Design ideas for Wes Anderson inspired interiors

It's rare to be able to look at a still from a film and immediately identify the director, but such is the distinctiveness of Wes Anderson's visual style that most people with a passable understanding of pop culture could manage it. Both his costumes and his sets, including the interiors, have been highly influential, blending saturated colour, vintage style and a wry, whimsical mood. Anderson is well-known for meticulously constructing every frame of his films, so no visual cue should be ignored. His interest in interiors has also extended to designing them in real life; you can visit Bar Luce at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, a 1950s style cafe that Anderson created in 2015, and last year he revealed a carriage aboard the luxury British Pullman Belmond train, complete with swan-shaped champagne coolers and plenty of intricate marquetry.

The sets of The Royal Tenenbaums, with its red rooms (including Margot’s iconic Scalamandré ‘Zebras’ wallpapered bedroom), and The Grand Budapest Hotel, with its candy-pink exterior and grand red interiors, have been highly influential. Should you wish to decorate your house like a Wes Anderson movie (we're on the fence about whether this is a good idea), colour is most certainly the place to start. Go bold and saturated, with either a tonal or a totally contrasting scheme (think red and purple in Budapest). Pink may be the colour most associated with Anderson, but red is a constantly recurring theme, from Chas Tenenbaum's red tracksuits to Steve Zissou's red beanies, and most other strong shades have had their moments across the films. The blue and red/ochre colour scheme that predominates in The Life Aquatic, though it doesn't come up in interiors specifically, is a great basis for a decoration scheme (see Lucy Williams’ sitting room in her London house).

Once you've settled on a memorable colour scheme, it's time to attend to the finer details. Anderson's films always make a heavy appeal to a retro aesthetics, with the styles of the 1970s usually appearing somewhere. 2021's The French Dispatch is set in 1975, and the offices of the fictional magazine are a wonderful world of yellow and brown, brilliantly evoking the decade. Symmetry and geometry are also crucial; doubling of architectural features or decorative elements often occur, along with highly harmonious arrangements of objects. Bill Murray's amazing ‘Issue in Progress’ pinboard in The French Dispatch is something all magazine editors should surely aspire to. 

So is the style of Wes Anderson something you can realistically emulate at home? Well, we might not go all the way down his perfectly constructed rabbit hole, but a little touch of his distinctive aesthetic might well spread some joy, just as his films do.