Feast Your Eyes on Design Details and Historic Locations From HBO's ‘The Gilded Age’

The latest episode of HGTV’s behind-the-scenes YouTube series HGTV On Set With just might be its splashiest yet. We sat down with production designer Bob Shaw and set decorator Lisa Scoppa of HBO’s The Gilded Age — which launched into its all-new second season on Oct. 29 — to learn how they immerse audiences in the more-is-more spaces and historic design vocabulary of wealthy New York society in the 1800s. Their work includes everything from emptying and redecorating landmarked spaces to communicating via ultra-specific decor cues since, for the Victorians, flowers, fringes and even fork placement could speak volumes about the people that shared space with them. Those design elements showcase wealth and influence, hint at where it comes from and reveal what characters are trying to accomplish with it.

Working with that visual vocabulary doesn’t always mean replicating how well-heeled Victorians decorated their homes, mind you. “We have to give the impression of the period and not get in the way,” Bob explains. “I say that about wallpaper all the time: ‘It pops out too much, and you need to pull it back and always keep actors the main event.’” It does mean that Bob and Lisa are always trying to outdo themselves. “Generally the marching orders for Season Two were to top Season One,” he says. “Partially it makes sense because that’s what Bertha [Russell, a character whose family represents “new money”] would be doing. She got her foot in the door [of fashionable society] and now she has to make sure that people know that she’s a force to be reckoned with.”

“I channeled my inner Bertha [pictured here in Season One] to try and figure out how I would impress people more,” Bob continues. “There was a T-shirt that [the Gilded Age crew] made that says 'STILL GILDING.' So if I had to come up with a word for Season Two — what’s the word for more gilding? Gildier?” Watch HGTV On Set With: The Gilded Age to see their work in action, and read on for a deep dive on the fabulous historic spaces they’re both referencing and creating.

Fair warning: We’ll be discussing plot points from the first season of the show and the beginning of its second season here. If you’re wary of spoilers, stream The Gilded Age on Max and join us here afterward!

As you might imagine, shooting a period drama on the streets of modern-day Manhattan is something of a non-starter. To capture the look of old New York, the Gilded Age team (and location manager Lauri Pitkus, who works closely with Bob) turns to upstate destinations like the town of Troy. “We [took] Monument Square [above], which is a major part of the town of Troy, and covered the streets with dirt and put signage on all of the storefronts and then [did] storefront displays on most of them,” Bob recalls.

“The tremendous gift of Troy is that it's largely untouched. They were, you know, an economic powerhouse in the mid 1800s,” he continues. The architecture associated with that boom was never demolished to make way for a new round of development. “You can go to Washington Park in Troy and all around it is unbroken houses of the right period, starting from the 1830s, then maybe getting to around 1900. But for a squint, every house around that entire square is fine for us. And then we can walk from that square all the way to Monument Square, which is like maybe four or five blocks. And we could do a walk and talk that whole way and just have to remove air conditioners, [trash cans and] window treatments.”

The Gilded Age is all about the conflict between established elites and the up-and-comers challenging their social dominance; the widowed matriarch Agnes van Rhijn (played by Christine Baranski) and her sister, Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon) epitomize the former. “For Ada and Agnes, the important thing is that everything is done the same way — and it has to be the old way,” Lisa explains. “The whole thing of the Brook-van Rhijn family is that they’re resistant to change. That’s very much an old-money sort of thing,” Bob adds. They’re also very private and quite literally curtain themselves off from their neighbors. “I always say the difference between the Russells’ [house] and the Brooks’ [house] in New York is that it's very dark and moody in the Brook house and it's lighter and airier in the Russell house.”

“The key relationship between the old money and new money — the Brook-van Rhijn family and the Russell family — is important, and it’s scripted that the Brook sisters are watching this monstrosity [for the Russell family] being built across [the street] from them,” Bob explains. “It used to be the thing in New York that you didn’t want to display your wealth on the street; your brownstone should be like everyone else’s.” Another key contrast? “The quickest read on the difference between the two houses is [that] the old money wanted to be English and the new money wanted to be French.”

