Following its recent Emmy wins, art director Brian Grego explains how they designed and built a convincing Frank Lloyd Wright studio building for Apple TV+ show The Studio.

For The Studio, the design team, which recently won an Emmy for the production design of the show, chose the intimidating task of creating an original Wright building from scratch.

“One of the biggest compliments I’ve gotten about the show is from people who work in the art departments, who do what I do, and have asked, ‘did you film at a real Frank Lloyd Wright building?'” Grego told Dezeen.

“We’re like, ‘you do this, you should know’, but because of so many things that added together in a really magical fashion, what we did almost is a magic trick – it’s a really fragile illusion.”

The production team designed a Frank Lloyd Wright building for The Studio

The team wanted the building to be a realistic home for the company at the heart of the series, Continental Studios, depicted as a studio that had its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s.

After researching the styles of the actual, legacy Hollywood studios, production designer Julie Berghoff determined to create a building that would have been built by America’s best-known architect.

“Most of us have worked at the big film lots around LA, so we kind of have an intuition about the way the different ones look – some are more Spanish and some are more deco,” explained Grego.

“Julie was looking at the architects that were working during that time, and there was just something that resonated about Frank Lloyd Wright during that era.”

In the show, Wright  is named as the building’s designer

In the 1920s, Wright was at the peak of his fame and was working regularly in Los Angeles, designing a series of significant houses, including Hollyhock House in 1921 and Ennis House in 1925.

Rather than design in the style of Wright, the production team aimed to create a building that was a realistic design from the architect, with Wright name checked as the architect several times in the show.

According to Grego, this contributed to the idea that Continental Studios was a significant player in the 1920s and 30s, but added a weight of expectation.

“We were stressed,” he continued. “I have to hand it to Julie, she’s a tremendously courageous designer. I think some designers wouldn’t even attempt it – I’m just really proud that she had the conviction to go for it.”

The aesthetic was derived from Wright’s Mayan revival houses

The production team did not want to directly replicate a Wright building, but instead aimed to envision what he would have created if he had been commissioned by a major studio in the 1920s.

“We wanted to be inspired by Frank, but wanted it to feel unique to Hollywood and to Continental Studios,” said Grego.

“We have a tremendous amount of respect for him. And we spent a lot of time doing research into his work and really looking at the stuff that he was building in LA during that time and and trying to channel it into what we do.”

“It’s not an exact rip-off – we tried to modify it and make it work for us in a lot of different ways.

The set was built on a Warner Bros lot

The Studio follows the trails of Matt Remick, played by Seth Rogan, as the newly appointed head of fictional Hollywood production company Continental Studios.

“The intent was to imply that Continental Studios was kind of an era gone by – it was big and grand and great at one time, but we are kind of past that time,” explained Grego.

The exterior was also built on the lot

The ground floor of the exterior of the studio building was built alongside a car park in Warner Bros’ lot in Los Angeles, while a two-storey set was built at the studio.

Described by a tour guide in the show as designed in Wright’s “signature Mayan revival style”, the building follows the style of his Los Angeles homes from the period, featuring his signature “textile blocks”, a key element in maintaining the illusion that this was a real Wright building.

Numerous “textile blocks” were fabricated for the set

“Every house he did had a different textile block,” said Grego. “He created a new pattern for each building, so what would he have done for Continental Studios?”

“So Julie and our graphic designer Zach Fannin, who’s just brilliant and fantastic, said, ‘well maybe it’s a C – it’s a theme we can use, a motif.'”

For the set, the production team manufactured 1,000s of blocks using various fabrication techniques that were then covered in plaster.

“Okay, we have 1,000s of these textile blocks to manufacture in time, so we were doing CNC routing, we were doing laser cutting, we were doing foam casting,” explained Grego.

“It was a total patchwork of different fabrication methods of the blocks, and then it all got sprayed with plaster to unify it all.”

The blocks were fabricated in several different ways

After researching Wright’s Los Angeles houses, the team aimed to imitate the texture and finish of the concrete used.

“One of the really unique things about the [Wright] houses was in the concrete – he would mix in something that added shine to it,” explained Grego.

“At Hollyhock House, all of the concrete has brass shavings in it, so when you’re there in person, there’s kind of like this very faint shimmer,” he continued.

“[To imitate this] the plasterer would spray the wall and then throw different materials like welding slag at it while it was wet.”

A C-motif was repeated throughout the building

To maintain the illusion of a Wright building, a team led by set decorator Claire Kaufman furnished the studio with pieces within the Wright style.

“He’s known for designing, essentially, all the furniture that goes into his projects, so we thought ‘okay, that’s he would have done that here too’,” said Grego.”

Given the short timespan to create the set, much of the furnishing was made from scratch in the style of Wright, including signature pieces such as desks, chairs and conference tables.

Set decorator Claire Kaufman created a Frank Lloyd Wright-style desk

“Claire started six weeks before we filmed, so the ability to design and build and dress in that amount of time is really remarkable,” said Grego.

“She really found some incredible things and actually built a lot, like the massive walnut desk in Matt’s office – they designed and built that,” he continued, adding that they looked into the reissues of Wright furniture by American brand Steelcase, but needed the pieces in a month.

Numerous pieces of furniture were created due to the short time scales

Overall, Grego believes that it was essential to create a high-quality building as the show was making fun of Hollywood.

“I think the approach to the craft of making the show was so deliberate and so intentional, because I think you can get away with making fun of something if you prove that you know it really well,” he said.

“So for us, it felt really important to do something excellent.”

Other recent set designs featured on Dezeen include the eerie, retro-looking offices of Severance and the extraterrestrial buildings in the Murderbot series.

The images are courtesy of Apple TV+.

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