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.