How Do You Make a Warehouse Look British? 🇬🇧

In episode 6 of The Flight Attendant on HBOMax, we get a few brief shots of Cecilia, Miranda’s associate, in an undisclosed warehouse. What you may or may not have realized is that even though this warehouse was actually located in Brooklyn, NYC it was scripted to be located in London.

So when Jess gave me the responsibility to do this set the first interesting question I pondered was, “how do you make a warehouse look British or that it is located in London?”

I mean if you are in a car and the scene is supposed to take place in London you just need the drivers side to be on the right and voila we have the visual cues we need.

But what about a warehouse? 🤔

The first thing I tried to do was google search as many permutations of the words “London warehouse” “warehouse in Britain” as I could. And believe it or not, the internet is not rife with photos of the insides of British warehouses, and even when they are it’s hard to see anything particularly British about them.

So then I started looking up warehouse shelving and solution companies based in the UK and combing through their brochures, catalogs, and websites to try to get some good reference photos. This method elucidated some good warehouse photos—but they were mostly very sterile looking, huge industrial scale warehouses that looked borderline like stock photos.

The ideal photo I was hoping for was a chaotic-in-the-middle-of-fulfilling-a-lot-of-orders warehouse on a Wednesday morning at 10am with lots of life layers and details I could study. I never found that photo of my dreams.

So I started thinking of ways we could express Britishness (or at least distinguish the space from an American counterpart) and this is what I came up with:

1. A4 paper

2. British office supplies—particularly those file holders I always see on British and European shows but which we don’t really use in America cause we use binders instead.

3. Some British snacks.

4. British style light switch and electrical outlet covers (which are very different since they are on a whole different voltage and outlet prong system).

5. British premiere league football (soccer) team paraphernalia.

Ultimately these are very small and specific details that most people wouldn’t notice on screen one way or another (we’ll get back to them later though). When you are doing a set that is 93% boxed air (literally), you gotta keep it interesting for yourself though.

A lot of the main work of this set was of course filling a completely empty room by finding the shelving, furniture, and a quantity of boxes, crates, and containers of varying sizes, color, and texture to make a convincing looking warehouse that also had visual interest. None of which (boxes, shelving, basic warehouse furniture) was that distinguishable between British vs. American.

Warehouse Before

Warehouse After—93% boxed air.

I also gave myself the added challenge of not using ULINE (for political reasons) for this set—when definitely this is a set MEANT for ordering from ULINE. It would have definitely been the easiest and most straightforward way to get the great majority of shopping done fast and cheap. And normally I advocate for not making things more complicated than they need to be, but…in this case no.

I mean just that above was enough to keep me busy (its the quantity and volume I was talking about!). When you have an empty room, you really gotta make the calculations to make sure you are going to have enough stuff to fill the space with enough variation to look natural and interesting.

The worst fear of all decorators is to be dressing a set and realizing you don’t have enough stuff and no time (or money left) to get it. I wish I had the picture of the paper I used to calculate and plan each shelf ahead of time to make sure we had enough things to fill all the space but I definitely threw that away.

So after I got that taken care of Jess supported me on my mission to find all the British details listed above.

1. A4 Paper.

   I special ordered a carton of A4 paper from a paper supplier to use for all paperwork and printed signs in the warehouse.

Living in Asia for 10 years (for my first career), one of the weird small frustrating things I encountered is how standardized paper sizes outside of the US are different from what we use in the US (haha America likes to do that). So my American folders, document covers, and binders wouldn’t work with the local document sizes. If you want to learn everything about American letter size paper vs. A4, click here.

I thought this was a fun detail that yeah absolutely nobody will notice at home and likely not even the actors, yet it brought a level of authentic realism to the set that at least Jess and I could enjoy knowing.

2. British Office Supplies

I got in there looking for the British equivalent of Staples and scrolled through all their inventory to see what actually looked different than what I would find at Staples, and I discovered quite a lot actually!

This was August during COVID so shipping times and fulfillment were dicey especially for an international order. I even reached out to a few British office supply companies to see if they would work with me on shipping times. They all said no, but one guy suggested Amazon.co.uk which was 💡.

