Ayla Ruby
Over Zoom, production designer Alison Gartshore sat down with us to chat about the massive world-building behind Bridgerton‘s third and fourth seasons. After serving as an art director on the show’s debut seasons, Gartshore became PD and got to tackle some of the series’ most anticipated undertakings yet, including breaking ground and building a massive, highly detailed London backlot optimized for filming. Gartshore sheds light on constructing a hand-guilded palace suite for the Queen and she shares how historical research and real-life site visits inspired the visual differences between the bustling, bright Bridgerton household and the frugal, dim servants’ quarters of the Penwoods. Read on for more details behind the scenes of Bridgerton.
Ayla Ruby: Thank you. It really is all. It’s all okay. Okay. So you’ve been with Bridgerton for a while, and I know you did season three and now you’ve done four. I always like to know how people come into something. So was season four always the plan for you, or what made you really want to do this season?
Alison Gartshore: Well, I was an art director on season one and two, so I was part of setting up the whole world in the first place.
Ayla Ruby: Absolutely.
Alison Gartshore: And then when the designer for season one and two, Will Hughes-Jones, he didn’t want to carry on, he wanted to go and do something different. He put me forward for the role, and I jumped at the opportunity. So that’s how I ended up doing season three and then rolled on into season four.
Ayla Ruby: I love that. And the work, it’s all beautiful, so I love it. You, I guess, read the scripts for four, what were your reactions? What were you excited to get into, I guess?
Alison Gartshore: I mean, season four was a really big jump for us because in between season three and four, we were asked to design a backlot with season four in mind.
Ayla Ruby: I have many questions about that.
Alison Gartshore: Yeah. We did a drawing program for about 10 weeks during the summer and then it had to go through all sorts of rounds of financial scrutiny really, to make sure that it was financially viable to build it. Because part of the brief from Netflix really was to try and bring the show a little bit closer to the base. So they didn’t want us to travel quite so much because it’s tough on the crews when they’re traveling and-
Ayla Ruby: Of course.
Alison Gartshore: … driving after long hours. And it just costs so much for a show like Bridgerton, it’s such a massive footprint that we drag around with us wherever we go somewhere. So many trucks and cars and goodness knows what. It’s a very costly process. So we looked at building the backlot and so we had that going on in the background. It took months actually for them to financially crunch all the numbers and make sure that it was fiscally viable to build such a large enterprise.
And they came back to us and said, “Okay, yeah, we’ve got the go. We’ve got the green light.” So we actually started working ahead of the preps, the normal prep start. I think we started in the November with the proper drawing package and then prep for the season I think started in March or so, but we were already up and running.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, that’s amazing.
Alison Gartshore: The backlot started in January. We broke ground and the building started in the January. Yeah.
Ayla Ruby: Okay. So I’ve seen the pictures on Instagram of the backlot. I’ve read a little bit about it, and you just talked about it a little bit. It seems just in this amazing undertaking and just going through it, you talked about the financial stuff. What’s the design process for? How do you conceptualize what goes into that? Because I know there was a lot of making sure cameras can go in specific places and that it’s functional.
Alison Gartshore: Yeah. I mean, it was a massive undertaking. So you’ve got to think about all sorts of things. You have to think about the piece of land that you get given to build on for a start, and that lends itself to a certain layout of the streets. We had lots and lots of meetings with the folks at Netflix and Shondaland, and we discussed what needed to be put in there that we could then use for locations rather than… Because of course, when you go to a location for a show like Bridgerton, it’s so restrictive for what you can and can’t do. And often we’re shooting in some of the country’s most gorgeous heritage buildings and you have to be extremely careful, and you can’t do an awful lot to the building. So you have to go in and dress them really is all that you can do. And sometimes you can’t even do that.
So in terms of finding locations, it’s pretty difficult. And for big street scenes, it’s very difficult in and around London because obviously, it’s such a busy city. And we’re not a major motion picture. We haven’t got the spending power that somebody like, I don’t know, Tom Cruise might have. They can shut down whole sections of the city. We’re not in that league. So to find places that we can shoot for a period drama, it proved tricky in season three. So we thought about all the things that were difficult for us to find and we put those forwards in a design package, and then we had lots of discussions with Shondaland and Netflix. Eventually, we came to the consensus of what it should look like.
