AN ELF house for Awkwafina is Nora from Queens

Elf House in Iceland

Probably my favorite set to decorate in Season 3 of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens was “the Elf House,” the home of Alfur the elf played by Lea DeLaria in Episode 4 of Season 3, directed by Jordan Kim.

Even though most of the episode was actually filmed on location in Iceland, we filmed this Elf House in Queens, New York City!

that rug is an actual vintage Nordic rug from Sweden!

This is what this part of the room looked like before which is a NYC Parks Department building.

Gathering Inspiration

Where do you start to decorate a fantastical and fictional interior like an Elf House with tangible concrete things available in New York City 2022?

Our set decoration team together with Production Designer Laura Miller started by pulling visual research images to get some inspiration based on ideas like:

• historical Icelandic and Nordic interiors

• illustrations from Icelandic and Nordic fairytales

• how elf residences have been portrayed in other media (haha like the 2003 Will Ferrell movie Elf)

• images of other fictional interiors that seemed to have the right vibe (I was thinking a lot of Mr. Fox’s residence from The Fantastic Mr. Fox).

Hunting for what’s available

Next I visited New York City’s community of prop houses (where we rent furniture and props for shoots) to see what they had that might fit the aesthetic of our reference images.

For instance when visiting the prop house Eclectic Encore, I saw this rustic piano that seemed so perfectly whimsical I decided the Elf House needed it even though nowhere in the script or initial furniture plan does it specify “and we need an elf piano.”

The wonderful lamp is from the lighting prop house City Knickerbocker and everything else are items we bought in a store, online, or thrifted!

you can catch a tiny glimpse of the piano in the corner of the right of the frame!

After hunting and gathering we put together boards of how the items we selected as candidates for serving “elf house” might work together (or not) and finalized what we would rent or purchase.

We had three different zones we needed to outfit for the story: a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen area

working board for the Elf House kitchen and the bedroom

working board for the Elf House living room

how my desk at work looked that week hahahahah.

Kiran very nicely surprised me with a slice of cake from LADY M!

Set dressing time!

Then we had 1x day to bring all our stuff and transform that empty room into the Elf House you saw on screen. So at 7am we showed up with a truck full of furniture, a small army of set dressers, and got to work.

I wish I had photos of all our boxes and tables of set dressing laid out, outside when we started but sadly I don’t.

I do have this photo of in the midst of dressing and trying out different layouts of funiture.

They certainly don’t have American “Exit” signs in an Icelandic Elf House!

Here is leadman (head of the set dressers) Nate Obey checking out how removable the sign is, and our Shop Electrician Dan Eschuai removing the sign (behind set dresser Allen Ploenes posing with a flower).

FINISHED SET!

And all that work finally results with a finished set!

Living Room

Bedroom

Kitchen

What wasn’t working, were our window treatments. While I’m sure almost no viewer is paying attention, I’m sorry to say it still nags me!

There were a number of constraints that made it challenging for us to get the window treatments perfect:

• we couldn’t drill holes into the historical property’s wood

• we needed the window treatments to be very secure because Nora has to move a curtain to jump out the window

• we needed the window treatments on one side of the house to completely block the view so you couldn’t see the NYC traffic lightpost right outside the window.

I think if we were a bigger budget show we might have been able to come up with a construction facilitated solution but alas we aren’t so the only options we had of how to rig the window treatments made them sit a bit weird on the windows depending on your angle.

But I guess for their key starring moment here when Nora jumps out the window they looked fine and functioned perfectly.

Iceland exterior also in queens

while most of the episode’s exteriors are filmed on location in Iceland, there is one exterior shot that was actually filmed in a park in Queens!

here is a photo of the sign we brought in early morning to set up

Nora sitting on a rock with wildflowers near her feet?

this is set dressers Paddy and Sean and my water bottle with the faux rocks we rented, brought in, “planting” the wildflowers around Nora.

Our set decoration shopper Margie Verghese woke up VERY early this morning to go to the Manhattan wholesale flower market and find flowers and greens that could pass for Icelandic wildflowers, met us at the park which we got to when it was still dark out so set dressers Paddy and Sean, and I could try to enhance this little patch of a Queens park to look like Iceland.

