Inside the Set of Netflix's 'Bridgerton' Season 4

Welcome to Bridgerton season four.

[lively orchestral music]

Hello, welcome to the Bridgerton world.

My name is Alison Gartshore

and I'm production designer on season four of Bridgerton.

Here we are in the Queen's World conservatory.

The space initially was only going to be

so that we could light what is behind this wall,

which is the corridor.

We needed a set of windows that we could push light through,

but when we saw the size of the space on the drawings,

we kind of thought,

Actually that's too big to just have as empty space.

So we decided to come up with the idea of a conservatory

for the queen, the conservatory is an interior space,

but, really, we're suggesting

that this wall is an exterior wall.

They often used to have winter gardens

within the walls of the palace,

and it would be lit by skylights,

somewhere that they could feel outside,

but actually they're inside

and protected from the cold and the weather.

I pay my maids well and treat them with respect.

Brimsley?

The royal household is royal, Your Majesty.

Hello, I'm Hugh Sachs and I play Brimsley in Bridgerton.

Brimsley? Her Majesty is taking

her royal nap.

I do not have long.

When we did the first season,

none of us had seen anything like it.

On Bridgerton, every time you go to a different location

or to a different set, you are just amazed, really,

at the caliber of the artistry.

I like the conservatory here.

It's small and contained,

but also some really moving parts

of the queen's story happen there.

I want gossip.

We have here a bonbon tower,

which is a classic thing for our Queen Charlotte.

She loves her bonbons,

and we normally do them in this format

in the shape of a cone,

which is how they used to pile them up,

decorated with edible florals and raspberries.

As you can see, she's got a bit of a sweet tooth, the queen.

This space is designed using trompe l'oeil,

which means deceiving the eye,

and it's a theme that runs throughout

season four of Bridgerton.

It mimics the fantasy versus reality

that threads through the storyline.

We had a scenic artist who came in and painted

all of these panels to look like they're 3D,

but actually they're not, they're just a paint effect.

Very decorative, beautiful.

We top-dressed it with florals.

We decided to continue the theme of the 2D versus 3D

with these beautiful bird sculptures,

which we made up in-house.

The centerpiece is a beautiful tiered fountain,

but instead of having running water,

which of course isn't very good for sound,

we decided to make it into a sculptural

floral display instead.

The queen loves her florals, she loves the color,

the scents of the flowers.

Statuary, classic Greek and Roman,

sort of bringing the outside in, really.

Here we have the chinoiserie which is the 2D chinoiserie.

Another of our scenic artists painted

all of these items individually

and then they were all printed and graphically applied.

And we do that quite a lot as a technique

because then if we need the same motif somewhere else,

we can easily replicate it.

And all the gold leafing was done by hand.

It's fake gold leaf, obviously, we're a film set,

but normally in other spaces, we wouldn't do gold leaf work.

We would do gold paint

because it's just more cost effective.

But we felt Queen's World had to be elevated to her status

and she would have nothing less than pure gold leaf.

The flooring for the conservatory

is actually a recycled element.

This was actually Will's gentleman's club flooring.

It is real oak veneer,

so this is one of our proper floors

that we have on the sets.

[light orchestral music]

Here we are in the queen's corridor.

We are dressed for a particular event.

Lady Danbury is going off on her travels

and the queen is reluctantly letting her go.

Why do you wish to leave me?

As I said, I desire a return to my homeland and I-

No. Why do you wish to leave me?

I always describe Brimsley as in charge

of the queen's hardware, like her day-to-day life,

and Agatha is in charge of her software, her emotional life.

It's incredibly moving 'cause the way Golda plays it

is she sort of unravels at the prospect

of losing her best and only friend.

And Brimsley is desperately trying

to persuade Lady Danbury not to go.

You must come back.

Request an audience with Her Majesty.

Apologize.

I shall do no such thing.

We've got a lot of galleon imagery

to represent that journey that's about to happen,

and for this particular piece,

we asked our florist, Philip Corps,

to design and make a floral seascape for the ship

to be bobbing away on.

The guests are coming through that doorway,

up the stairs and into the ball itself.