Ayla Ruby: Amazing. So when you broke ground, and I’m assuming you were there during the construction and all that, but what was it like when it was finished when you were on these Mayfair streets and London streets, what was it just walking into this world you made?
Alison Gartshore: I mean, it’s incredible. It still takes your breath away. It’s huge. It’s difficult because we saw it growing up from bare ground. It was just wasteland, it was a car park basically. And so we visited often every other day, every week to check on the progress. And so you see something come to life very slowly, but actually not so slowly because the construction company were already pre-building the first street to go up, which was the Royal Crescent Street and it flew on. As soon as we got the scaffolding up, they were flying in with their pre-made scenery and very quickly it started to take shape, but it took a long time. We were filming on bits of it while we were still constructing other bits of it. We had really bad weather. I mean, it’s England, it rains a lot sometimes. And unfortunately that spring, it absolutely rained just about every day.
So of course, it made the whole process very slow because plaster finishes and paint finishes you cannot do in extremely wet weather or cold weather actually sometimes as well, because it affects the cement drying times. And sometimes things don’t cure properly, and it comes with a lot of problems. So walking on there when it’s all finished, it was just amazing because you feel like you are in a town center really. It’s like a network of streets and you can’t quite believe that it’s all just the facades, the frontage. The finishes are so beautiful and so realistic and you just think, “Wow, this is just amazing.” So film friendly because everything is in your control, you can do whatever you need to do. We built it so that all of the windows have runs behind the scaffolding so that you can access behind each window.
So every window gets dressed, every window gets sheers and curtains and maybe a light source or whatever needs to happen. All the doors are practical, they’re all open so you can get behind them if you need to get people coming in and out. You can put the camera anywhere you want. It’s just one of those things, it’s a game changer in how something is filmed really.
Ayla Ruby: I mean, that makes sense. And you can see it on screen because there are just so many details and it just really comes through this season especially. So you mentioned the bad weather, but still the world of Bridgerton, there’s so much color, and even just so much beauty and textures. And I’d love to know a little bit how designing the world of Benedict and Sophie is different than say the world of Penelope and Colin. Because Sophie, we see a very different side of Bridgerton than normally, right?
Alison Gartshore: Yeah. I mean, part of the joy of designing season four actually was the upstairs, downstairs elements. I was just absolutely desperate to get my teeth into that underworld. Not the underworld as a bad side of life, but the downstairs world, the cogs behind the machine of Bridgerton. We are all very used to seeing these incredible flamboyant ball scenes and high society with the queen and the feast and the banquets, but actually who are the people that make all that work? And you know that there’s an army of servants behind every single one of those scenarios, and we haven’t seen much of them in the past. So season four was a real opportunity to get to grips with actually what goes into making these extraordinary feasts. And you see it very clearly in the Bridgeton kitchen scenes, I think. And I think they just work beautifully well, and they really give the whole thing. It starts to feel grounded for me. I think you really start to see what holds up this high society is all the people below supporting everything.
Alison Gartshore: There’s a big difference though between Sophie and the Penwoods servants quarters and the Bridgerton servants quarters. We wanted to contrast them very much because, obviously Lady Bridgeton, she runs her household incredibly well, although it’s Kate officially obviously. But Kate and Anthony are away, they’re often at traveled. So Lady Bridgerton carries on in her usual role until they come again. But she’s very kind and conscientious, and she really looks after her people. And it shows they’re very loyal to her. So of course when the maid wars start, there’s no question of any of her servants jumping ship because she really looks after her people. Whereas with the Penwoods, Araminta, she doesn’t treat her people very well and particularly not Sophie. And so we felt that as with all scenarios, what we do designing the backgrounds is to support what the story is and what the actors are doing, and how they’re portraying their characters.
So we wanted to make sure that her servant scenes in the Penwood House were on a much different scale to the Bridgerton House. So everything was much darker, much more pared back. It wasn’t so friendly. It was a little bit unfriendly. It was a bit more of a dark and dingy interior that we saw her in her maid’s bedroom was very frugal, I would say, is a good word to use for that.