A glimpse of my Amazon.co.uk order (there was more not pictured here too!)

👀 some of the British office supplies from the order? To me those yellow pens are emblematic because they look very un-American to me. You might notice the British electrical cover and some British snacks in here too (we will get to that in a second).

You might be thinking 🧐 “wait a minute, I don’t ever remember seeing this desk in the warehouse…” Which I unfortunately have to say “yes 😔, sadly we never even see this part of the room at all on screen in the final cut!” (The angles that were scouted were not the same ones that ended up on screen in the final cut of the episode).

This actually happens all the time in our work, and 🤷🏻‍♀️ you gotta be doing it for the love of the game and the enjoyment of the process. Because besides that we have very little control of what ultimately ends up on screen after the final edit.

anyways here’s another angle of the desk with all the A4 paper, imported British office supplies and British snacks…

On one hand, it was a slight blessing in disguise because the biggest pieces of distinctive British (and all European actually) office supplies that are visibly different than American ones were the document file holders they use instead of the binders we Americans use.

The ones I ordered got held up, our filming date got pushed earlier, so in the end they didn’t arrive in time 😭.. So we ended up having to use some binders (and it was killing me on the inside because I knew they weren’t right and we had ordered the right ones they just weren’t here on time!). Well turns out either way you never saw the shelf where the document file holders should have gone.

3. Some British snacks

This one was pretty easy, I knew there was a British food importer in Connecticut, and just ordered some snacks off their website, and called them to make sure the shipping would arrive in time. Any food item you catch on screen is from them!

4. British style light switch and electrical outlet covers

You might have noticed from the above image of my Amazon.co.uk order that it included two outlet plate covers. Anyone who has traveled to the UK will realize, hmm we speak the same language, share a lot of cultural heritage, and yet I can’t charge my cellphone here without getting a voltage adapter…

Covering up all the American outlets with British outlet covers seemed like an easy win and way to convey visually this warehouse is in LONDON.

5. British premiere league football (soccer) team paraphernalia.

This idea to communicate British-ness was not only seemingly low-hanging fruit in displaying a different sports culture than America, but it was also intended as a tribute to one of Jess and my favorite prop house warehouse workers: Josh at State Supply Props.

When State Supply was at their Harlem location, Josh’s workspace at the loading dock was a living altar to the Mets. He had so much sports fan paraphernalia hanging up everywhere so we thought it would be fun to make the British warehouse loading dock character’s working space an homage to Josh just with a British football team.

Turns out WarnerMedia’s legal team only gave me the ok to put up ONE branded British football team fan item…so I tried to chose wisely and we put it here:

That’s a British football team scarf hanging over the bulletin board…do you know what team?

Now of course, which team should our warehouse worker character support was a whole thing. As an American and someone who pays so little attention to sports, I had no sense of what fandom of each team signified. Even though I don’t really pay attention to sports, I do understand the many unsaid and understood signifiers of a Yankees fan v.s a Mets fan in NYC.

So I turned to the internet to try and figure out what team would make sense for our warehouse worker, and stumbled upon this wonderful gem from Reddit:

I found this breakdown hilarious despite its…shall we say crudeness. I double checked this with a British friend who said it was startlingly accurate.

“White van drivers called Tony” sounded like exactly the profile of the character I was thinking of, so West Ham it was!

AND YOU ACTUALLY GET TO SEE THE WEST HAM SCARF ON SCREEN!

Those boxes behind Cecilia were custom printed and had kg and cm units of measurement.

BONUS!

Oh one last bonus one: if you notice all these boxes have the weights in kg and dimensions in cm because the rest of the world (including the UK) uses the metric system. We had these boxes custom printed and I asked our graphic designer, Ambika to please make sure the dimensions were in metric.

I’m 100% aware that 0 people watching the show noticed any of these details I went through painstaking trouble to realize and now just recount to you, but I’m so grateful Jess gave me the space and encouragement to do it anyway.

I mean, a lot of times these small decorating details are just for the actors or ourselves or the abstract belief that even if they aren’t noticed explicitly the sum total of their presence creates an overall tangible feeling of authentic natural realism.

