When we first met the ambitious and cutthroat young financiers of HBO’s Industry, the characters of Harper Stern (Myha’la), Yasmin Hanani (Marisa Abela), and Eric Tao (Ken Leung) rarely left the offices of Pierpoint, the fictional investment bank that employed them, aside from benders at the pub. But as their careers have leveled up, so too have the spaces they move through. For Industry season 4, whose finale airs Sunday, the drama took place not on the crowded trading floor and in starter apartments but across lavish country estates, old-money offices, slick tech start-up HQs, and far-flung destinations. As Industry’s storytelling becomes more ambitious—it was just renewed for a fifth (and final) season—the show’s architecture and interiors have become even more seductive.
“We’re literally representing every single aspect of UK life,” says Simon Rogers, the production designer of Industry season 4.
Unlike other series that focused on wealth and power with tantalizing sets to match—Succession, most recently—there’s usually a darker, colder sheen to the environs of Industry. Each character is depicted in their own environments more often than previous seasons, just as the scripts reveal deeper and more intimate layers of the characters. The spaces onscreen align with their interiority and they’re less gleaming penthouse than tarnished mansion. Wealth, and the pursuit of it, is especially sinister this season. Greed is not good in the eyes of show creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay.
“All the decisions I’m making are really there to provide thematic reinforcement to the story and the events that are happening, or comment on action, or suggest that these characters are maybe trapped by the environment or they’re not telling the truth,” Rogers says. “You’re making a series of decisions that provide contrast between the sets so you always know where the characters are.”
The Tender office
Season 4, like the series as a whole, was mostly shot on location in Wales. Rogers and his team built two sets constructed on soundstages at Bad Wolf Studios. The first was for the offices of Tender, the fintech startup run by Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) whose business practices are the season’s focus, and who eventually becomes the employer of Yasmin and Henry Muck (Kit Harington). The modernist space is all glass and concrete, a contrast to the wood-paneled walls and coffered ceilings of the offices of Otto Mostyn, where Harper works before casting out on her own.
“The Tender environment was always about very reflective surfaces, never being able to see clearly through anything, and things being hidden constantly,” Rogers says. “It’s not a very safe place for any of the characters there. That office is full of sharp edges and has a solid concrete floor…. I wanted it to be quite confusing visually, but still pleasant to look at.”
SternTao HQ
The second set Rogers created was for the hotel suite where SternTao, the partnership between Harper and Eric, set up its office. It is also Eric’s residence. “I always felt like he was slightly like a King Midas character, so we used a lot of gold,” Rogers says. The space is furnished with damask, lacquered chinoiserie screens, antiques, and contemporary art in gilded frames. At one point, Eric comments that the room costs him $100,000 a month. “We got a chance to do our version of a five-star London hotel, which was great fun,” Rogers says. “All the decisions speak for the vast amounts of money at stake here and the money that they have at their disposal.”
Muck Manor
The most lavish spaces, however, belong to the upper-class characters, namely Henry’s country estate, which he now shares with Yasmin. The mansion appeared in previous seasons, but this time an entire episode took place within it. Rogers and his team cobbled together interiors and exteriors from multiple historic houses to create the space onscreen.
Longleat, an Elizabethan prodigy estate completed in 1580, was the location for the grand staircase and red dining room where Yasmin hosts a costume party. The nobility commissioned these grand homes to cement social status and display wealth, but through the generations they have fallen into disrepair. “They show their age, and it was just great,” Rogers says. Instead of looking at these houses through a lens of reverence, he looked for their darker sides to portray Muck Manor.
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“It’s no news that these big country houses are basically fortunes built on terrible crimes, so they're a world of intrigue, aren’t they?” Rogers says. “It’s a space full of decay and misery and terrible secrets and guilt and horror. Why is Henry leaning back into this awful place? Don’t do it, Henry! And here we go. Yasmin is just going for it, the massive interloper that she often becomes.”
Henry’s bedroom was filmed at Norton Hall, an estate in the Cotswolds. Rogers selected a room with dark paneling. “It felt like the most depressing place you’d ever want to go home to and really underscored his level of his state of mind at that point,” he says. The room Henry and Yasmin share—the site of a major fight between the two, which is furnished with a gilded mantel and canopy bed—was from another house. “I liked it because it was silver and monochrome and just completely without any love whatsoever,” Rogers says. “It was a bit threadbare as well. When you go behind the scenes, a lot of these houses are tatty.”
The castle
This season of Industry also introduces the audience to even wealthier echelons in the form of Austrian aristocracy. In the third episode, titled “Eurotrash,” Henry, Whitney, and Yasmin travel to the continent to meet Johanna and Moritz Bauer, a mother and son who control a legacy bank that Tender is eyeing for a merger. The Bauers live in a castle, which was actually filmed in Wales at Castle Coch, a Gothic Revival castle completed in the 13th century, which is open to the public.
It was a challenging location to find. Rogers scouted places in Austria but nothing looked right. Then Down was driving to set one day and passed Castell Coch and thought it could work. “We all went there and stood in the location just going, ‘Is this it? Can we do this? It’s a bit mad, isn’t it?’” Rogers recalls. They had to cover up Welsh iconography, like coats of arms, and bring in some of their own furniture, lamps, and artwork—but it worked. “It’s a castle that’s an ancient monument; there’s only so much you can do.”
And all the rest of the Industry world
Even some of the smaller interiors moments reveal important elements of the characters’ arcs. Harper’s apartment, located in a modern building with a balcony overlooking the Thames, was selected since it gave the character the chance to survey the cityscape from her window. “She’s looking out across her next potential conquest south across the river to some of the new financial districts in London and right at the heart of the city,” Rogers says. “It was a key decision to put her somewhere like that.”
This season also took the characters to Ghana (some of which was filmed in Accra, Wales, and South Africa) where Rogers and his team depicted everything from small storefronts to luxury hotels, abandoned warehouses, and beachfront bars. As the series progresses, there’s sure to be more alluring destinations on the horizon.
“With the show’s ambition and confidence, you get a chance to pull all the tricks out of the hat between your down-at-the-heel council houses to your up-market prison hotels,” Rogers says. “It allows you to try things out still, which is always good.”