New York City’s Academy of Music (pictured here in an 1856 etching) opened for the 1854 season on the corner of 14th Street and Irving Place, and was described by the New York Times as a “tolerable faithful copy of the Opera House at Berlin.” Though it was the largest opera venue in the world when it was completed, it was not large enough for the up-and-coming Russell family, who couldn’t gain access to one of its coveted boxes. Bob’s team created some of those precious boxes and evoked the opulent venue for Season One: “I would say that [the scenic artists] worked on it for three or four weeks and it was on, I don't know, less than 30 seconds of screen time,” he recalls.

The Academy’s exclusivity — and the Russells’ frustration with that exclusivity — come to a head in Season Two, when the Russells and other newcomers throw their weight (and wealth) behind the creation of the “Old” Metropolitan Opera House (which opened in 1883). We suspect Bob’s team learned quite a bit about that development for this season's sets.

The fabulous, custom-upholstered backs Lisa’s team created for Ada and Agnes’s dining room chairs will never wear out — because they aren’t intended to come in contact with diners. “When you sat at a Victorian dinner table in the dining room, you were not supposed to have your back touch the upholstery. You were supposed to have a space between your back and the chair,” Bob explains.

These chairs are also taller than Victorian chairs would have been, thanks to the era’s cumbersome fashion trends. “That was for the women to sit with some of these enormous dresses,” Bob says. “[W]hen we have the actual, correct period furniture, someone will [frequently] come into a scene and they'll be trying to figure out what to do with their legs because it's much lower.” “We had to add feet to some of our furniture because it was just too low for our needs,” Lisa adds.

In some cases, Bob and Lisa found themselves dialing back on historical accuracy to avoid overwhelming the viewer. “In the Brook house, we’d have our paintings hung two paintings high, one over the other,” Bob says. “If you look at the research, [Victorians] would have four, sometimes five [rows of pictures on the walls], and it was just too much. It’s not meant to distract; it’s not meant to create visual confusion.”

A seemingly-simple arrangement like this one spoke volumes in 19th-century New York — and every arrangement on the show tells a story. “Part of the way it worked for wealthy people at the time was they often had their own greenhouse,” Bob says. “If they wanted to have flowers all year round they had to grow them. So that was a status symbol, particularly to have things that were a little bit out of season to let people know that, you know, ‘We’re more powerful and more important and we can have things that you can’t.’”

An exception to that rule? Carnations, which the Victorians adored. “Carnations don't look fancy to us anymore,” Bob says. “So if we did what was accurate and do carnations [in arrangements for the show], it would look to the contemporary eye like we kind of cheaped out.”

“We took some liberties, because otherwise it would get a little repetitive,” Lisa says. “[We’re] trying to create the response in the audience to what the response at the time period would have been,” Bob adds.

Lisa and Bob also took care to honor the characters’ enthusiasm for ornamentation and curios without tipping over into historically accurate chaos. “Especially with the Victorian period, especially with the Gilded Age era, it was so over the top that we really had to pull back a lot all the time,” Lisa recalls. “It was so distracting. There were so many patterns, so much going on, so so many knickknacks everywhere! So we really, really had to hold back a little bit.”

Given the choice of living in either Ada and Agnes’s comparatively subdued home or the Russells’ more ostentatious one, both Bob and Lisa say they’d be more comfortable with the "old" residence. “It's warmer,” Bob says. “It feels lived-in to me; I'm happiest on that set.”

“There's something so perfectly just homey and special about it,” Lisa adds. “When you walk in, you feel like you're in a real house.” Keep this staircase in mind as we move across the street to the Russells' new build.

The hard-charging railroad tycoon George Russell (played by Morgan Spector and based on the robber baron Jay Gould) and his ambitious wife Bertha (Carrie Coon, above), in turn, represent the incursion of new money. Their ostentation is a far cry from Ada and Agnes’s change-averse introversion. “It’s a very different thing when the Russells come along,” Bob says. “It’s like, ‘We’re here, we’re rich.’”

Modeled after French chateaux, the Russells’ limestone home is a dazzling visual challenge to the van Rhijn-Brooks’ brownstone across the street. “There was a figure named Mary Mason Jones, who was the person to build a limestone facade in Manhattan, and she built it on 57th Street,” Bob says. (The Russells and van Rhijn-Brooks face off across 61st Street.) “There's a character in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence that's modeled on this person who was the first pioneer to build uptown and wait for everybody to come up. So the Russells are part of that wave.”