Like I said earlier, you gotta be doing it for the love of the game and the enjoyment of the process so that even if the work doesn’t ultimately appear on screen or get noticed by viewers, at least you can be proud of the work.

The Quest to Find All that Shredded Paper

Cassie and Alex in her mind palace of trying to piece together what those shredded pieces of paper mean.

In episode 4 “Conspiracy Theories” of The Flight Attendant, after Cassie stole the shredded paper remains from Janet Sokolov’s office in episode 3, we see her wrestling with all this new and puzzling information in her mind palace space/subconscious with Alex. They are back in the hotel suite but now it is is COVERED with shredded paper.

Cool idea. But when set decorators read a scripted idea like that we think “!!! going to need to find or make tons of shredded paper!”

One of the cool things about set decorating is, it is translating a scripted idea from the writers or design idea from the production designer into an actual physical reality. And sometimes it is the simplest things that are the most challenging. Honestly often it is.

Shredded paper: sure anyone knows how to find that. You go to Staples, you buy a home office paper shredder and shred some paper. Done.

But once you start getting into larger quantities, the kind of quantities to make a cinematic effect and really
”read on screen” like in the shot above, it becomes a lot more challenging. Quantity is a big thing when finding things for sets—I could write a whole thing on that but I won’t right now.

I often say it is being able to buy things in the quantity needed, on our crazy production timelines (need it yesterday), with a limited budget that makes set decorating a profession versus someone who is good at shopping, has a knack for interior design, or is resourceful.

In this case, I’m going to walk you through what a challenge it was.

Jess (THE set decorator for The Flight Attendant) and I talked about how our dream situation was we would find a vendor who already dealt in industrial quantities of shredded paper we could buy mass amounts of shredded paper from (I’m talking 1000 pounds of shredded paper to be exact) that we simply picked up or they dropped-off.

I believed deep down inside that I must be able to find this dream vendor.

little snapshot of the calling journey I took from my work notebook (on the other side was my list of things I was buying for an entirely different set. We are usually working at multiple sets at a time concurrently).

So I started googling and calling around all the shredded paper vendors in the NYC tri-state area. Quickly I discovered this was going to be tougher than I realized because what these companies sell their customers is security and peace of mind re: disposing sensitive documents. All of them said flat out no way were they going to sell me their old shreds—that would violate their whole confidential promise to their customers.

Think about it, why do you want to shred something? Because you have a document you want safely and simply destroyed. (Why did Janet Sokolov shred those documents in her office? To destroy evidence!)

Cassie uncovering the shredded documents in Janet Sokolov’s home office in Episode 3 (another set Jess and I worked closely together on!)

Okkkkk. So we discussed the possibility of renting some industrial size paper shredders, bringing them to our set dressing shop, buying obscene amounts of new paper, and then asking for the manpower hours required to have a few set dressers going to town shredding all that new paper.

We didn’t love this plan for three reasons:

1. omg why waste all this NEW paper (and squander the lives of millions of trees in the process) when the world and certainly New York City is already filled abundantly with people disposing of already used paper?!

2. New paper would lack the texture and dimension that used paper with writing and graphics and different color has. This plan costs way more money (renting the machines, buying the material, and budgeting for the manpower).

3. And lastly, renting an industrial shredder is possible but not as easy as we had hoped. Nowadays most companies who hire one of the paper waste companies get a service where someone comes to pick-up paper meant for shredding which then gets hauled and shredded in an industrial paper shredder truck.

I asked a few companies, what if I provide all the paper, could I hire you guys to shred it in your truck, but the truck just parks outside of our office and when it is done shredding we just take the contents? They all said no to this option citing that the trucks are often filled with multiple client’s paper so they can’t just give us our paper and anyways they don’t do that.

Feeling a bit stumped I even called a few other set decorator friends working on other productions to see if they had done something similar before and had any vendors they’ve used. They all said no and thought the best option was the DIY method (the one we didn’t love for the reasons stated above.)

…I really believed there MUST be the right paper shredding vendor out there. You know maybe a smaller firm less bound by all these corporate contracts, someone with a little more flexibility to cater to this very specific situation…

And just as I was giving up hope I got the call back from a vendor with whom I had left a message on their voicemail. He heard my message, googled this new show “The Flight Attendant” and saw that Kaley Cuoco was starring and his wife loves Kaley! He’s the owner of his paper shredding solutions company in New Jersey, had that can-do spirit that small business owners do, and believed he could deliver what we were hoping for. YAY!!!!!!!!