It was a beautiful early fall morning so we were pretending to be cold here to match the Icelandic sign.

You can read more behind-the-scenes putting together the sets and everything related to Awkwafina is Nora from Queens Season 3 here.

Madonna, Rhianna, Ilana + Fruit Cart!

On last night's Broad City one of the funny little joyful sequences was Ilana's little jaunt arriving at Madison Square Park. 

For this sequence, one of the key pieces of set dressing was a classic NYC fruit cart.  

There are many ways to go about finding the right fruit cart, but in this situation we decided approaching a working fruit cart nearby and negotiating a rental deal was the ideal choice for ultimate authenticity. 

The fruit cart we used in its natural habitat on 6th Ave in Manhattan

So I walked up and down 6th Ave approaching different fruit vendors. As you can imagine, most of the guys working a fruit cart are not interested in entertaining little requests like this + many don't have the authority to ok a non-traditional request like this. 

But I finally found, Helal, who was willing to do it.  Finding out he was a Bangladeshi immigrant, I talked him up in Bangla which I learned while living in Bangladesh for two years when I was a Foreign Service Officer--who knew speaking Bangla would turn out to be so useful for set decorating in NYC? 

Here is the fruit cart in question on set, Helal on the right in the brown shirt, and the actor who plays him on the left in the maroon shirt. Hilarious right? oh also, Ilana on the right. 

I thought Helal and I talked about him bringing another plain umbrella for the shoot, but when we got to set we realized the only two umbrellas he had were all marked up with company brand names. In the future, I will always bring an extra back-up umbrella-lesson learned. 

So then it became an issue of finding the right matching blue tape nearby to do the best "Greeking" job we could on short notice. 

It isn't the greatest color match, but it was the best we could do on such short notice. 

I'm sure when you watch that sequence for the first time your attention was focused on Ilana and her unique blend of charming and irreverent joyful charisma.  I, however, was watching the blue tape. 

You can watch the whole episode "Burning Bridges" (Season 3, Episode 8) from Broad City here 

Art Deco Details + Why I Love Set Decorating

During one shoot I worked on in Tribeca, I had to go out a bunch to pick up more props around the neighborhood which is full of buildings with great Art Deco details. 

One of the things I love best about set decorating is the chance to walk around New York City so much in search of things.  

The chance to spend so much time out doors and interacting with the city so actively while in pursuit of that perfect item, prop, dressing, or whatever is something I deeply enjoy. 

As a huge Art Deco fiend (one of my ultimate favorite aesthetic eras), the opportunity to notice and appreciate small decorative and design details in New York's old buildings, especially the Art Deco ones, is one of the small joys of living and working in NYC. 

Crazy Amazing Skyline View from Set

this is seriously a no filter snapshot from my phone--the view was so incredible

I recently had the amazing fortune to work on a shoot from the penthouse of The Standard East Village (so fancy right?).

In between all the packing/unpacking/moving/unloading/loading we had the chance to soak in these incredible views of beloved New York. 

That's one of the things I love about production work: it has brought me to all sorts of cool places throughout New York.   Going to set I often find myself in corners and heights of New York I wouldn't normally find myself in and I totally appreciate the opportunity to explore new areas. 

isn't it crazy how many water towers there are in Manhattan? I feel like the water tower has come to be the symbolic icon of Brooklyn so I was surprised to see so many on Manhattan rooftops too. 

Because let's be real, there are not many circumstances under which I would find myself in the penthouse suite of The Standard. (oh yeah, I'm not an eastern european model or Saudi financier in town for business)

(again if my internet game was better I would insert one of those ridiculous fashion editorial/aspirational advertising spreads that would encapsulate the two archetypes I mentioned). 

Anyways, when I have the opportunity to soak in the iconic skyline of NYC like this I sort of hear the soundtrack cue in the back of my head to:

mixed with:

mixed with:

...and then of course after a while the penthouse rooftop becomes just a holding place for the crew and all the crazy amounts of equipment and just another place to wait between takes or when you are needed: