- 31 minutes ago
Architectural Digest goes behind the scenes of Bridgerton Season 4 to tour Queen Charlotte’s opulent palace set–the royal backdrop to Benedict Bridgerton and Sophie Baek's love story. Production designer Alison Gartshore reveals how Netflix’s hit series created the Queen’s World, trompe l’oeil panels, hand-applied gold leaf to 2,000 gilded shells in the Long Gallery, and palace doors that took 7 weeks to hand-carve.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:01Welcome to Bridgerton season four.
00:21Hello, welcome to the Bridgerton world.
00:23My name is Alison Gartshaw and I'm production designer on season four of Bridgerton.
00:28Here we are in the Queen's World Conservatory.
00:32This space initially was only going to be so that we could light what is behind this wall, which is
00:38the corridor.
00:39We needed a set of windows that we could push light through.
00:42But when we saw the size of the space on the drawings, we kind of thought, actually, that's too big
00:47to just have as empty space.
00:48So we decided to come up with the idea of a conservatory for the Queen.
00:53The conservatory is an interior space, but really we're suggesting that this wall is an exterior wall.
00:58They often used to have winter gardens within the walls of the palace and it would be lit by skylight.
01:04Somewhere they could feel outside, but actually they're inside and protected from the cold and the weather.
01:10I pay my maids well and treat them with respect.
01:14Brimsley.
01:15The royal household is royal, your majesty.
01:19Hello, I'm Hugh Sacks and I play Brimsley in Bridgerton.
01:22Brimsley?
01:23Her majesty is taking her royal nap. I do not have long.
01:26When we did the first season, none of us had seen anything like it.
01:29On Bridgerton, every time you go to a different location or to a different set, you are just amazed, really,
01:36at the calibre of the artistry.
01:37I like the conservatory here. It's small and contained, but also some really moving parts of the Queen's story happen
01:45there.
01:45I want gossip.
01:48We have here a bonbon tower, which is a classic thing for our Queen Charlotte.
01:53She loves her bonbons, and we normally do them in this format in the shape of a cone, which is
01:57how they used to pile them up.
01:59Decorated with edible florals and raspberries, as you can see.
02:02She's got a bit of a sweet tooth, the Queen.
02:04This space is designed using trompe l'oeil, which means deceiving the eye, and it's a theme that runs throughout
02:11Season 4 of Bridgerton.
02:13It mimics the fantasy versus reality that threads through the storyline.
02:17We had a scenic artist who came in and painted all of these panels to look like they're 3D, but
02:23actually they're not.
02:24They're just a paint effect. Very decorative, beautiful. We top dressed it with florals.
02:30We decided to continue the theme of the 2D versus 3D with these beautiful bird sculptures, which we made up
02:38in-house.
02:38The centrepiece is a beautiful tiered fountain, but instead of having running water, which of course isn't very good for
02:46sound,
02:47we decided to make it into a sculptural floral display instead.
02:51The Queen loves her florals. She loves the colour, the scents of the flowers.
02:56Statuary, classic Greek and Roman, sort of bringing the outside in really.
03:00Here we have the chinoiserie, which is the 2D chinoiserie.
03:04Another of our scenic artists painted all of these items individually, and then they were all printed and graphically applied.
03:13And we do that quite a lot as a technique, because then if we need the same motif somewhere else,
03:18we can easily replicate it.
03:19And all the gold leafing was done by hand. If it's fake gold leaf, obviously we're a film set.
03:24But normally, in other spaces, we wouldn't do gold leaf work. We would do gold paint, because it's just more
03:31cost effective.
03:32But we felt Queen's World had to be elevated to her status, and she would have nothing less than pure
03:37gold leaf.
03:38The flooring for the conservatory is actually a recycled element. This was actually Will's Gentleman's Club flooring.
03:46It is real oak veneer, so this is one of our proper floors that we have on the sets.
03:59Here we are in the Queen's corridor. We are dressed for a particular event.
04:04Lady Danbury is going off on her travels, and the Queen is reluctantly letting her go.
04:09Why do you wish to leave me? As I said, I desire a return to my homeland and I...
04:16No!
04:16Why do you wish to leave me?
04:18I always describe Brimsley as in charge of the Queen's hardware, like her day-to-day life,
04:23and Agatha as in charge of her software, her emotional life.
04:26It's incredibly moving, because the way Golda plays it is...
04:29She sort of unravels at the prospect of losing her best and only friend.
04:34And Brimsley is desperately trying to persuade Lady Danbury not to go.
04:39You must come back. Request an audience with Her Majesty. Apologise.
