Dory surprises the gang in Portia’s Season 5 apartment
As fans of Search Party know, Portia’s apartment gets a design transformation each season.
Portia’s Apartment design transformation Seasons 1-4
This season we had a lot of fun with Portia’s apartment.
Once we knew that Portia was no longer an actress and mourning her acting career was a plot point (it was a bigger plot point in earlier drafts of the script), Production Designer Maggie Ruder and I started talking about what that would mean for Portia’s apartment this season
A big personality mourning her glory days of being an actress of course calls to mind one iconic character and set: Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
hahha look at how over the top this interior is!
While Portia can be a little extra in a Norma Desmond-esque way, Search Party is still a low-budget comedy so we didn’t have the $ to go full excess and had to think up some resourceful ways to communicate the same vibes.
So we did a lot of visual research.
VISUAL RESEARCH
pulling references from Victorian mourning, modern neo-Gothic inspired interiors, Grey Gardens, and of course Sunset Boulevard.
I brought in some interior and design books from my collection that I felt were the vibe we were going for.
as you can see what had a lot of post-it notes of inspiration.
from Maggie’s design deck, that mantel photo is from the Syrie Maugham book.
You can see the Sunset Boulevard stair balustrade details we added in this shot!
we tried our best with the mantel and the oil painting of Portia and Eliot that has appeared in multiple seasons.
PORTIA’S FADED DAYS OF ACTRESS GLORY
The original from Sunset Boulevard
Finding the right collection of frames from a favorite vintage and salvage store
Collecting images and stills from past seasons from Portia’s various acting jobs was super fun.
you can see some of these photos which were spread over the windowsill of the two windows behind the couch
the silhouette of the frames make it in this shot
this is a terrible photo of when we were still working on the set, but allows you to see the photos on the windowsill.
This frame idea is a perfect example of a set dressing decoration element that had a lot of:
intention (mimicking Norma Desmond’s own journey)
thoughtfulness (combing the show’s archive for all of Portia’s past acting gigs) shouts to Sydney Barbara who did a ton of research!
effort, and time (finding the right frames, matching image with frame, measuring all the dimensions, shout out to Andrew Behm!, our beloved graphic designer Loren Kane sizing and printing the photos to work, actually framing them in)
put into an idea that is at most a flicker in the background of the screen that absolutely no viewer can decipher…and yet totally worth it and so fun for us to do!
FURNITURE HUNT PROCESS
What my office wall looked like while we were hunting, gathering, and searching (SEARCH PARTY?) for the furniture pieces for Portia’s Apartment. The circled red part is all the rejects of furniture photos we won’t end up using.
narrowing down
some key furniture pieces we purchased found at five different locations of used furniture around the NYC metro area. Four of these will be modified by us in someway (painted, reupholstered, fringe swap) to make it work for the set.
Maybe you will recognize the furniture above when they were at the store in the finished sets below and some of the previous set photos in this post:
ADDING THAT DECORATION TWIST
Did someone say Re-Upholstering and FRINGE SWAP? (that’s like decorator candy)
a selection of fringe and trim
fabrics we decided on for reuphostering
Katie our Assistant Set Decorator who valiantly swatched fabrics, fringe, and trim around NYC while we have one of our many meetings to narrow down options. And a box of the best LaCroix flavor: apricot
THIS IS THE SAME ANGLE ON PORTIA’S APARTMENT
For more set photos, view this gallery of Search Party Season 5 set photos.