The Oscar-winning production designers of Poor Things on how to design like a time traveller

Dollhouse furniture, The Garden of Earthly Delights, an iron lung: these are just a few of the myriad references that inspired production designers Shona Heath and James Price in constructing the Victorian sci-fi look of Poor Things, the latest feature from Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe.

Poor Things, based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray and set in an off-kilter version of the late 19th century, tells the coming-of-age story of Bella Baxter (Stone), who is brought to life through a Frankensteinian experiment by her creator and surrogate father, Godwin Baxter (Dafoe). Heath tells Christie’s that by imagining how Baxter would live, ‘we found how we could design the film. We did it almost from his point of view as a maverick surgeon, cutting and splicing together all sorts of different architectural ideas, thoughts, medical equipment and new materials.’

Heath and Price pulled from all corners of art history to create a fantastical aesthetic that collages forward-thinking designs from many eras and follows Bella’s journey around the globe, traversing otherworldly versions of London, Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris.

‘Production design is all about storytelling,’ adds Price. ‘You are visually telling the story. And you do that by getting into the characters’ heads and creating the world they live in.’

Alongside the film’s set decorator, Zsuzsa Mihalek, Heath and Price won the Oscar for Best Production Design at the 96th Academy Awards on 10 March. Their exceptional work has also garnered an Art Directors Guild Award, as well as accolades from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the Set Decorators Society of America.

Heath and Price’s innovative and collaborative approach is a testament to the power of visual storytelling — and it also offers heaps of inspiration for the maximalist collector with an eye towards crafting their own sumptuously era-defying interiors.

Think like a collector

Mad scientist Godwin Baxter’s house was partly inspired by the work of the architect and collector Sir John Soane. Like Soane’s famous London home — now a museum — the Baxter residence is a cabinet of curiosities filled with art and rare objects arranged in crowded hangs and idiosyncratic custom displays. ‘We looked to [Soane] and his way of cutting up space — the way he did it, he really was an artist as well as an architect,’ says Heath. ‘We weren't stuck to an era. We were trying to be outside of all of them.’

The Baxter house contains many hallmarks of Victorian decor like dark jewel tones and excess ornamentation executed with a time traveller’s nonconformist interpretation, as in a moulded ceiling shaped like an ear.

In the dining room, chinoiserie ceramics inspired by the Willow pattern cover the main wall. They represent ‘this sort of quintessentially English taste and obsessive collecting of Baxter,’ says Heath. ‘We felt like he would specially design the walls to fit them, taking pride in meticulously laying them out in a geometric way.’ The delicate porcelain awaits in the background, like Chekhov’s gun, for a smash from the raucous Bella. ‘We knew she had to break plates and it was a fun link to have them there already.’

Play with scale

Bella and Godwin sit at the dining table in cartoonishly oversize chairs, which were based on a design from a Victorian dollhouse chair. ‘We liked the idea that Bella could feel small in the house, so that she could appear more childlike, like a doll,’ says Heath. This play with scale is part and parcel of the film’s sense of whimsy, embracing playful artifice and Old Hollywood effects combined with cutting-edge technology. ‘We were using a lot of painted backdrops,’ says Price, which contributed to ‘a traditional 1930s/1950s studio movie feel’ in the dreamlike Lisbon scenes.

Whereas for Bella’s Mediterranean voyage by ship, they employed 11 sprawling 90-metre wraparound LED screens to display the changing sea and sky around the ocean liner. The exterior shots of the whole ship were done using a 10-foot scale model, one of Price’s favourite items from the film’s production. Seeing it up on the big screen was satisfying for Price, who had dreamed of using models like this since seeing the miniatures employed in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. ‘It was like a childhood dream come true,’ he says.

Create a safe space

Bella’s bedroom in the Baxter home reflects the protective — and often claustrophobic — environment Baxter has created for her, complete with soft surfaces including padded walls. ‘I got obsessed with the quilted walls,’ Heath says. ‘They had to be really deep and puffy.’ The embroidered designs on the panels drew from myriorama, the 19th-century children’s game, in which cards can be rearranged to create a panoramic ‘endless landscape’.

‘Each panel was a sort of human endeavour of freedom, like hot air ballooning or sailing a ship or ploughing the land,’ notes Heath. ‘I felt like Baxter would've put those stories in her life to feel enriched.’

Look at paintings and drawings

Director Lanthimos gave Heath and Price several images of paintings to feed their vision, including Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, as well as works by Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. ‘In the Bosch paintings, there are depictions of dreamlike architecture,’ says Heath, ‘with crazy glass structures and slightly fantasy sci-fi-looking buildings, which really influenced how Baxter's house looked on the outside.’ The fleshy pink hue of the Baxter house also recalls the tones of Bosch’s structures.

For the ‘psychedelic, trippy feel’ of Lisbon in the film, the designers looked to the 19th-century French illustrator Albert Robida. ‘He had done a lot of amazing illustrations,’ says Price, ‘predicting what the future would look like.’ These included flying vehicles and other candy-coloured inventions, whose influence can be seen throughout Bella’s time in the city.

Give yourself rules to break

When asked if they have any advice for collectors looking to meld wide-ranging styles in their own maximalist interiors, both Heath and Price recommended starting with a few well-chosen constraints.

‘Decide, Okay, I’m going to buy pairs of tables and chairs, or I'm not going to have anything with hard corners and I'm going to do everything in blue,’ Heath suggests. ‘Take out a few things. By limiting yourself you end up with a stronger choice that works in a new way.’

‘Make some rules up,’ Price agrees. ‘Failing that, just hire me and Shona — we’ll do it for you.’