And we just wanted to emphasize the fact that she really had nothing. She was treated badly. And in the first instance, we don’t know who she is. And so we just assume that she’s a very impoverished maid and she has very, very little. And that contrast with the Bridgerton scenario in their kitchen where everything’s very beautifully bright and lit well and lovely copper kettles and pans and everything is shiny and bright and gorgeous in the Bridgerton House as it always is. So yeah, that’s a bit of contrast, I suppose.
Ayla Ruby: Even the bustle in addition to all the scene elements, just the bustle in the Bridgerton House is so much different than in the Penwood House. And it really helps hammer home how much Sophie actually does, like how much she’s carrying on her back for that house. And it’s such a good job. So it seems like there would be a little bit of a different research into this world, right? Because you haven’t had the chance to do that upstairs, downstairs dichotomy. Did anything inspire you? Did you go to any different sources? How did you build the world in your head?
Alison Gartshore: I mean, it always starts with historical research, and it’s no different for Bridgerton. You have to go to the source material. So you look at paintings at the time, you look at engravings at the time. There’s a wonderful artist that we’ve got called Hogarth and he did a set of very satirical engravings about life at street level of the time. So he shows the rough underbelly of life really as it were, gambling and drinking and prostitution and all of those things. So his engravings, his artworks are just really very key actually for when you are looking at researching things like this. I can’t tell you how many stately homes and looked at their sort of kitchen scenarios. And that’s part of what I would do anyway for designing a normal season of Bridgerton, but I was paying particular attention to the houses that had still got a working kitchen in their in their house somewhere.
And there are a few still around that still have the suite of rooms. And you very quickly realize that it’s not just one room, it’s not just a kitchen. You have a room for the dairy work, you have a room for making cheese, you have a room for doing the laundry, you have a drying room, there’s all these different rooms and you start to think, okay, so we’re not in a stately home in the Bridgerton House, it’s a London townhouse, so it can’t be on that scale exactly, but it still would’ve had a few rooms. And so we started to put together a suite of rooms for the Bridgerton kitchen. So we’ve got the main kitchen, then we’ve got the servant’s hall where they eat their own food. We’ve got the maid room that Sophie works in and does all her washing and mending, and the pantry and then the corridors and staircases off. So it ends up being quite a complicated set of rooms really.
Ayla Ruby: And the staircases are important storywise too.
Alison Gartshore: Oh, hugely important. Yeah, so important. There was a lot of action on the staircases, as we all know.
Ayla Ruby: Yes.
Alison Gartshore: Yeah. So contrasting with the Penwood, their kitchen was much more all in one. It was just one room. Again, to emphasize the fact that Sophie was doing most of the work along with a couple of others, but certainly wasn’t the army that the Bridgerton House had. So yeah, I think you picked up on the level of busyness and the bustling nature of the Bridgerton House. It was a nice contrast, I think.
Ayla Ruby: It made us feel so much more sympathetic for Sophie. So it really just, I don’t know. I love when everything supports character, so that was just fantastic and great work with that.
Alison Gartshore: Well, that’s what we do. We’re there to support the acting and to support the stories. Yeah, to Sophie.
Ayla Ruby: We’ve talked a little bit about the backlot. Was there anything that was otherwise that was really challenging or just really technically professionally gratifying that you were able to accomplish with this season with bringing everything to life?
Alison Gartshore: I think the other major thing that we did this season was designing a set of rooms for the Queen, Queen’s world, as we fondly called it. Again, for the queen scenes, it was always very difficult to find somewhere that had availability that we could fit into our schedule, that we could travel to distance-wise. We ended up traveling quite far for Queen’s environments. We used to go to Blenheim and Wilton House and all these amazing places. We thought it would be a really good idea to, again, have a set of rooms that were in our control for the Queen’s. Again, when you go to these amazing palaces, you can’t do anything in there apart from redress a little bit. So to have a set of rooms that were in our control that we could change if we needed to, if we suddenly needed a Queen’s bedroom, we could give her one.
We could redecorate and rebuild. So at the same time as we were doing the backlot and the season, we were also doing the Queen’s rooms as well, which was a monumental task because they are incredibly detailed.
Ayla Ruby: And they’re royal. I feel like that adds a different layer too.
