Touring The Set Of ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Season 3
Today AD joins production designer Patrick Howe for an in-depth set tour of ‘Only Murders in the Building’ season 3. The hit show starring Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short takes place at the Arconia, a classic early 20th-century New York City apartment building full of mystery. Join Patrick for a closer look at your favorite characters’ apartments and the intricate work of bringing them to life on screen.
Season 3 of #OnlyMurdersintheBuilding is now streaming on Hulu. New episodes Tuesdays.
Season 3 of #OnlyMurdersintheBuilding is now streaming on Hulu. New episodes Tuesdays.
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00:00 (gentle music)
00:03 Hi, my name is Patrick Howe,
00:04 and I'm the production designer of seasons two and three
00:07 of "Only Murders in the Building."
00:09 I'm gonna show you around, let's get to it.
00:11 (gentle music)
00:14 Our apologies if you hear any additional sounds or noises
00:17 while we're taking our tour.
00:19 We're in the middle of preparations for scenes next week
00:22 with lots of construction and painting.
00:24 (gentle music)
00:27 Welcome to the primary hallway of the Arconia.
00:30 As you remember in the beginning of season two,
00:33 we introduced the architect of this building,
00:35 Archibald Carter.
00:36 He was famous for developing this building.
00:39 It's an entire block on 86th and Broadway.
00:43 It was chock full of secret passageways
00:46 and secret elevators.
00:48 - Bunny had a secret elevator?
00:50 Where does it go, hell?
00:51 - It's modeled on late 19th century architecture
00:55 in New York City.
00:55 This is a very sort of common look
00:57 of these mosaic tile floors,
00:59 which we wanted to carry throughout the common areas
01:02 of the Arconia.
01:03 - Did Jim poison you?
01:05 - No, he didn't poison me.
01:06 - We have to get him to a hospital.
01:08 (gentle music)
01:10 - You've seen this before from season one and two.
01:16 You'll see it a lot in season three.
01:18 - You can't sell this.
01:19 Wasn't this your biggest show?
01:21 - No, no, this is my biggest flop.
01:23 - Oh, there were bigger flops.
01:26 - Oh, no, no.
01:27 - He does have a closet dedicated,
01:29 some accessories for Winnie and leashes, et cetera.
01:32 If you look real closely at some of these accessories,
01:34 you'll notice that they're all a nod to films
01:37 that Martin Short and Steve Martin have been in.
01:39 Oliver, we know as a Broadway director.
01:44 - Not squirt, not tinkle, splash.
01:48 - And this is a different look for this season.
01:51 About episode three, we start moving furniture
01:53 out of the living room and putting it everywhere else
01:55 in the apartment in order to make room for Oliver
01:59 to rehearse his show.
02:00 Hence all of this furniture stacked up around the perimeter.
02:04 And we are going to kick ass with this show.
02:07 You hear me, Oliver?
02:08 - Oh my God.
02:09 - The "Death Rattle" musical takes place in Nova Scotia.
02:12 Some of the characters are these triplets
02:14 and this is the bassinets of the era
02:17 that the show takes place in.
02:19 (upbeat music)
02:21 Hi, welcome to Ben Glenroy's penthouse apartment
02:26 at the Arconia, formerly Sting's apartment in season one
02:30 and another version of it for Amy Schumer in season two.
02:34 And Amy Schumer has kindly sublet her apartment
02:37 to the character Ben Glenroy played by Paul Rudd.
02:41 - Let me just.
02:41 - Ben is a famous Hollywood actor
02:48 known for a lot of franchise movies.
02:50 One of the many movie roles that he's famous for
02:54 is playing the character, Cobra.
02:56 - Cobra doesn't live in the gray.
02:58 Is he a Cobra?
02:59 Yeah.
03:00 Is he a bro?
03:01 Yeah.
03:02 - By day, he's a zoologist and by night he converts
03:05 to a snake where he can help police solve crime.
03:08 Our wonderfully talented scenic artist department
03:11 did the sculpting and painting of this from scratch.
03:14 And there's snakes tucked away in this apartment
03:17 represented in different artworks and sculptures.
03:19 Initial directive from our show runner
03:23 in the first script about his apartment
03:26 was that it had a lot of memorabilia,
03:28 that it was the equivalent
03:30 of a Hard Rock Hall of Fame volume.
03:33 There's Kansas City Chief and Kansas City Royal jerseys
03:36 that are framed and that's really from Paul Rudd's hometown.
03:39 So let's step further back into this next room.
03:42 That's got many more treats inside.
03:44 Fictitious movie Chinook Rising,
03:47 a positive spin on the Iraq War
03:49 and commissioned portrait from George Bush,
03:52 who now paints a portrait of Ben Glenroy done in Legos.
03:57 It's no surprise that we need a lot of places to hide.
03:59 In season two, there was all of the story
04:01 about the secret passageways in the Arconia.
04:04 Of this season, Mabel and Talbert
04:06 are investigating in here.
04:07 Somebody else enters the room.
04:08 They need somewhere to quick, quick hide.
04:10 So they hop in the armoire.
04:12 There was initially a scene of opening the doors
04:15 and them starting to step in.