So this is one of the first things

that they see when they come into the ball.

[light orchestral music]

Welcome to the Blue Stateroom, named for obvious reasons.

We specifically chose the blue turquoise of the walls

that would go beautifully with the gold.

We knew we needed a lot of gilding in here.

As part of my research,

I visited lots of the stately homes

and palaces in the country and thought about

what made a palace a palace.

The scale of the rooms had to be right.

It had to be elevated

from what we normally see in Bridgerton.

Much bigger, much higher ceilings.

Also, the level of moldings and details had to be right.

They used to highly decorate all of the available spaces,

lots of gilding, lots of strong color,

and this gorgeous turquoise fabric,

which actually we had printed in India.

If you visit stately homes and palaces,

you will often find that there's a series

of staterooms leading to a big banqueting hall

or a big hall.

Palaces were laid out in that way,

so that depending on how close you were to the monarchy,

depends how far you got through the staterooms.

And the closer you got to the king or queen's bed chamber,

the closer you were and the more trusted you were.

A lot of the inspiration for these rooms

were places like Buckingham Palace,

Windsor Castle, Petworth House,

all the very big hitters that we have in this country.

So over here we have a couple of technical drawings.

This is a ground plan and it shows all the space

as if you are a bird looking down,

and it shows the outline of the walls

and the thickness in between the walls and the layout.

So you can see that all of the rooms

interlink through the doorways.

If we wanted to,

we could do a circular walk and talk

through all of the different spaces.

And this is what we call a set of elevations.

So you have the ground plan in the corner,

and then each and every wall has an elevation,

which gives you all the detail

that needs to be on that particular wall.

Once we've got the elevations,

then we go into the fine detail.

And every single thing that you see in the room

has been drawn by an art director

or an assistant art director,

and it's really a vital job

because the drawings go to construction

and then they know what to build, how big,

what fits together with what

and how it's all constructed and put together.

It's a lot of fine tuning.

[light orchestral music]

Here we are in the Pink Stateroom.

These colors were inspired by a room

in Blenheim Palace actually.

We wanted to show a difference

between the blue and the pink.

The Blue Stateroom is a much harder, harsher room.

Any scene that she's going to be a bit firm

with somebody usually is the Blue Stateroom they choose.

This one is a bit more feminine, a bit softer.

The carpet in here, as with all the spaces,

they're all graphically designed.

The turnaround time to make a carpet like this

is about three months.

So it's one of the first things that we have to design

when we are designing any space

for any set at Bridgerton if we need a carpet.

It really helps to play the character.

I always say the sets make you want to stand up straight.

It's not a slouching world.

When you play royalty or that world,

it's not only the way the characters treat the queen

and her world, but it's also the set.

You kind of know that you are in somewhere

very rarefied and special.

I believe my taste in ladies

may be as discerning as your taste in bonbon.

It was scripted that actually

the bonbon towers had to be huge,

so here we have the most enormous bonbon towers

that we've ever had on Bridgerton.

They are absolutely vast.

This beautiful lattice work.

There's thousands and thousands of individual pieces

within this room that were hand stuck on,

each one individually measured

and hand stuck in exactly the right place.

The wall panels either side of the palladian windows,

you can see we had one, but we needed two.

So we had to hire a sculptor

whose job it was to replicate exactly and hand carve.

We do that quite a lot actually

when we need sculptural pieces,

which is great because, you know,

they're very skilled people and I love giving artisans work.

It's wonderful.

Such as the shell details in the bottom of the panels,

a couple of weeks' work in each one.

So all of our fireplaces in the Bridgerton sets do work.

We can't have anything that gives off a noxious fume,

so our special effects team actually came up

and designed a system for us specifically,

using a biofuel that doesn't give off

any kind of dangerous vapors.

And the access to this fire is through the doors there.

There's a secret little hidey-hole,

you can get behind the fire where they can refill

the tray of fluid whenever they need to do that.

But it does give a decent, realistic size fire.

[light orchestral music]

Welcome to the Long Gallery.

This is the biggest space that we have in Queen's World.

It was designed with presentations in mind,

balls in mind, any space where the queen

wanted an individual to feel very, very small.