[I wanted to embed the GIF of Ari Gold from Entourage doing his “I LOVE THIS TOWN"!” celebratory dance after realizing he could negotiate with an intransigent school principal once he realized the principal’s son was interested in working as an agent, but I couldn’t make it work with this website’s interface]

THE HIGH. THE BEST HIGH. When that crazy quest you’ve been on finally sprouts a good lead. I’ll never forget how pumped Jess and I were in the office after I got off that phone call that evening.

I worked out all the price and delivery logistics with my Paper Shredding Guy, his company was going to deliver 1000 pounds of shredded paper to our stage two working days before we needed to film. Great, I can check that off my list.

But of course it is never that easy.

Friday Feburary 14, 2020 I was on location working on the set for Diana’s office (another set I was in charge of) and it was surprisingly a pretty chill day considering the high stress few months proceeding it. (Also little did we know what a calm before the storm it was considering what was about to engulf all of our realities COVID wise in just a few weeks).

Literally kicking back on set at Diana’s Office (Annie’s boss at the law firm) which we were dressing the morning of Feb 14, 2020 and which I was using as my desk to get some work done.

The actual intended use of the desk in the show. (I would like to note that all those awards in the background were custom engraved with the character’s name all sorts of fake honors I made up for her.)

Jess came to set, we were both relaxed in a way we hadn’t been in weeks. We even had time to go do some fun smalls shopping together for the finishing touches of Diana’s office at NYC’s most fun office supply store Goods for the Study.

We are all enjoying life cracking jokes with the set dressers dressing Diana’s set with us, and then we get The Call.

Sara the Production Designer calls us from the stage where they are dressing in the 1000 pounds of shredded paper that have been delivered from our Paper Shredding Guy. Sara says with slight panic, the shreds are not the right shape. It is Friday afternoon, and we are filming this first thing Monday morning.

The shreds the props department created for what Cassie stole from Janet Sokolov’s Office are straight shreds—the kind you get from a simple home office paper shredder. The kind of shreds we currently had 1000 pounds of were cross-cut shreds.

Knowing very little about the details of the paper shredding Jess and I honestly didn’t understand this distinction until Sara sent us a photo. OH. This distinction was something that was never specified to any of us and not one we even knew to ask. (I learned so much about the paper shredding industry that week).

I called my Paper Shredding Guy to see if he could help us. He said “That is the industry standard you know: cross-cut. Cross-cut shreds are what most effectively obscure and destroy sensitive documents because they are much harder to piece together.”

Yeah, exactly. If the shreds were actually cross cut, maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for Cassie and Max to reconstruct the strip shreds they stole from Janet Sokolov’s office:

The strip shredded paper Max and Cassie were able to piece back together in Annie’s apartment on her shower door (I had to find this unique custom curve shower door but that’s a whole other post)—this is exactly why you don’t strip-shred—its too easy to piece back together—and the industry standard is cross-cut.

And like with so many vendors I’ve had this talk with before I pleaded with him: “I know this doesn’t make sense in real life or in how it actually works in your industry, but can you help us make a bunch of strip shreds to support the fake cinematic world we are creating? Could you also make 500 pounds more and deliver it by Monday morning at 5am?“ (we thought we could layer some of the crosscut under the strip shred for bulk—a little movie magic.)

Like I said before Paper Shredding Guy is a can-do guy and for the right price he said sure he could help us out.

But considering our thin time margin of working hours left, we were going to be cutting it very close (haha paper shredding pun!). We all agreed we needed a Plan B. Because relying on a third party to deliver something we needed to make the shot on Mon at 5am was a risky Plan A. Any number of things could go wrong and we needed a back-up.

So now Jeanelle, the other assistant set decorator joined our little Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force to try and figure out how we were going to come up with 1000 pounds of strip shreds before Monday morning. Did I mention it was late Friday afternoon by this point? The Friday of Valentines Day when many people have plans with their dearest loved ones and are not planning on working a minute later than absolutely necessary?

