The Top Set Designs of This Year's Golden Globe Nominees

You could watch both seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel without any sound, and still understand what an enchanting show it is, simply because the set and costumes pop off the screen. The mid-century tones that shine in the Upper West Side apartments are a delight, and yet the set designers still managed to exceed expectations in season two when they created a 1950s Catskills masterpiece and a lit-up Paris stage for Miriam to regale her audience with tales from her marriage.

The set designers of Homecoming had their work cut out for them as they built a two-story set from scratch with the goal of bringing a podcast to life on the small screen. The set of Homecoming deserves recognition not because it’s vibrant and colorful like a Mad Men goes California-type set, but because it helps set the ominous and dark tone that lingers throughout the enthralling first season. In an Architectural Digest interview, Homecoming production designer Anastasia White said, “We often heard how eerie people felt when they walked onto the set.”

To call the Crazy Rich Asians set “lavish” would be a wild understatement. The tallest order, of course, was to design a “$40 million wedding” without actually spending eight figures. Production designer Nelson Coates created an indoor jungle and a water-lined aisle in an early 1900s church in downtown Singapore for the big screen wedding. And to create the Young family estate they refurbished two abandoned 19th century mansions in Singapore’s Tyersall Park.

The dark Baroque set of The Favourite exudes 18th-century English luxury. The period piece took over Hatfield House, erected in 1611, and even used Hampton Court Palace as a filming location. The intricacies that went into cultivating the aura of English luxury included lighting a scene entirely with candles (and creating fake surfaces inside Hatfield House so the candle wax wouldn’t damage the property) and sourcing period-appropriate art to decorate Hatfield House, which serves as Queen Anne’s palace in The Favourite.

Creating Wakanda was, of course, one of the biggest set design feats of 2018. Production designer Hannah Beachler’s research took her along the South African coast, and touring Africa helped Wakanda take shape. She also spent time in South Korea which informed the building their Korean casino set. The Wakanda set goes out of its way to blend old tradition with cutting-edge science fiction—it fuses an ancient world with technology that’s still decades out of reach.

The attention to detail that goes into The Good Place set is not only hilarious, it’s an integral part of the story. From the expert puns that shift with each iteration of the "good place," to the “medium place” which creates an on-the-nose tribute to mediocrity, the hyperbole of heaven and hell is brilliantly executed in The Good Place set design. When the set adds to the comedy gold of a show, that’s when you know a production design team is going above and beyond.

Put simply, the Westworld set decorator and production designer were tasked with creating a never-before-seen fictional world. And they had to create a set within a set—the fictional Westworld theme park, and the behind-the-scenes of Westworld where the robots are made and groomed and the park employees run the show. As the Westworld universe expands in season two, the set decor dips into different decades and various levels of consciousness and reality.