Portia's Season 5 Bedroom and Bathroom on Search Party / January 14, 2022 by Charlene Wang de Chen

Even though every season Portia’s apartment gets a redesign on Search Party, we don’t actually see her bedroom every season and we’ve only seen a glimpse of the bathroom once.

But this season we were doing both a bedroom AND a bathroom! Bed, Bath, and Beyond!

For the bedroom, Maggie Ruder the Production Designer, wanted to keep the look close what we did for the rest of her apartment but with a different color palette and from the same reference books we were consulting for the rest of Portia’s apartment found this photo:

So we basically copied it as best we could with the budget we were working with.

Maggie giving directions of what was happening on that opposite wall which we NEVER see. I must note this was before we fixed the hem of the sheers.

For the bathroom Maggie said she wanted to do a wallpaper and…you know me I LOVE WALLPAPER.

…the one hitch was the producers wanted us to find a wallpaper design where the company/designer would sign off clearance on the design (a first for me) which made the search slightly more challenging.

But we did find something I loved that met the necessary criteria.

Here’s Maggie’s design file for the bathroom

Ok not Dory’s finest moment but this shot lets you see our great bathtub hardware, and the hallway you don’t really see otherwise.

LOVE Portia’s fabulous robe in this bathroom scene

while we are still working on the set I sort of love this photo and it shows off our cute little sink that you never see on screen.

I was taking this photo to show the set dressers something, but I love how the mirror’s shape lines up so nicely with the design of the wallpaper, which you also never see on screen.

Ok you might notice in the photo above that that bar soap looks WAY too new and like it was just taken out of the plastic wrapping.

So in order to age it I brought it over to the nearest bathroom to wash it down and at least soften the hard edges to look a little more used, aged, and lived in.

Well, while I was doing that Katie our Assistant Set Decorator came into the bathroom and stood in the doorway so we could do one of our daily recaps and touching of base on what we still needed to do for our upcoming sets.

It seemed normal enough as a way to use time effectively, but at a certain point I realized how absurd this set up was, and I was like hold on I need to take a photo of this moment.

There it is, me with the soap I’m washing down and Katie with her notebook.

That’s it for Bed, Bath, and Beyond Portia’s Season 5 Apartment on Search Party!

To see more photos of Search Party Season 5 sets, click here for the portfolio.

Portia's Season 5 Apartment on Search Party / January 8, 2022 by Charlene Wang de Chen

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

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!