We revisited some previous plans and I called the places we had inquired about renting industrial paper shredders. Turns out any industrial size paper shredder only cuts cross-cut. Strip shreds are only for little amateur home paper shredders. AGHHHHHH.

I called a bunch of Staples around the city to find out how many strip-shred home paper shredders they had in stock now, and it turns out VERY FEW. Most of that is sold online now, and as anyone who has had experience with a dinky home paper shredder they are not that durable.

In order to make the quantity of shreds we needed, we needed a bunch of these dinky little shredders so that if one died from exhaustion (sorry paper shredder) we had another waiting in the wings. Also we needed enough so that we could have a small army of set dressers shredding all at once. I mean, 2 guys and 2 shredders was not going to cut it (HAH! another paper shredding pun!) Thankfully production agreed to let us pay a handful of set-dressers a 6th day rate to staff the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory.

Online though, wasn’t going to be fast enough. We needed these shredders now. So that first thing Sat morning the Paper Shredding Army could get to work.

In the end Jeanelle found a guy who sold on Amazon but had a warehouse of 20+ strip shred home office paper shredders in New Jersey (NJ to save the day again) and could deliver them all in a van to Brooklyn that evening. Katie our set dec shopper was able to procure the obscene amount of paper we needed for the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory.

Here is a video of Jeanelle coming into the office at 7:04 pm (you can see the rest of the office is dark and everyone else has long gone home) with one of the paper shredders that had been delivered just to test that it would work.

The huge sigh of relief we all breathed.

In the end my Paper Shredding Guy DELIVERED. He showed up Monday 5am with the 500 pounds of strip-shredded paper as requested and together with the shreds from the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory we were able to create the beautiful quantity required to make the shot in time for camera.

PHEW

The Quest + the Intense High Stakes Problem Solving are two things I actually love. So even though they are less about beautiful objects and the design aesthetic side of set decorating (which duh is the best part), they are processes I really enjoy and which keeps me loving set decorating.

Those Taxidermy Polar Bears

There was a quick little moment when Cassie is exploring the Sokolov Estate in Episode 3 “Funeralia” of The Flight Attendant and she comes across a huge taxidermy polar bear in one room. (above)

And then when Cassie and Max have successfully broken into Alex Sokolov’s apartment in Episode 5 “Other People’s Houses” we see a taxidermy polar bear cub in his apartment too—echo-ing the bigger one at his parents home. (below)

As the assistant decorator assigned responsibility for both of these sets (the Sokolov Estate and Alex’s Penthouse Apartment) it was, among other things, my job to find these these taxidermy polar bears.

One thing I learned early on was it was VERY difficult to find a real taxidermy polar bear in the United States for rental or even purchase because IT IS ILLEGAL to trade in taxidermy polar bears.

I found a guy in Canada who had some good looking taxidermy polar bears but then he told me, “I can’t rent it to you across the border in the US because it is illegal to trade in polar bear taxidermy.” Oh. (turns out the Canada-US-Polar Bear triangle is a whole thing)

Hunting Polar Bears has been illegal in the USA since 1973, with exceptions for the indigenous people of Alaska and I talked to one taxidermy specialist in California who told me that it is extremely difficult to find a real Polar Bear taxidermy after the 1940’s and the one they had available to rent was from 1936.

…the problem with that one is it looked like it was from the 1930’s…it was yellowing and a little bit mangy. It didn’t look like a taboo prized possession of some ultra rich people who dealt with dirty money.

In the end we went with one of our familiar taxidermy rental houses in the New York City area who had life size polar bear and polar cub models that weren’t actual taxidermy but very good substitutes that looked great on camera.

For a while, the polar cubs were in our office, though, because even though we had found the scripted polar bear taxidermy pieces, the cubs didn’t come with a stand so we had to build a custom stand for the cub.

View from my desk of Nick our Art PA helping tape out the surface area required to encompass the polar bear cub, with Katie our Set Dec Shopper in the background.

Nick a straight up legit dog whisperer bringing the same love and attention to our polar bear cub model.

