Am I the only one who likes to imagine what the interior designers of yesteryear might have managed if they had turned their eyes to set design, with the budget and stringent visual requirements of a film production to fulfil? If Elsie de Wolfe had worked with Martin Scorsese, say, to shape his adaptation of The Age of Innocence – a film set in the New York of de Wolfe’s late Victorian childhood and heavily reliant on sumptuous production design? Or if Arne Jacobsen or Erno Goldfinger had been on hand when Ben Wheatley decided to adapt JG Ballard’s High-Rise, perhaps pointing out how to incorporate a shadow-gap here or a cantilevered concrete balcony there into the set?
Sadly, life doesn’t work that way, and so we are, as aesthetic creatures, forced instead to live the other way around and to draw inspiration for our own homes – even if it’s only the very inkling of an idea – from the films that we watch. Perhaps, one evening, we dip into Parasite and realise we’ve got the furniture totally wrong for our sleek contemporary family home and all its monolithic concrete slabs and plate windows. Maybe we watch Anatomy of a Fall and decide that the bleached wood, high ceilings and tiled kitchen islands of the ski chalet in which the murder takes place (or does it?) are the perfect look and feel for our new loft conversion. Perhaps we watch Emerald Fennell's Saltburn and realise we want to own a claw-foot bath (it's worth watching her Vanity Fair video where she talks about how she made such a huge house look lived-in for the film).
Which prompts the question: which designers cram the best ideas and aesthetics into their films?
A good place to begin is less with interior design, and more with sets. The usual suspects here are the big names of the last 50 to 70 years, and while they might not have their own dedicated aesthetics that span every film, their individual films are immediately recognisable. In other words, Ridley Scott himself might not scream “signature set design”, but watching Blade Runner (and its sequel, Blade Runner 2049, though that wasn’t directed by him), you immediately know you’re in the world of replicants and Tyrell Corp, where everyone lives in sinicised, Hong-Kong like tenements and megacorporations build vast concrete ziggurats the size of several housing blocks. Jump into another Scott film, though, like Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven or Napoleon, and you’ll immediately recognise the rich historical interiors of ancient Rome, 12th-century Jerusalem and the Revolution-era apartments of the Tuileries, respectively. Scott and his production designer Arthur Max (who worked on all three films, plus House of Gucci among others) have a real eye for interiors that fit their story.
Elsewhere, Stanley Kubrick, Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton each create rich visual worlds (watch del Toro’s underrated Crimson Peak for the weirdest vision of Victorian dark wood interiors you will ever encounter). But there’s still a problem: these are all more set designs than honest-to-God interiors, as said before. So they’re too arty, too designed, not exactly liveable. When we watch a film, don’t we really want to see homes in which we might reasonably live?
Nora Ephron springs to mind here. House & Garden has made no secret in the past of our admiration for the interiors in her films, which we described in 2022 as full of the “warmth and light-heartedness” that also imbue her writing; they are supremely liveable and comfortable spaces in which her characters can sink into a charming striped sofa or a deep armchair while mulling whatever relationship conundrum Ephron’s scripts have inflicted upon them. They have a particularly American feel to them (obviously), and often make very efficient use of relatively small apartments, with walls lined with bookshelves and lots of prints and drawings on the walls. The exception is Julie and Julia, much of whose action takes place in a recreation of the kitchen used by real-life broadcaster and chef Julia Child – this is an airy, sea green take on a simple 1950s-style kitchen with a dash of the coastal to it.
Speaking of apartments, if you live in a flat, look no further than Pedro Almodóvar. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown will make you drop everything and go buy a bucket of orange paint for your walls, a load of leather-and-chrome furniture, and more plant pots than you can possibly hope to keep alive without triggering a national hosepipe ban. Volver will have you painting your plain wood furniture in sky blues and your corridors avocado.
That won’t work if you live in the countryside, though. For that, we prescribe watching the entire oeuvre of Thomas Vinterberg (in fact, we prescribe that whether you want interiors inspiration or not). The Danish director has directed 11 feature films, three of which have been Denmark’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award – Festen, The Hunt and Another Round, which won the Oscar. More importantly, though, these all take place in various different deeply Scandinavian locales, with a variety of interiors. Festen centres on a large family gathering in a country house somewhere in the flat Danish countryside, The Hunt is set in a small Danish village, and Another Round takes place in Copenhagen; the first film is all high ceilings, wine cellars and white tablecloths laid over trestle tables and stained with red wine, but the latter two will easily convince you to move to a one-storey house in the forest, fill it with Carl Hansen & Søn furniture, and clad it in pine. Come for the brilliantly written and acted dramas, stay for the situationally appropriate furniture and architecture.
There’s a name that hovers over all others, though, when it comes to contemporary movie aestheticists: Wes Anderson. The American director is almost embarrassing to include here (ditto Sofia Coppola) because he seems so obvious to name, but while the question “Which directors have the most interesting interiors in their films?” might lead you down the path of looking for consistency – for those filmmakers whose respective films all look very distinct and alike to one another – Anderson has actually managed to apply his visual style to a wildly different array of settings.
Moonrise Kingdom nailed that New England log cabin look; The Royal Tenenbaums did it for New York brownstones; The French Dispatch had three sub-stories, each set in a different milieu-cum-homage to the French New Wave, including a story about a student uprising whose interiors were peak European café culture. Anderson even managed to turn his eye to India, with The Darjeeling Limited, a film which more priggish film critics might suggest he had no right to do, but which I think is both a stunning and sensitively done portrait of a subcontinent through the eyes of three American brothers on a trip to retrieve their grieving mother from a Buddhist monastery after the death of their father. In that instance, it was the colours, the prints and the patterns of the material culture of the Himalayan foothills that were Anderson’s inspiration.
There are half a dozen others who could be included here – Yorgos Lanthimos, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, Baz Luhrmann – not to mention about a thousand TV shows. But that’s for another time. For now, go buy a cinema ticket – and then book a call with an interior designer.
