On Set, "Wuthering Heights" Is as Romantic as it Is Fantastical

This month, everyone will be packing their bags and bracing their hearts to journey to Wuthering Heights. Director Emerald Fennell, the writer-director behind the films like Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, brings her distinct visual style and sensibility to this adaptation of Emily Bronte’s famed 1847 novel, blending period inspirations with contemporary ones to capture the heightened feelings of reading — and watching — this tale of the passionate, turbulent romance between Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) on the Yorkshire moors.

Oscar-nominated production designer Suzie Davies (Conclave), who previously worked with Fennell on Saltburn, didn’t need to lean on her own recollections of reading the novel when it came to creating its visual world on screen: it all burst forth from Fennell’s script. Her “Wuthering Heights” is conceived through the lens of a 14-year-old reading the book for the first time. That, Davies explains, meant their design choices weren’t bound to historical accuracy. “Although we acknowledge the period aspect of the film, we then went and twisted everything,” she explains. “So proportions are all out, textures are exaggerated. If we could do Smell-o-Vision, you'd be able to smell it. You can almost touch it.”

Ahead of the film’s arrival in theaters on Feb. 13, Davies took HGTV.com into its storied country houses, which she’s packed with bold color, varied texture, and surprising touches (look out for the arresting red floor in the library). Keep reading for a grand tour of Thrushcross Grange and the titular Wuthering Heights.

The film’s two big sets, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, were built on stages at Sky Studios Elstree in Hertfordshire, England, where Davies filled the spaces with not just the homes but the environment around them. “There's a yard, there's stables, there's rock formations, and we wanted it to feel like a composite set,” she says. “You can gallop up in a horse and carriage through the Gothic arch into the yard, hop out, go and have a cup of tea inside on the fire that's practical, walk into the parlor, and then go up to bed and have a snooze whilst the horses are eating hay in the stables across the way.”

This parlor in Wuthering Heights is one example of the inside and outside merging together. Its imposing fireplace is made to look as if someone chiseled it out of the rock face behind the house. “We gave it this sort of sweaty feel,” she notes. “We wanted the rock to feel like it was sweating or bleeding or crying. Basically, everything has an emotional aspect to it.” The triple-height ceilings and checkered floor add to the moodiness, as does the “Doom painting” depicting the Seven Deadly Sins. “It gives this unease — we don’t reference it, you only catch little bits of it, but it just gives that heaviness to the room.”

This space at Wuthering Heights was constructed to make Heathcliff — and Elordi, the notably tall actor who plays him — feel out of place. “We designed it so that Heathcliff could never stand upright,” Davies explains. “We made all the doors and ceilings just an inch too short for him. He needed to feel uncomfortable in the environment, sort of subconsciously."

The door at the end also opens up into the parlor, contrasting this compressing space with one that allows far more room to breathe.

The vision for Cathy’s bedroom at Wuthering Heights was already vivid in Fennell’s script — including the dolls suspended from the ceiling — but Davies amplified it with touches to make the room feel lived in. She changed the size of the floorboards to evoke the space going through many years of use, and the walls maintain the moisture from the rocks and moody Yorkshire weather. The window looks out onto the stable, which was important as well.

“We wanted this whimsical, sort of heightened sense,” Davies says. “Everybody who worked on this just bought their A-game. Even the line of poetry on the end of the bed was a big decision. What color should it be? Let's change one letter to red. We had little highlights of red dotted throughout the film. It was really, really fun to do.”

Heathcliff’s bedroom sits above the stable block — the one Cathy could see from her room — on the composite set, so you could actually walk up from the stables and enter the room. The diamond-shaped window looks back at Cathy’s bedroom across the yard, while the one behind the bed looks out on the rockface.

Parts of the ceiling were removed so that director of photography Linus Sandgren could let shafts of light into the space, and also rain: when it rained, Davies says, it really did rain into this room and down to the stables below. The bed also isn’t really a bed: as the production designer explains it, they made it out to look as if Heathcliff found a spare door, some animal skins, and a chair, and fashioned it all into a place for himself to sleep.

This space at Thrushcross Grange, with its shiny red floor, is one of Davies’ favorite rooms in the film. It actually was a set they almost didn’t build. It came later in the process, after a lot of the other spaces in the home had been developed, so it inherited elements from “all over the place.” The hands motif — which is “a very Victorian thing” that Fennell “turns up the dials on” — can be seen in the fireplace mantel, wall sconces, and in hands making shadow puppets above the bookshelves.

Davies also drew inspiration from discussions costume designer Jacqueline Durran (Atonement, Little Women) had with Fennell about a dress Robbie wears in the film, with a red PVC-like skirt that gives way to a white bodice. “We felt like it'd be really interesting if we could make the floor merge into the dress,” Davies says. “So the dress probably came first, and then my design responded to the dress — that never happens, really. But it worked perfectly.”