Christine Foley (The Flight Attendant’s Awesome Art Director) talking with Katie Citti (one of The Flight Attendant’s Set Designers and Assistant Art Directors) about a design for the stand which Katie drew up for our construction team to build.

And VOILA! A (legal!) polar bear cub that looks like a legit taxidermy polar bear cub on a beautiful custom stand! (see below)

Hard to imagine how much work goes into these little details that appear on screen for a quick second right? I personally think that’s part of the total charm and fun of set decorating world—the crazy weird things you end up learning in your quest to find the right things either in the script or to flesh out a character’s imagined backstory.

You start out focusing on high-end penthouse masculine chic design furniture and then you end up learning all about the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. :)

If you do want to see more photos of the high-end penthouse masculine chic design Jess and I put together for Alex’s Penthouse set (polar bear cub) though, or the classic old money interiors we did for the Sokolov Estate (big polar bear) you can see more photos of the set here.

Organizing Those Vintage Playboy Magazines

When Cassie enter’s Alex’s closet she finds out some things she may or may not be entirely ready for…one surprise is that Alex is a guy who has the entire collection of Playboy magazines catalogued systematically.

yes, those are real vintage playboys we purchased.

This is me very early in the morning organizing these magazines on set before the crew arrives.

So definitely we could have asked for these to be arranged in chronological order before they arrived to set…but somehow they weren’t. And not everybody is up for the sort of insane attention to detail and diving into a mountain of disorganized magazines and cataloging them in order that this project would require…

Fortunately that morning it was exactly the kind of soothing quiet project I was game for. Getting paid to answer to the most OCD corners of your mind can be a pleasure. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m by no means the kind of person who has all my magazines catalogued in order at home.

when I still had one shelf left to go.

one things I learned in this painstaking process is there is a transition in binding for Playboys from stapled binding to the flat edge binding that happens today.

I would like to note that the closet at the location was totally empty when we started, so one of our tasks when decorating this set (which was already a pretty massive project) was to find all the items to totally fill in this closet with designer clothes (on a non-designer clothes budget) and all the small things you might find in your closet with the sort of details that would make it look realistic.

here’s a little bonus, that isn’t this closet, but something else I worked on that same afternoon after I sorted this closet: The Medicine Cabinet close-up.

this is what we see Cassie and Max see when they open the cabinet

the reverse shot of Cassie and Max staring into the interior of the medicine cabinet.

If you are ever wondering how they do that, this is what it looked like when we were setting it up:

Roxy and Richard, two great set dressers I was working with that afternoon.

This is what my files for “Alex’s Penthouse Apt” looked like when we finished the set.

A Wrap on "The Flight Attendant"

(This is not even all the scripts or all my set files—just the ones that were stashed in a file cabinet 🗄 before March 12!)

The end of a job that stretched out over four seasons because of a pandemic. There’s always that surge of relief at the end of a job but also a twinge of sadness that all of a sudden it is over and the people you were used to seeing and texting all day long and the routes you drove on autopilot are done.

One of my proudest achievements on this job, however, is that I managed to find all the things we needed, within budget and on our crazy timelines WITHOUT once going to HomeDepot or ULINE from August-October (when we started back up after the COVID imposed break). This is something I’m truly proud of.

This past summer (2020) when many of us decided we would be more intentional about how we spent our money: investigate who it supports, doesn’t support, or harms, it felt imperative to cut out spending money at HomeDepot or ULINE. Especially when we are working with substantial budgets shopping frequently at home improvement and hardware stores (like HomeDepot) and wholesale bulk suppliers (like ULINE.)

Because of set decorating work, I can map all the HomeDepots in the NYC and vicinity for you off the top of my head and know the layouts of all the one main ones in New York City by memory.

Our art department coordinator on “Russian Doll,” Mia, did educate me on all the ways ULINE works against many feminist causes, and encouraged me to rethink supporting them back in 2018. …it was so hard to disavow them though, cause ULINE is so convenient. They reliably will ship you something by next day if you get the order in by 6:00pm, they have an amazing selection and good prices, and great customer service…

And same with HomeDepot, they have good parking lots, PARKING LOTS! all around New York City (which is huge when you are driving around a minivan and need to get a lot of things), a much better website and app than Lowe’s, locations everywhere, and unbeatable hours.