So the queen can sit up on her throne on the top there

and have someone walk the very long walk

all the way up to her to be chastised or whatever.

You are late.

You have only just sent for me, Your Majesty.

Late!

We don't normally have all these florals in this space,

but as it's a ball and as it's Bridgerton,

we have gone over the top with our florals as usual,

using the queen's colors

but also we've referenced seashells,

so we have 2,000 scallop shells

which were all individually hand gilded.

We also have got what looks like coral

woven between the florals

and actually what we've used for that

are the plastic throwaway sticks

that the fake flowers come on.

The walls were very, very tricky.

The color is a particular gray,

which was very difficult to actually get right

under different lighting conditions.

We tested and tested and tested for about three weeks,

just trying out different tones of gray,

and then the process of picking out

and hand painting all of the trompe l'oeil panels,

of which there are over 220.

Each type was painted individually by our scenic artist.

Then printed, replicated, pasted up around the room,

but before they got pasted up,

we had to do the gilding detail,

which you can just see.

That was all done individually by hand.

We had a whole team of people for weeks on end,

just sitting there doing tiny little gold lines,

but it was vital to do it because without it,

it wouldn't be alive.

When they light this room,

the whole room shimmers with the gold,

and that's exactly the effect that you want.

It has to look opulent.

It's the queen space, it's one of her public spaces

and it's a show of wealth.

All the trompe l'oeil panels are actually quite masculine

in style, but obviously Queen Charlotte

is rather feminine in her demeanor,

but she is in a very masculine role sometimes.

But we wanted to show the difference between the two,

so we put in the trompe l'oie florals

just to break up that masculinity

and to make sure that Queen Charlotte's stamp

was marked on this space.

As you can see, we have a map of England,

which of course was hand produced

by our graphic artist, Katie Buckley.

Obviously, for Queen Charlotte,

she's the center of the universe.

That's how it was back then.

And referencing the center of the universe,

the center of the navy, we come to the floor,

which references a compass point

with the 12 points of the compass.

To achieve this particular floor,

we had our scenic artists paint

lots and lots of samples of hand painted marbles,

which we then photographed,

digitally replicated and printed

on the panels pieced together very precisely.

We're very pleased with this floor.

It looks very beautiful.

Obviously, for a ball for Bridgerton there's always music.

For this particular ball,

we built in a podium across the windows

for the musicians to be ever so slightly elevated

so that they play a bit more of a role in the picture.

Through the windows,

you might be able to see we have a new printed backdrop,

which is called a translight.

Because we have established that the queen's palace

is the exterior is akin to Blenheim Palace,

we took the landscape from Blenheim Palace,

we photographed it and had it reprinted

so that it looks like it's the view from the palace.

It lights for both night and day.

We can light up the windows in the buildings

to make them glow, to make it look like

it's a nighttime scene out there.

When I walked into this room, you just look.

I mean, there's a scene with Nicola as Penelope

when she walks in here

and we are all up there like Avengers.

It just looked stunning.

Here we are standing in front of one of the many pairs.

We've actually got 44 doors on this whole Queen's World set,

which is a phenomenal amount of doors.

They are absolutely beautiful,

but were very, very difficult to achieve.

The doors are very large.

Assistant art director, Natalie McCormack,

it took her seven full weeks of work

simply drawing and working out these doors,

how to design them.

Over the 44 doors that we've got on the set,

there's over 10,000 individual pieces of decoration

that were all hand applied.

The lion's heads.

That was a piece that was sculpted

by our sculpturist, Tracy Lilly.

In the middle, we have hand painted queen's insignia

for Queen Charlotte, and they were complicated,

but look rather magnificent, I think.

It's just a real treat as an actor

to work in these kind of surroundings

because in a way it does the work for you.

It gives you the world your imagination is trying to create.

For someone like Brimsley whose whole life

has been in service to the queen and this is his home,

it's just really helpful as an actor

to have this caliber of creativity to support you.

[lively orchestral music]

Thank you so much for visiting with me

in Queen's World new for season four.

Off you go. Bye-bye.

[lively orchestral music]