Architectural Digest joins Production Designer Chris Trujillo to step inside the world of ‘Stranger Things’ to tour the Season 5 sets. Explore iconic locations like the Wheeler House basement and Hopper’s Cabin, where unforgettable moments from the show came to life, and discover how Trujillo and his team recreate 1980s Americana with painstaking attention to period authenticity.
01:23I'm a child of the 80s, a suburban child of 1980s America, so it was very exciting to be able to kind of create what for me would have been just the ideal place to hang out with my friends as a kid.
01:35The domestic sets oftentimes are the places where I feel like I can most contribute to storytelling and character development.
01:40And that's because this really speaks to who the people who live in these homes are.
01:46In fact, it's a mid-century sort of ranch-style house, so it is very, like, fundamental Americana, American suburbs.
01:53And the layering of these sets, my set decorator, Jess Royal, is very fastidious about period specificity and character specificity.
02:00So as you look around this space, all of this furniture, which we saw for the first time in 1983, is very clearly not from 1983 and would not have been current at the moment.
02:10It's important for us to reflect the reality of how a basement ends up being dressed.
02:16And the family, as they're keeping up with the Joneses and they're remodeling the upstairs, mom and dad are very aspirational.
02:22So naturally, when we're upstairs in the Wheeler House, we're in this very contemporary Better Homes and Gardens sort of vibe.
02:28But when we're down here, we're looking at maybe the leftovers from the 70s or even the late 60s,
02:34because we get to have all of this fun color and texture and everything is a little bit more worn and lived in.
02:39We're always really careful in our approach to set dressing into the life layer of all of our sets,
02:45that they pass the period specificity tests.
02:48Almost everything is directly from the period.
02:51We buy all of our pieces from estate sales.
02:55So we're the people that come in and literally open up kitchen drawers and buy the contents of the kitchen drawers.
03:01And that's the length that we go to to be very specific.
03:04Light switches, outlets, all of that is going to be period correct.
03:08We've got our old 80s washer and dryer.
03:11We may not spend time over here in the script, but it's important to us to have a sense of completion and to show that the entire family is represented.
03:18You've got your basement bathroom, which while we only spent a brief beat in, is very important to us to have elements like that complete so that we can play that door open.
03:28We can play it closed. We get the light coming out of that basement and you get the depth and you can see the world that should be there,
03:34even if we're not necessarily going to be spending time inside that space.
03:38And just kind of goes back to that ethos of creating a world that when actors come in, they feel completely engaged and they can kind of lose themselves in and feel like, oh, they've walked into this world that's on the page.
03:51During one of our first days of shooting with the children in this space, they had been here for hours shooting.
03:57And when one of them walked out back onto the soundstage and looked around, he kind of like stopped.
04:03He was like, oh, wow, I forgot that we weren't in a real house.
04:07And I just happened to be standing by and it was like the most gratifying thing I could have ever heard as a production designer.
04:12A testament to the work that my art department and my set department does to build immersive environments.
04:19Wait, guys, I'm still here.
04:24Guys.
04:27We are standing outside of Hopper's Cabin.
04:40This is primarily our interior Hopper's Cabin.
04:42We've actually also got a version of this, an exterior version out in the woods on location where we have the exterior duplicated and it's, you know, finished all the way around.
04:51Whenever we're playing scenes of exterior Hopper's Cabin, we're out there.
04:54But this facade here allows us to enter and exit into our interior set.
05:00Normally this would be surrounded by greens and trees and we'd be standing in sort of a fake forest and there would be a backdrop.
05:07But for the work we're doing here this season wasn't necessary to have the entire exterior world finished on set.
05:13This is a set that premiered in season two when Hopper was using it to keep Eleven safe and hide her out in the woods.
05:22The story we built in to kind of motivate the design of the architecture and the dressing of the space was this would have been a hunting cabin that's been in Hopper's family for a number of years.
05:34Maybe his grandfather built it in the 40s as just a very sort of bare bones hunting shack.
05:40And over the years it's been added to and, you know, plumbing has been added.
05:43We've got a bathroom in it now and kind of been in a state of disrepair.
05:47And then suddenly Hopper needed a place to hide out and he did everything he could to make it home for him in Eleven and to make it, you know, warm.
05:55Oh, Jesus.
05:58We were able to bring it back to life.
06:00And this was a chance to do a sort of rough constructed cabin in the woods that would have been built on a budget and built very, very roughly with older rough sawn materials.
06:11So a testament again to our construction department and our scenic folks that all of this wood was just fresh, clean lumber that they painstakingly processed and painted and texturized
06:24so that it feels like a cabin that's been sitting in the woods for the better part of 60 or 70 years.
06:29This set, as so many of our sets on this show, does evolve over the course of the show.
06:34I mean, it starts out as Hopper in Eleven's Hideaway and naturally there's a monster attack that destroys it and then it sits vacant for a while.
06:41And then in this most recent season, our gang has rehabbed it and some of our folks have moved back in.
06:47So it's fun over the course of the seasons to see the set evolve and things move around.
06:54Another of the more interesting modifications to our cabin for season five was this situation here.
06:59I normally don't let myself get this designy, but this was just too fun of an opportunity and it was justifiable.
07:04The idea being that this might have been an old door from the cabin.
07:08And what we needed to build was a homemade isolation tank for Eleven to use her powers to amplify her powers.
07:16So this was our answer to the need for a do-it-yourself sensory deprivation tank that fit the vibe of Hopper's cabin.
07:26This is another instance, as is the case with almost all of our sets, where in the interest of creating a set that is, you know, real world dimensions,
07:34we needed to accommodate camera nevertheless.
07:37So this bathroom here is actually built on a wagon and the whole bathroom will just roll away as needed at a moment's notice.
07:45It's kind of a fun little detail.
07:47Over here we've got Eleven's room.
07:49And in the season that we introduced this, it was very more deliberately dressed to reflect than sort of newly teenage girls' bedroom.
07:58But it was funny because obviously the rest of the cabin is very Hopper and very rough.
08:04We tried to show that in his effort to make her comfortable, he took the time to paint her room and to kind of decorate it as best he could,
08:13likely from thrift store furniture elements.
08:15But we wanted to contrast Eleven's world and exploring her teenage years and hanging out with Mike and doing her thing.
08:23It wanted to feel like a space that was separate from this old man's hunting cabin.
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