6 min readFew things excite us like some great vintage decor. If you’re a fan of design history like we are, chances are you’re watching Bridgerton and wondering where the settees came from. In our favorite period TV shows and movies, the vintage decor in the background is a silent hero. After all, it wouldn’t feel the same if Regency-era characters were sitting on a mid-century modern sofa.
We got curious: How do you find the furniture and decor that makes these shows feel so real and grounded in history? We chatted with two production designers and set decorators behind some of your favorite shows and movies, and they shared what it’s really like to find the vintage decor that makes a scene come to life.
Era-by-Era Design Cues
When set decorators and production designers want to evoke a certain historical era, there are often a few design hallmarks they can look to as guiding principles. Set decorator Maxwell Fine defines a few popular TV and movie eras by the following features:
Victorian Era (The Gilded Age): Sets will feature heavier woods, like mahogany or walnut, richly carved ornamentation, turned legs, and elaborate upholstery.
Edwardian Period (Downton Abbey): Sets have a lighter and more refined feel, slimmer proportions, simple ornamentation, and a mix of woods and painted finishes.
Art Deco (The Great Gatsby): Rooms feature strong, weighty and sometimes bulbous geometry, glossy veneers and materials that feel sleek and radically modern for the time.
Mid-Century Design (Mad Men): You’ll see cleaner lines, lighter silhouettes, woods such as teak or walnut, and an emphasis on practicality and openness rather than ornamentation.
When trying to nail down decades of influence, a set of visual rules for the production helps immensely. It could be a wood finish, a recurring pattern, or a color story that ties spaces together. By using the period hallmarks above as a jumping off point, set decorators are able to re-interpret them in the tiles, fabrics and decor they include. Fine, who worked on Netflix series Heartstopper, paid homage to the series’s base media: a graphic novel.
“We gravitated toward hand-drawn patterns on fabrics, uneven wood finishes, and hand-painted ceramics with interesting glazes,” Fine says. “The overall styling was designed to create a familiar sense of home, both within the wider world of the show and also to reflect the emotional sense of home the two central characters find in their relationship.”
Heartstopper’s interiors were full of familiar textures and domestic details to help it feel like your childhood home, full of decades-old furniture. But when creating something more fantastical, like in Disney’s Disenchanted, Fine knew something more ornate and gilded was necessary. Late 19th-century Art Nouveau influences run rampant in the movie.
“We spent a lot of time trawling antiques markets looking for furniture and decorative pieces with the typical flowing lines, trumpeting forms and floral flourishes associated with the movement,” Fine says.
It’s About More Than A Single Decade
Crafting a believable backdrop is not as easy as isolating one decade and only furnishing the set with pieces produced then. True historical accuracy on set involves thinking about before and after the time period the show is set in. It’s about layering, recognizing that many homes are built and furnished over time or with hand-me-downs.
“Even if a script is set in the 1960s, a home might naturally include furniture from the 1950s, or earlier pieces that have stayed with a family over time,” Fine notes. “The nuance usually comes from how those interiors are curated, rather than from an obsession with any single perfectly matched period element.”
Depending on the period in question, advancements in electricity can have a huge impact, says production designer Bob Shaw, who has worked on both 1880s drama The Gilded Age and The Irishman, a film primarily set in the late 1950s through ‘70s. He navigated periods decades apart, one with electricity and one without.
“When working on location, we have to remove contemporary lighting fixtures and replace them with fixtures that appear to be gas lit,” Shaw says. “When we film outdoors in a city setting, the elements that are incorrect for our time period are innumerable. The Irishman was much closer to our time, although there were still some differences. I remember one of our younger crew members looking at a rotary dial phone and asking how they texted with it.”
Character Matters
When designing homes for fictional characters to live in, you have to think beyond historical accuracy. Even if a couch, lamp, or table is period-accurate, does it make sense that the character using it would actually own it? Fine thinks about the socioeconomic position of the characters in a project while sourcing furniture to make it come to life.
“Would the furniture be inherited, handmade, modest, or chosen to project status?” Fine asks. “Is a piece aspirational, foreign, or perhaps something that has been in the family for generations? Sometimes we take motifs from a period and transcribe them to pieces with simpler materials, so they live more comfortably within the scheme.”
As a set decorator on Heartstopper, Fine designed protagonist Charlie’s home with late-’90s hallmarks, despite the show being set in the present day. He kept Charlie’s parents in mind, thinking about what they would’ve bought as younger first-time homeowners, and kept over the years. It worked well for that layered, lived-in look.
“The living room sofa, with its heavy rolled arms and bold Aztec print fabric, felt instantly recognizable as a piece of late ‘90s, British 'every man' design,” Fine says. “It had the kind of style that many households would remember.”
Where It All Comes From
Now that we’ve nailed down the inspiration, where do the products themselves come from? The answer? By casting a “very wide net,” according to Shaw. From antique dealers to Facebook Marketplace, the decor piece that pulls a set together could come from anywhere.
Trusted Suppliers
When you’re working on bigger productions, a few trusted furniture and decor suppliers are typically on hand to rent or purchase pieces from. Fine gets his mid-century pieces from a supplier who gathers them from across Europe.
Shows that are long-running present a unique challenge. The further you get from the period you’re trying to recreate, the harder it is to find those defining pieces. Shaw has run into this over three seasons of The Gilded Age. Across seven years in production, some of his favorite vendors, like Belfry Historic, have shuttered operations.
“The current market for luxury silks is very limited,” Shaw says. “Most companies do not keep a lot of stock on hand. In Bertha Russell’s bedroom, the drapery, upholstery, and fabric-covered walls are all done in the same pink silk. It required close to 300 yards of fabric. In the instance of the Russell Dining room, there was not enough time to have the drapery fabric that we wanted woven, so Scalamandre printed it for us.”
In-Person Antique and Flea Markets
Production designers, they’re just like us! Fine regularly gets some of his favorite set pieces from UK antique and flea markets he visits in-person. “We often have trucks come over from France filled with fabulous finds, and every design team on a show sends teams to the markets to source all kinds of things,” Fine says.
Facebook Marketplace
Yes, your favorite show might have found its set from the same place you find your apartment furniture. Shaw has been in production design from before Facebook Marketplace was a thing, so he’s grateful for how much easier the internet makes it to locate things. “Now, a simple search can uncover that settee frame in someone’s barn in the Midwest,” Shaw says. “Our biggest issue is whether it makes economic sense, and when we have the time to ship.”
Museums
Even a trip to the museum can lead to the right set decoration. When Shaw came across photos of the Merchant House Museum, he knew he needed the same features in The Gilded Age’s brownstones. “I knew we had to have the same period style wall-to-wall carpet on our set,” Shaw says. “Regina Graves, the decorator on season one, found a company that manufactured period-appropriate carpeting. It is very different from the carpet that we are familiar with. It is very flat wool that feels more like a blanket. Now I can’t imagine the set without it.”