…but after this summer I decided despite it all, I really wanted to stick to my commitments of more intentional alignment with companies and try my best when working to not support either HomeDepot or Uline. Thankfully Jessica, the decorator for The Flight Attendant, was totally on the same page about this and supported and encouraged me to try.

I knew it would be harder and more inconvenient and I would have to rethink old default patterns of buying things. But we managed to do it for the last three episodes of The Flight Attendant. We had one set in (you’ll see once it airs and I’m able to post a behind the scenes about the set) which would have definitely been 10x easier with ULINE, but I found a competitor that got the job done! And as for avoiding HomeDepot, New York City actually has a bunch of old school hardware and building supply companies all around and I rediscovered the wonders of Metropolitan Lumber (a place I first starting using back when I was working on The Affair in 2016), which I came to learn has pretty much everything you need!

I never used either place once, which gives me encouragement that it is possible for all work moving forward.

The Flight Attendant airs on HBOMax on Nov 26!

Back at Work in a Pandemic!

Opening my old work notebook on August 3…for the first time since March 11!

Well we have resumed work on “The Flight Attendant” (the job I was working on in March when everything shut down due to COVID.)

We are one of the first productions back up in New York City and it feels a little bit surreal and scary to be first out of the gate…

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at our beloved flooring vendor CarpetTime

And then after the new air filters were installed in our production office, we were back in the office which was like discovering a lost civilization…

Everyone's Real Homes

I’m on Day 17 of being stuck at home here in NYC.

It has been a real rollercoaster of anxiety, occasional moments of joyful laughter, and just all the emotions. But one thing I have really been enjoying in these 17 days of being at home, alone, together is all the videos and images people are sharing of themselves in their regular-un-prepped-for-a-photoshoot homes all around the world.

Getting access to so many normal people and images of their everyday lived-in homes has been a real treasure trove for me. I’m loving it on an anthropological level, a design level, and a human level. I love seeing all the little details, what art they chose to hang, what things are left out, what cords are hanging out where, and how they arrange their furniture to actually use their rooms—basically all the little details we try to recreate in a set when we decorate it.

For the first movie I ever decorated “Trouble,” I was struggling to put in what we call the “life layer” of a set. The life layer is the magical pixie dust we sprinkle onto sets to make it look like a naturalistic lived-in environment that a real human occupies and not the fictional set that a bunch of people were paid to create (which is in fact the reality hahah).

Life layer is the stray paperclips on an office desk, or the strange accumulation of earrings next to tissues and a cup with a loose subscription card from a magazine on your nightstand, or how layers of post-its are arrayed on a bulletin board. It is always a fun and challenging part of finishing dressing a set: to make this look as realistic, natural, and unconsidered (even though it is totally considered often 3+ people working on it together) as possible.

When I was struggling with life layer on “Trouble” I called an older more experienced decorator, the very kind and generous Karin Wiesel Holmes who was the set decorator for “Girls” and “Sex and the City” (I was an Art PA for Season 6 of Girls for little bit). Karin gave me some ideas and then told me this nugget of wisdom: “just think about all the things you would tidy up or put away when guests come over” as a guiding principle for life layer. I always think about this when I get stuck on life layer now. (Thanks Karin!)

So the great thing about all these videos and photos people are sharing of themselves stuck at home around the world during the spread of COVID-19, is you get an unvarnished view into peoples homes FULL OF LIFE LAYER. I mean maybe they did some tidying up before they hit record, but it still looks way more natural than most interiors we get access to in magazines, shows, and publications that showcase interiors.

Because most interior photoshoots of homes in interior design magazines are TOTAL FICTION. It took a team of many professionals to make it look like that for the shoot and often it is not even what the featured celebrity’s home actually looks like day to day. I heard a rumor from a friend in the industry about how the cover shoot of highly regarded New York actress’ home for a super prestigious and popular interior design magazine involved a decorator colleague sourcing and bringing in and swapping out new furniture and etc just for the shoot. Like I said, total fiction.

