screenshot of an album in my phone to show what pieces we have been looking at or already bought for this set.

A little glimpse into the process of carefully accumulating the right pieces to put together the finished look of the Lake House in the feature film “Here Today” written, directed, and starring Billy Crystal with Tiffany Haddish.

There aren’t many scenes in the interior of Lake House but it is the emotional core of Billy Crystal’s character’s journey in the movie and the setting of the finale of the movie so I felt it was a very important set. Additionally it was a place that connected Billy Crystal’s character deeply to his first wife, so I wanted to feel like you could feel her there through the furnishings and decoration.

a snapshot of the items we bought for the lakehouse from one antiques store.

After the designer communicates their vision for the set, and we discuss color palettes and touchstones fro mood the first part of the job is to go out and find the furniture, items, and pieces (within budget) that will come together to create those ideas.

I went to a bunch of different vintage, antique, thrift, and secondhand furniture stores surrounding the New York City area scouring for the pieces that I thought would contribute to the vision for the Lake House interior Andrew and I discussed always keeping in mind who Billy Crystal’s character was and what would make sense for the story.

I like to keep track of what we have bought from all the dfferet scoures and how it might work together on a board. I am fully aware there is something called Pinterest which in theory would make this super easy to do digitally, but somehow it is not the same and more pleasingly productive for me on paper. it makes swapping around and playing with combinations easier actually.

The second part of the process is getting to the location where you will be filming and actually putting together all the items you have gathered and hoping all your planning and accumulating will actually work out in the way you were hoping.

Worst Case Scenario is you don’t have enough pieces or the ones you have don’t work and you need to buy more things but you are out of time and out of money. The second Worst Case Scenario is you have far too many things, have overbought thus used up a lot of the precious budget, and forced your poor set dresser colleagues to load up and carry in and out more heavy furniture then needed.

So yes, the Best Case Scenario is something like a Goldilocks situation you want to have enough items to play with and so you don’t have to go out buying more things but not too much it is a drain on resources.

Fortunately for this set we were close to best case scenario leaning on the more than needed side. This was a set I was worried about getting right and happy it came together the way it did. See below for the before and after.