Alison Gartshore: Oh, you have to elevate. For the Queen, everything has to be elevated because she’s the Queen, obviously. You can’t give us something that looks like it fits within any of the other main characters households. It has to be another level. So the level of gilding, you find yourself using real gilding rather than… Normally, we use gold paint a lot for the other houses, but for the queen, we had to use gilding because nothing has the shine and the sheen for that kind of matches. So the amount of moldings that we had to put in there. Again, you start with the research, you go and look at the palaces and you go, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I can see the difference between a normal stately home and a palace.” And so when you are doing the drawings, you start to build in the levels of detailing, which will carry the fact that this is a queen environment and a royal palace, and it has to be elevated as such. So we had the kitchens at one end of the scale and looks like and the Queen’s suite at the other end of the scale, it was quite a varied season this season.
Ayla Ruby: Was there anything in the world of the Queen that maybe that you want to draw attention to? You mentioned the gilding that if you go back and watch that people should check out that they should watch for, besides the flowers. Because I think of the flowers and I’d love to know more about them, but I’m wondering from your perspective, what detail there is?
Alison Gartshore: I mean, there are so much to look at. Something that the showrunner, Jess Brownell said at the very beginning was that the season was all about fantasy versus reality, and daring to dream. Maybe if you are brave and bold and do dream. So that sort of struck a chord with me and I thought, okay, well, I can run with that theme in terms of doing a lot of trompe-l’œ this season. And trompe-l’œ is a paint technique, and it translates into trick of the eye. So it means that you can paint scenery to look as though it’s three dimensions, but actually it’s two-dimensional. It’s painted. So you paint with light, highlights, and shadows. And so there’s a lot of that. For example, in the long gallery, the biggest space in the Queen’s world actually, every single one of those panels was hand painted.
Ayla Ruby: In that way, yeah.
Alison Gartshore: Yeah, yeah.
Ayla Ruby: Wow.
Alison Gartshore: And so it was a blend of real moldings where the columns are real, but then behind them everything is flat. And so a lot of the detailing running around the room, what do you call the panels below the dado and the dado, that’s all a paint effect. And so you wouldn’t necessarily notice that, but it’s something that they used to do in the palaces way back when. It’s an older style of architectural decoration from the probably 16, 1700s, I would say. But it’s something that you find in a lot of the royal palaces in the country, you’ll find a sort of a stately room or a staircase that is in this trompe-l’œil. So we brought that in to give a little bit of gravitas, and we spent weeks and weeks and weeks. We had a whole team of people.
The scenic artists hand painted each panel and the graphic artist worked with them to give them the right size on a piece of paper with the rough outline. They then painted in the panels, and then they went off to the printers to be scanned and printed. And so we painted one column, but we needed 16 to go around.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, yeah.
Alison Gartshore: And then it was the construction painter’s job to actually paste them up onto the set. And then we had a team of people hand gilding tiny lines highlighting all-
Ayla Ruby: Wow.
Alison Gartshore: … of the details so that when the room is lit, it glows. It has a real feeling of warmth and gold. Again, it’s what they used to do. They used to hand paint 24-karat gold onto the top to embellish so that when the sun hits, it really shimmers and shines, and we did the same thing.
Ayla Ruby: That’s amazing and beautiful. And I’m going to go back and look for that just to see if I can notice any of that because I love details like that. I know we’re getting pretty close on time, but is there anything else you want people to know about your work on the show, your work this season, or anything you want to share about just any of it?
Alison Gartshore: I mean, I think one of my favorite spaces was Benedict’s, his bachelor apartment. I loved doing that one. That was a joy to design. It just reflects his nature, I think, his artistic nature. The fact that he doesn’t quite know who he is. He’s not a very neat and tidy person. He doesn’t quite fit into society. He hasn’t found himself yet. And so we got to play quite a lot with the dressing in his spaces. Yeah, I can’t think what else to say really.
There was so much to do for season four. I think that’s the main thing really was that there were so many new sets to do. I think we had about 35-
Ayla Ruby: Wow.
Alison Gartshore: … just for the first two episodes.
Ayla Ruby: Wow.
Alison Gartshore: And that’s on top of all our standing sets. And so it was just monumental. The size of the season was absolutely huge. Yeah, it was a steep learning curve.
Ayla Ruby: That number blows my mind a lot, and makes this all so much more impressive. Thank you. This has been wonderful chatting and yeah, that’s amazing.
Alison Gartshore: Pleasure.
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