Also I subscribed to some of the premier interior design magazines and realized instead of inspiring me they actually bum me out. Because it is less about creative interiors expressing personality and interesting off-beat combinations or telling a story through design but about expressing wealth, prestige, generating “aspiration” and maintaining status quo “good taste.” barf emoji.

What I sometimes fantasize about it is creating a magazine of normal people interiors as a balm to that barf emoji. Like everyday people and how they create solutions for small space in their homes, or have off-beat design styles, or decorate their homes in a way that does not look like a generic instagram or catalog photo. Often I get stuck at the issue of “but how do you get that access???” and make sure people don’t self-consciously clean up before you arrive to take photos? It is such a human impulse to want to put your best foot forward and hide the things that make you feel less-than.

And that’s where all the self-quarantine, socially distanced, on lockdown because of COVID-19 videos and photos people have been sharing from around the world comes in. All of a sudden a wealth of images and glimpses into regular everyday peoples homes! People who decorated without a team of professionals guiding “their taste.” People who set up their home to make them feel comfortable, cozy, and as an expression of their passions and interests. AND I’M LOVING IT.

The last reason I’m loving it (hahah this turned out way longer than I expected) is because it also now this precious catalog of reference photos. Set decorators are always on the hunt and collecting good reference photos to help us re-create realistic interiors true to the character and setting of the story in the script. We study reference photos together with the production designer and try to catch key details from often grainy small photos that we will then try to find somewhere to then dress in to our set.

I feel like I always spend a good amount of time ingesting and really digesting reference photos whenever I start work on a set so that it can guide me when I’m out shopping and looking for things and particularly when it comes time to dress the set. And not just for period pieces, but contemporary sets too.

Whenever I see a good “reference set” in the wild, like a store’s cash register that has a lot of good little details, or an office with a lot of great layered memos and post-its on the wall, I snap a photo and treasure that little reference. Closely observing the mundane details of life like on an almost anthropological level to re-create is one of my favorite parts of set decorating work. And now with the all the homes people are filming themselves in, it is like a wonderful encyclopedic catalogue of reference photos of contemporary life.

Sigh, just writing this is making me miss the work of set decorating. …but it’s going to be while.

I’ll try to update this post later with photo examples of the interiors I’ve been loving getting a glimpse of while at home these last 16 days.

Little America is out!

premiered on Apple TV January 17

Last winter, I worked as the Assistant Set Decorator for four episodes of Little America. This was the unusual TV show that had two Art Departments, one for every even episode, one for every odd episode. We were “Team Odd” (which of course we all loved.) But then the number we shot the episodes as (and which ones were odd or even) changed when it came time to air, so I think all our credits are attached to the wrong episodes…

Finally on February 8, the Decorator Lindsay, our team’s Set Dec Coordinator Jackie, and I all went to Lindsay’s place, ordered some really good pizza and watched the episodes we worked on together. Which are the following:

Episode 7, “The Rock” about Farhad.

Episode 2, “The Jaguar” about Marisol.

Episode 4, “The Silence” about a silent meditation retreat in the 1970s.

Episode 6, “The Grand Prize Expo Winners”, about Ai.

It is always fun to watch the finished product with the people you worked on it with. Reminiscing about the crazy little stories, the funny memories, the moments of extreme stress, and the things that gave us grief as we see them appear on the screen. As well as being able to exclaim in excitement when a set comes together in a great way on screen after the editing and plus the lighting, costume, hair and makeup, and of course the actors.

We all shared a few moments of heartbroken disbelief when sets we worked on really hard never made it on screen (scenes in the script that took place in that set were edited out or certain angles of the camera never captured the part we were most proud of in the set).

The real heartbreak was in Episode 6, “The Grand Prize Expo Winners” where they added in new scenes they reshot in Los Angeles after they finished filming in New Jersey, so then used a completely new home set as the setting for the childhood home as opposed to the one we worked on. The home we decorated was so lovingly put together with so much attention to detail and came straight from my heart and personal lived experience…(crying emoji).

…I’ll try to put together a post of set photos from that home so at least the set can live on here even if it never made it on air.

Either way it was such a gratifying show to work on to focus entirely on immigrant stories that were so unique and compelling with some really fun sets. (on Apple+ TV!)