“I just built the biggest staircase I could,” Davies said, looking at a snapshot of this room at the center of Thrushcross Grange — which again brings through that theme of red, evoking the beating heart of the house.

The color extends from the walls up to the ceiling, where a stunning chandelier hangs encircled by a group of hands, carrying over the motif seen in the library. Even the fake fur underneath the staircase is red, an idea that came from a discussion with Fennell. Davies had initially envisioned covering it in a shiny plaster, but the director wondered if they could do anything more textural. “We had some fun [with it],” she shares, adding, “It sort of looks like a mouth as well, a mouth and teeth.”

While the red and white is striking, there are also subtle details in this room that help tell the house’s story: there’s a trompe l’oeil painted on the floor depicting a map of the entire estate. It was originally supposed to appear in the dining room, Davies adds, but ultimately landed here.

Looking at the rich pattern on the walls, you’d never know those crystals could have wound up as rocks at Wuthering Heights. The design for this drawing room went through a few iterations — a silver, a damask wallpaper, a gold option, a cream — before landing on these inviting shades of blue. The crystal on the wall, meanwhile, is actually vac form: a plastic that you can form into various shapes. This one was a prototype for the rock face that happened to be lying around Davies’ studio and caught her director’s eye. “Emerald kept seeing it, going, ‘I quite like that,’” she remembers.

So she crafted it into these geode-type formations, layering them over a shot silk. The result gives an ombre effect, making the walls look darker or paler depending on where you look. Initially, Davies had a wooden floor in this room, but then switched that for wall-to-wall carpet in the same blue, and set decorator Charlotte Dirickx reupholstered the furniture to match. Davies also calls out the coordinating lamps, which resemble the traditional British candies known as “boiled sweets.”

Here we see the silver decor that ultimately didn’t get used in the drawing room, with everything from the walls and ceiling to the framed mirror to the dollhouse at the end of the room all coordinating.

Davies says that working with Fennell, with her “infectious” ambition, “draws out the creativity that I didn't know existed.”

“We spent a good month, maybe six weeks, trying to find that visual language, because I kept thinking, ‘I've got it,’ and then she'd bring in references from all over the place,” she adds. “I think she said: think of a mash-up of brutalist references, Kubrick, period drama. It was such a fantastic combination that it took me a beat to get what she was talking about. She kept bringing more vision, more visual images. Eventually we started landing in this recreation of her interpretation of this book, and that was extraordinary.”

Through conversations with costume designer Durran, it became clear that the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), whom Cathy marries, “was going to be a green sort of guy.” His bedroom carries that through, with the ornate bed and lush shag pile carpet adding layers of opulence to the green walls.

The room was decorated using an interior design process known as gainage. “The panels are all the same architectural proportions as every other room, but they're covered in this amazing fabric that my wonderful set decorator Charlotte found, and that's just on every surface,” Davies explains. “It was the hardest thing for my team to do, because you have to be really neat. And we even did it over the fireplace, over the doors, over all the moldings.” The bed, found at an auction in Scotland, got the same treatment as well.

Every room in Thrushcross Grange shares similar architectural details — highly polished ceilings, with the hand-adorned ceiling roses already seen in the ground floor hall, and the proportions for paneling and windows. But the "Wuthering Heights" team also knew they wanted each space to have a different texture, so they’d all stand apart.

This bedroom belongs to Edgar’s sister, Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver), which Davies wanted to evoke a youthful (but still lavish) feel. “When we came to Isabella's room, we wanted it to feel like a teenager's room — just before that sort of sexual awakening, you know, like an early teenager's room. How perfect could that be? And her father wants her to have absolutely everything that she could ever want.”

Purple is not a color Davies typically uses on set, but here it’s deployed to great effect with these walls of folded purple silk. Set decorator Dirickx also “had the best time ever” finding all the fabrics and knicknacks that fill the room, like small seashell boxes that don’t fit the historical period but perfectly embody Fennell’s vision. “The deliberateness in all of the design is like an extension of Emerald's memory of when she read that book,” Davies notes. “It all goes through this lens. So everything is slightly heightened, rather than period correct. It's to evoke a feeling from you.”

The description for Cathy’s bedroom at Thrushcross was that it “was covered in skin that looked like Cathy’s skin” — which Davies thought sounded brilliant, but, how was she going to do it?

The answer came from a swatch of PVC plastic that the set designer had at her desk. She’d used a version of it for an early moment in the film where a character is behind a screen, and people were always touching it when they’d stop by her office. Davies remembered there was a light flesh-toned color for one of the swatches, which was tactile and see-through, and she began experimenting with how it would look stretched out over images of her own skin. Then, they tried it with Robbie’s.

“We got Margot to send photographs of her freckles, the skin on your forearm where you can see the veins, things like that,” she continued. “We had lots of images of her arms and legs that my brilliant graphics team blew up to bigger than life size, and then we just slightly enhanced and made the veins stand out a little bit more, and then stretched this fabric over these panels.”