04:44I shall do no such thing.
04:46We've got a lot of galleon imagery to represent that journey that's about to happen.
04:51And for this particular piece, we asked our florist, Philip Corr, to design and make a floral seascape
04:58for the ship to be bobbing away on.
05:01The guests are coming through that doorway, up the stairs and into the ball itself.
05:06So this is one of the first things that they see when they come into the ball.
05:16Welcome to the Blue State Room, named for obvious reasons.
05:21We specifically chose the blue turquoise of the walls that would go beautifully with the gold.
05:27We knew we needed a lot of gilding in here.
05:29As part of my research, I've visited lots of the stately homes and palaces in the country
05:34and thought about what made a palace a palace.
05:37The scale of the rooms had to be right.
05:40It had to be elevated from what we normally see in Bridgerton.
05:43Much bigger, much higher ceilings.
05:45Also the level of mouldings and details had to be right.
05:48They used to highly decorate all of the available spaces.
05:52Lots of gilding, lots of strong colour and this gorgeous turquoise fabric
05:57which actually we had printed in India.
06:00If you visit stately homes and palaces, you will often find that there's a series of staterooms
06:05leading to a big banqueting hall or a big hall.
06:08Palaces were laid out in that way so that depending on how close you were to the monarchy
06:13depends how far you got through the staterooms.
06:17And the closer you got to the king or queen's bedchamber, the closer you were and the more trusted you
06:22were.
06:22A lot of the inspiration for these rooms were places like Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle,
06:28Packworth House, all the very big hitters that we have in this country.
06:32So over here we have a couple of technical drawings.
06:36This is a ground plan and it shows all the space as if you are a bird looking down
06:40and it shows the outline of the walls and the thickness in between the walls and the layout.
06:45So you can see that all of the rooms interlink through the doorways.
06:49If we wanted to we could do a circular walk and talk through all of the different spaces.
06:53And this is what we call a set of elevations.
06:56So you have the ground plan in the corner and then each and every wall has an elevation
07:00which gives you all the detail that needs to be on that particular wall.
07:05Once we've got the elevations then we go into the fine detail
07:08and every single thing that you see in the room has been drawn by an art director or an assistant
07:14art director.
07:15And it's really a vital job because the drawings go to construction and then they know what to build,
07:21how big, what fits together with what and how it's all constructed and put together.
07:26It's a lot of fine tuning.
07:35Here we are in the pink stateroom.
07:38These colours were inspired by a room in Blevenham Palace actually.
07:41We wanted to show a difference between the blue and the pink.
07:44The blue stateroom is a much harder, harsher room.
07:49Any scene that she's going to be a bit firm with somebody usually is the blue stateroom they choose.
07:55This one is a bit more feminine, a bit softer.
07:58The carpet in here, as with all the spaces, they're all graphically designed.
08:03The turnaround time to make a carpet like this is about three months.
08:06So it's one of the first things that we have to design when we are designing any space for any
08:12set at Bridgerton,
08:13if we need a carpet.
08:14It really helps to play the character.
08:17I always say the sets make you want to stand up straight.
08:20It's not a slouching world.
08:21When you play royalty or that world, it's not only the way the characters treat the Queen and her world,
08:26but it's also the set, you kind of know that you're in somewhere very rarefied and special.
08:33I believe my taste in ladies may be as discerning as your taste in bonbon.
08:42It was scripted that actually the bonbon tires had to be huge.
08:47So here we have the most enormous bonbon tires that we've ever had on Bridgerton.
08:51They are absolutely vast.
08:53This beautiful lattice work.
08:55There's thousands and thousands of individual pieces within this room
08:59that were hand stuck on each one individually measured and hand stuck in exactly the right place.
09:04The wall panels either side of the Palladian windows, you can see we had one, but we needed two.
09:11So we had to hire a sculptor whose job it was to replicate exactly and hand carve.
09:16We do that quite a lot, actually, when we need sculptural pieces,
09:19which is great because, you know, they're very skilled people and I love giving artisans work.
09:23It's wonderful.
09:24Such as the shell details in the bottom of the panels.
09:27A couple of weeks work in each one.
09:29So all of our fireplaces in the Bridgerton sets do work.
09:33We can't have anything that gives off a noxious fume.
09:36So our special effects team actually came up and designed a system for us specifically
09:40using a biofuel that doesn't give off any kind of dangerous vapors.
09:45And the access to this fire is through the doors there.
09:47There's a secret little hidey hole you can get behind the fire
09:51where they can refill the tray of fluid whenever they need to do that.