Consider, then, the Russells’ staircase. “A friend of mine’s mother always used to say, ‘That’s very nice, but it’s not for people,’ and that’s kind of the way I feel about the Russell house,” Bob says. “It’s very impressive, but, like, walking down that staircase every day, would you feel like you were supposed to be royalty and you weren’t? I guess that’s the way they want to feel: as if they’re royalty.”

Bob based the look of this sweeping set — which serves as the interior of the Russells’ Newport mansion — on the wrought-iron stairs at Marble House, a Newport mansion William Vanderbilt commissioned for his wife, Alva. Like the real Alva, Bertha Russell climbs New York City’s social ladder by withholding a key invitation until Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor (played by Donna Murphy) pays her the respect of visiting her at her home. Mrs. Astor, known as "Lina" Astor to the socialites lucky enough to share her orbit, was creator of "The Four Hundred," the first social register. Mrs. Astor's favor ensures those who enjoy it access to the loftiest heights of elite Manhattan society.

Bertha’s bedroom in New York City is also modeled on a similar space in Alva Vanderbilt’s home. Its intricate window treatments, like treatments throughout the world of The Gilded Age, are a labor of love. “You’re working in these mansions [where] the windows are gigantic [and] you have to do the swags and the valances. There's often, you know, several layers to it — and then you have to do the layers behind it! I mean, every window was a giant project,” Lisa says. Happily, the team is able to use existing window treatments when they find themselves filming in otherwise-empty historic homes, “because no one's going to walk on them or touch them.” Bob explains. Speaking of, it's worth noting...

“The greatest irony of working on the show and going into all these fabulous historical homes is that we say, ‘This home is just perfect. Now we have to empty out all the furniture and remove the rugs,’” Bob says. “We [have] to re-dress a house that was already perfectly dressed!”

“The Brook-van Rhijns do some entertaining, but it’s just not on the scale of the Russells,” Bob notes. “What’s the biggest dinner [at Ada and Agnes’s brownstone], like, eight [people]? Whereas at the Russells’ you’d have 24. Or more!” The scale of the Russells’ dining table is so massive that Bob and Lisa approached it like a garden project. “I thought, ‘Hmm, maybe it can be like landscaping,’ and we decided to make a [dinner party] tablescape like a little topiary garden.”

Everyone who was anyone in 19th-century New York society summered in Newport, Rhode Island, and the storied destination's landmarks feature prominently in The Gilded Age. Opened in July 1880 as a destination for summer visitors with extremely deep pockets, the Newport Casino — now home of the International Tennis Hall of Fame — has extended cameos in Seasons One and Two. (The word "casino" has no connection to gambling here; it owes its roots to the Italian word casa and refers to a small villa, summer house or social club.) A dazzling example of American shingle-style architecture, the complex was built by firm McKim, Mead & White; within the world of the show, Stanford White is both the architect responsible for the Russells’ monumental home in Manhattan and young Larry Russell’s mentor.

In Season Two, “there is a big tennis tournament [set at the Casino], which is a daytime scene which features the historic figure of [Larry’s friend Dick] Sears, who was one of the early tennis champions,” Bob says. “And we shot all over the place and [set] a lot of action there.” A bit of trivia: The Casino also hosts the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals, and Bob Dylan once played on this Gilded Age set.

The centerpiece of Season Two’s Casino party combined historic inspiration and contemporary garden supplies. “[The Casino] was used for a party probably in the 1890s, and there was this gazebo that was in the middle of what was our tennis court during the daytime,” Bob explains. “So we both had to figure out how to get it there in a hurry and then how to not damage the grass.”

“We bought a modern gazebo and then [the] construction [crew] just put up all this gingerbread decoration around it,” Lisa adds. “It looked great!”

That summertime soiree’s main decorative element was far lighter than the gazebo at its center but just as tricky to execute. “We had to turn [the Casino] around and dress it as a big party in just a few hours,” Bob recalls. “And so we had to come up with a very solid plan on how to do it.”

“It was just the end of spring in Newport,” Lisa adds. “So you know, it could be very windy up there and it was tricky, but it came out really cool: We used all these colorful Chinese lanterns that we had custom-made in Thailand.”

Outdoing themselves is part of Bob and Lisa’s job — and they’re the first to admit that historical bashes put theirs to shame. “We had to do more than we did in Season One [for Season Two], and in Season One we did quite a lot. But the truth of the matter is that in the actual period they did things that were beyond what we do,” he says. “They did parties that were so elaborate and so decorated; they would transform the ballroom of their house to Venice and have different themes.” Could Bertha’s mansion host gondolas next season? It’s not off the (huge) table.

