 3. This is the CA hallway. The inspiration for the runner here was John SS's Country Manor, which is Pit Hanger Manor. Interestingly, everything is period correct, although it looks more modern. than it really is, we have hand painted marble everywhere, there are a lot more details to see in the living room, so let's take a look at the ca family, we don't know much about their backstory from seasons 1 and 2.

I've seen a lot of Creser in seasons 1 and 2, how convenient, Penelope. I didn't see you there, we understand that she is a pretty difficult lady, she causes some trouble from time to time, so for season 3 we see more of the ca family that we started with. to understand a little bit more about her backstory and her upbringing and the reasons why she's maybe as difficult as she is, so the space that we designed was really to reflect the masculinity and the austerity of her father Turns out she's a pretty dominant character. in season 3 and so we wanted the space to feel quite oppressive and quite dominant and we wanted her to feel very small in the space like a caged bird.

I guess she usually wears very pink and frilly costumes, so we wanted her to Ping out of the darkness of the walls and space here, so one thing we have to do in these standing games is graphically design our rugs and print them . We always have to make our own rugs because we will never find such a rug. right color and right size design for a space uh the shelves you see are deliberately very tall um we had a scene where one of our characters wanted to look at the books and Creser was very nervous about it because she's not actually allowed to touch the books. books being a woman, it's not her place to touch the books, so we made the shelves very high to make them feel very imposing for her and to fill the room, but in reality most of the books are fake, so all of these are only On the back you can't see anything there where we need to take a book in action.

We'll put in real books so that a character can pick something up and it looks real to the camera, but that's always pre-established depending on what the director wants. to place your shot, sorry for the noises you hear in the background, the second unit is inside, they are filming some scenes of The Bard room that we just filmed last week, so the columns are actually fiberglass , as you can hear, and they are all hand painted with a marble finish, we have a very, very talented painting team among the construction guys, in fact, many of the finishes that you see in our games are painted, all the wood grain on the doors of the shelves, everything is hand painted. and we do it mainly because if we tried to do this with real wood veneer, it would take a hundred times longer and cost a hell of a lot more, so we have to cheat, that's the name of the game, we're not doing it.

We're cheating reality, but they do a remarkably good job and I think you'll agree that you really can't tell the difference. Another thing we must always consider is that the fireplaces in our sets are a period spectacle, the main heating. in the house there would have been fireplaces oh there must have been around like statues we look at period fireplaces and choose the details that suit the space all of this is made of wood and then it is painted and grained to look like a marble and slate fireplace our The team special effects guy had to come up with a new system to create a real fire in our chimneys because we're in a big warehouse and we're not allowed to vent harmful gases through the roof of the building, so we had to come up with a system. so we could have real flames and they use some type of bioethanol fuel.

I'm not exactly sure what it is. It's a special mix. I think it doesn't emit any gases, so we don't need to have a ventilation system. It was fantastic because it would have been quite complicated with so many fireplaces in the space, so here we are in the main hall of Featherington and on the staircase, as you can hear in the house next door, we are in the middle of building a new stage. Sorry for the noise, Featherington family. Obviously their color palette is citrus yellows and greens and they're also very decorative, so we spent a lot of time designing all the plaster work on the walls here and it's a completely over the top treatment, you wouldn't really believe it.

I don't normally see that much plaster. Work in a space. Lady Featherington is very concerned about how other people see her. She is very superficial. It's about wanting money, wanting power and status, wanting to marry off her daughters. ThatWe reflect it in the way we decorate their homes. The spaces are always very decorated and in art we call them the Kardashians of the Georgian era, so the furniture here is, as you can see, the black and gold Verace style based on a designer of the time called Thomas Hope and he made it . a lot of black, gold and Egyptian-influenced furniture and we felt that that reflected their characters quite well, it's very intense, it's very direct, it's very versatile, so here we have the royal staircase, which is a suspended staircase, which means that it doesn't there is any internal support so everything is hung from the outside walls which is sometimes found in Georgian architecture the iron work we didn't do we rebuilt from existing companies obviously the symbol of the Featherington family is the butterfly, so we decorate the staircase with butterflies, we usually use artificial flowers for our flower displays simply because they have to last several days of filming, usually in fairly high lighting conditions and you realize that if you use real flowers, they tend to fall off and wither over the course of the session, so if something was shown in real close-up or if someone had a bouquet as a handheld accessory, it would be real, maybe it would make the bouquet even bigger, the bride and the spaces They are quite iconic.

In the spaces from time to time there are small changes to the sets, but generally they remain the same as the standing sets, so when we started designing the set we were looking at all the different

architectural

elements that we wanted to bring in here when we were building a set, actually the carpenters do their job first, they put up the walls, they put up the floor, then the plaster comes, they finish everything with plaster, then the painters come after the plasterers, so it's like a conveyor belt that starts to finish A The game could take 6-8 weeks if it is this size for a ballroom, it would be more like 10-12 weeks.

They do a remarkably good job.