Excess is essential for a series like HBO’s 1880s-set The Gilded Age, with grand homes, elaborate balls, and a sweeping, historic version of rich New York. But bringing that period to life for the modern audience is trickier than it seems.
Production designer Bob Shaw seeks a constant balance between what’s historically accurate, what’s physically possible and what modern audiences will accept.
“There’s always a couple of major events each season,” Shaw says. “We have a tendency to get scripts that say, ‘This time Bertha [Carrie Coon] has really outdone herself.’ So the question is always, ‘How? How did she outdo herself more than the previous three times she outdid herself?’”
It isn’t just about making things bigger, either. Every scene needs to stay grounded in the rules of the period, whether that means the visuals, the lighting, or the materials used on set. For example: Electricity existed during the period when the show takes place, but most didn’t have access to it.
“These people lived in the dark,” Shaw says.
The production often overcomes limits like these, particularly when it comes to locations.
“I said in passing during an interview last year that we were running out of mansions,” Shaw recalls. “And then I started getting contacted by people who were like, ‘We have a wonderful mansion in Cleveland!’”
Finding usable spaces is more complicated than it sounds. A house might have the right exterior, but be unusable because of tight rooms, updated design or other practical challenges. Sometimes, layouts don’t fit the script, or Shaw and his team need to create a new room that feels like part of a pre-existing location. Street layouts are also complex.
“You can’t back up horses and carriages,” Shaw says. “You have to run them around.”
Bob Shaw on The Gilded Age‘s Illusion of Opulence
The ability to adapt and think non-linearly is key to creating the illusion of opulence. The team reuses and reworks locations, redresses rooms, and finds spaces that haven’t functioned as homes in decades.
Real interiors of the period were dense with detail, but too much detail can compete with what’s happening in a scene. Carnations may have been popular at the time, but the team swaps them for more opulent flowers. Figurines and other showpieces would have been littered throughout a house, but too many of them look cluttered.
“All the wallpaper in the Brook House was sprayed down twice,” Shaw reveals. “It needed to sit back and behave itself!”
Meanwhile, the show’s central theme of new and old money is also baked into what viewers see.
“The Brook House is mostly brownstone and brick,” Shaw says. “By the time the Russells come along, it was the style for the ultra-rich to make their houses out of limestone.”
The throughline to keeping all of these elements consistent is to keep the focus on the characters, and to allow the actors to play in a space that feels true enough.
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” he says. “Even though we’re a costume drama, even though we’re about period interiors, this is still a story about the people.”
The Gilded Age is now streaming on HBO Max. You can read more of our Emmy contender interviews here.
Main image: The Gilded Age production designer Bob Shaw, left, outside the Kirkland House. Photo courtesy of Bob Shaw