Speaking of scale, sourcing furniture and fabric for the show’s gargantuan interior spaces was a massive undertaking, both literally and figuratively. In a room like this one, “It wasn't one set of furniture; they would have multiple sets of furniture,” Bob explains. “And this idea of how much fabric we needed always came into play because they didn't [choose one] fabric for the sofa and then [a] contrasting fabric will be on this chair and then the ottoman will be in [another] fabric. They would have three complete sets of furniture and they would upholster everything in the same fabric. So in order to just do the upholstery in a room, we needed…”

“... 100 yards of fabric,” Lisa says.

Mrs. Astor inhabits a composite of three Newport mansions on the first season of The Gilded Age. “It was a little bit frustrating because we were next to what actually was [the real-life] Mrs. Astor's house," Bob says of Beechwood Mansion, which is privately owned and closed to the public. "But we weren't able to film there. So we shot the outside of the Chateau-sur-Mer [above] in Newport.” A second mansion doubles as the home’s interior, and a third property’s kitchen stands in for the servants’ floor.

Modeled after an 18th-century French château and completed in 1901, The Elms appears in The Gilded Age as the exterior of the Russell family’s Newport summer home, as renovated by the aforementioned Stanford White protégé, their son Larry. It was actually designed by architect Horace Trumbauer. Its construction cost the coal magnate Edward Julius Berwind — who was reputed in his day to be the world’s largest individual owner of coal-mining properties — a reported $1.4 million (the equivalent of about $50.6 million dollars today). Like the fictional George Russell, the Berwind had a reputation for refusing to bargain with employees.

Peggy Scott (played by Denée Benton), a brilliant young journalist, moves between the van Rhijn-Brooks’ home and her merchant-class parents’ brownstone in Brooklyn (above), a space rarely depicted in fiction or historical documents. “When we showed Peggy's world, we showed a world that's not seen very much, which is the elite Black community in New York in those years,” Lisa says. “And it was hard to find photographic research and images.”

“We had a really wonderful consultant, [Rutgers University professor] Dr. Erica Dunbar, who's very, very knowledgeable of the period,” Bob says. “And I think she actually first started to wake everybody up to the idea that there was this Black elite." Bob feels that no storyline illustrates this better than when Marian — Brook, Agnes and Ada’s niece — shows up at the Scott family home with a pair of old shoes in her bag, "assuming that they're poor." After realizing her error, she tries to cover her tracks, but it's too late and she's firmly (and deservedly) chewed out by Peggy.

The second season of The Gilded Age also draws a distinction between Peggy and her family’s lifestyle above the Mason-Dixon Line and what she experiences when she visits the South for the first time. “Peggy grew up within her world, a very privileged area of Brooklyn. And her parents were of the merchant class and, you know, upper middle class, probably,” Bob says. "And so she didn't have any idea of what the rest of the country was like, particularly for a Black person. And she also did not know what her parents had even experienced prior to their emigrating to Brooklyn.”

Places of business receive just as much attention as the characters’ homes. “Peggy's family owns a pharmacy in Brooklyn. And so she goes to see her father at the pharmacy, I think she goes to see him twice. And she has to walk through this pharmacy. And you either do it or you don't. You can't, you know, have a shelf with a couple products and then have her walk through that,” Bob says.

Happily, “my favorite set for Season Two was Mr. Scott's pharmacy,” Lisa says. “It was so much fun to source the different medications, all the graphics that we had to fabricate — [and it] was really fun to find store fixtures. That's always a cool thing to source. You have to find an old store and pretty much gut it and take all the fixtures.”

So, how realistic was that pharmacy Bob built and Lisa decorated? “When you do a street, you get to redo all the storefronts; a lot of the time you’re working with operating businesses,” Lisa explains. “We kept having people coming into the pharmacy trying to buy stuff,” Bob adds. “One guy specifically came in and [asked] what kind of cigars did we have, and I said, you know, fake ones.”

“My other favorite set was George’s private train car, which was definitely a symbol of wealth,” Bob recalls. “We had to make a private train car and it is very elaborate. It has [countless] little brackets and little things that are gilded, and there’s upholstered tufted fabric that’s along the ceiling line.”