09:55But it does give a decent, realistic size fire.
10:11Welcome to the Long Gallery.
10:13This is the biggest space that we have in Queen's World.
10:16It was designed with presentations in mind, balls in mind, any space where the Queen wanted an individual to feel
10:24very, very small.
10:25So the Queen can sit up on her throne on the top there and have someone walk the very long
10:30walk all the way up to her to be chastised or whatever.
10:34You are late.
10:35You have only just sent for me, Your Majesty.
10:36Late!
10:37We don't normally have all these florals in this space but as it's a ball and as it's Bridgerton we
10:43have gone over the top with our florals as usual.
10:45Using the Queen's colours but also we've referenced seashells.
10:49So we have 2,000 scallop shells which were all individually hand gilded.
10:54We also have got what looks like coral woven between the florals and actually what we've used for that are
11:02the plastic throw away sticks that the fake flowers come on.
11:06The walls were very, very tricky.
11:10The colour is a particular grey which was very difficult to actually get right under different lighting conditions.
11:17We tested and tested and tested for about three weeks just trying out different tones of grey and then the
11:23process of picking out and hand painting all of the trompe l'oeil panels of which there are over 220.
11:30Each type was painted individually by our scenic artist then printed, replicated, pasted up around the room.
11:39But before they got pasted up we had to do the gilding detail which you can just see that was
11:44all done individually by hand.
11:46We had a whole team of people for weeks on end just sitting there doing tiny little gold lines.
11:51But it was vital to do it because without it it wouldn't be alive.
11:56When they light this room the whole room shimmers with the gold and that's exactly the effect that you want.
12:02It has to look opulent, it's the Queen's space, it's one of her public spaces and it's a show of
12:08wealth.
12:08All the trompe l'oeil panels are actually quite masculine in style but obviously Queen Charlotte is rather feminine.
12:16in her demeanour but she is in a very masculine role sometimes.
12:21But we wanted to show the difference between the two so we put in the trompe l'oeil florals just
12:27to break up that masculinity and to make sure that Queen Charlotte's stamp was marked on this space.
12:33As you can see we have a map of England which of course was hand produced by our graphic artist
12:39Katie Buckley.
12:40Obviously for Queen Charlotte she's the centre of the universe, that's how it was back then.
12:46And referencing the centre of the universe, the centre of the navy, we come to the floor which references a
12:53compass point with the twelve points of the compass.
12:55To achieve this particular floor we had our scenic artists paint lots and lots of samples of hand painted marbles
13:03which we then photographed, digitally replicated and printed on the panels, pieced together very precisely.
13:10We're very pleased with this floor, it looks very beautiful.
13:12Obviously for a ball for Bridgerton there's always music.
13:15For this particular ball we built in a podium across the windows for the musicians to be ever so slightly
13:22elevated so that they play a bit more of a role in the picture.
13:25Through the windows you might be able to see we have a new printed backdrop which is called a translight.
13:32Because we have established that the Queen's Palace is the exterior is akin to Blenheim Palace,
13:39we took the landscape from Blenheim Palace, we photographed it and had it reprinted so that it looks like it's
13:46the view from the palace.
13:47It lights for both night and day, we can light up the windows in the buildings to make them glow,
13:52to make it look like it's a night time scene out there.
13:55When I walked into this room and you just look, I mean there's a scene with Nicola as Penelope when
14:02she walks in here and we're all up there like Avengers, it just looked stunning.
14:07Here we are standing in front of one of the many pairs, we've actually got 44 doors on this whole
14:13Queen's World set which is a phenomenal amount of doors.
14:16They are absolutely beautiful but were very very difficult to achieve.
14:21The doors are very large. Assistant Art Director Natalie McCornick, it took her seven full weeks of work simply drawing
14:29and working out these doors, how to design them.
14:32Over the 44 doors that we've got on the set, there's over 10,000 individual pieces of decoration that were
14:39all hand applied.
14:41The Lion's Head, that was a piece that was sculpted by our sculptress Tracey Lilly. In the middle we have
14:49hand painted Queen's insignia for Queen Charlotte and they were complicated but look rather magnificent I think.
14:56It's just a real treat as an actor to work in these kind of surroundings because in a way it
15:03does the work for you, it gives you the world your imagination is trying to create.
15:08For someone like Brimsley whose whole life has been in service to the Queen and this is his home, it's
15:13just really helpful as an actor to have this calibre of creativity to support you.
15:29Thank you so much for visiting with me in Queen's World, new for season four. Off you go. Bye bye.
Comments