04:16 And you see the doors closing with them inside.
04:19 Of course, the rest of the scene taking place
04:21 inside an armoire with the back removed,
04:23 the wall behind this removed, the sides removed,
04:26 so that you can get a multitude of shots of them.
04:29 From inside, they could part the curtains this way
04:32 and camera could get their point of view
04:34 and shoot right through the curtains
04:36 to see Dickie walking around in the other room.
04:38 [upbeat music]
04:41 This is Charles's front foyer area.
04:46 Leads to several rooms of the complex.
04:49 We've got the informal family room here
04:51 that goes right into the kitchen.
04:53 - Is that blood?
04:54 - Unlike in actual homes and apartments,
05:00 our ceilings can fly out for lighting purposes.
05:03 So it's an elaborate system of supporting with beams
05:06 and then sections of ceiling that can come out.
05:09 We also have the living room as well.
05:12 Debuted season one, designed by Curt Deitch
05:15 and decorated by Rich Murray, still decorating the show.
05:18 It's just really a beautiful job of a very controlled palette
05:21 that works for Steve Martin very well.
05:23 This palette of blues and grays.
05:25 - Still, still, still.
05:28 - They found this fabric for the sofa
05:33 and that was a good key to all the colors
05:35 of the whole apartment.
05:36 Outside these windows, we have photographic backdrops
05:40 of buildings on the Upper West Side.
05:42 The Arconia has windows on all four sides
05:44 and so it's common that nicer apartments
05:46 have at least two exposures.
05:48 [upbeat music]
05:51 This is the front door of Mabel's we've all known
05:56 for the last couple of seasons
05:58 and come on into this new foyer.
06:01 In episode 10 of season two,
06:04 we saw her starting to paint over her mural,
06:07 which was a big step about moving forward
06:09 and I'm gonna make some changes in my life
06:11 that is gonna include renovating the apartment.
06:13 So coming through here, this is the new dining room area.
06:18 Leads us right into the living room.
06:21 If you recall in seasons one and two,
06:23 this is a completely gutted apartment.
06:25 - You're living here in the middle of a renovation?
06:28 - Shh, please focus.
06:29 - What we saw was a raw fireplace
06:31 and raw stud walls and bare plaster
06:35 and now it's been completely freshened up, if you will.
06:38 What I wanted to do was maintain the openness.
06:42 It was a very successful design from season one
06:44 where because of the open stud walls,
06:47 you had a lot of depth into the bedroom
06:48 and the set was very spacious looking.
06:51 Even though it needed to be finished,
06:52 I did not wanna do a solid wall here
06:54 so I came up with this shutter system, light and airy
06:57 and it looks very elegant this way.
06:59 Mabel in story did design this herself
07:02 and had the renovation executed by professionals
07:05 but it has this look not so much tailored to her own tastes
07:09 but a universal taste that makes it marketable to sell.
07:13 Behind me now is the wall that in the previous two seasons
07:17 had the mural that Mabel painted as an artist
07:20 that reflected characters in the building
07:22 and I wanted to maintain or give a special tribute to that,
07:27 hence this gilded frame.
07:28 We have a new wallpaper inside it,
07:30 a print of building facades that's very, very similar
07:34 to the facade of the building we use for the Arconia.
07:38 I think there's six or seven patterns of wallpaper.
07:41 Most of them have this very organic feel about them.
07:44 That does tie to Mabel's personality about her artistry
07:48 and concern for the environment and such
07:50 and without giving too much away,
07:53 let's just say you will see her in bed with somebody
07:57 later on, I'm not gonna say more than that right now.
07:59 Come this way.
08:00 We can cut through any number of these spaces.
08:06 Here we're going out of the set now.
08:08 The messy backstage, don't tell anyone.
08:11 A backdrop for Charles's, this is all very compact.
08:15 You have to maximize the square footage
08:16 of every bit of real estate to fit all your sets in.
08:19 So come on in, I'm gonna give you a very brief sneak peek
08:24 of Loretta's studio apartment.
08:26 Loretta's played by Meryl Streep.
08:28 She's been a gift wrapper at Macy's for 40 years
08:31 and always wanted to be an actress.
08:35 - Where have you been?
08:36 - Thanks to Oliver, she gets her big break finally,
08:44 but she has a modest lifestyle,
08:46 lives in this small studio apartment,
08:48 definitely a rent controlled apartment.
08:50 In episode five, she's invited Oliver over for dinner.
08:53 She normally cooks her pork chops in the microwave,
08:56 which has gone out,
08:57 and so she's forced to cook it in the oven.
09:00 This is kind of a lot of kitchen for a studio apartment,
09:02 but I needed to create it open in this way
09:05 so that we could actually film that cooking part.
09:08 Loretta has been a gift wrapper at Macy's
09:11 for most of her adult life.
09:13 So we've just done some nods of some ribbon motifs
09:15 of this copper bow here.
09:17 There's a quilt holder on the wall there.
09:19 There's some other nods to Meryl's career.
09:23 She has a lot of books.
09:24 She studies plays and theater history.
09:27 When your whole life is here for 40 years,
09:29 then you need to have as much storage as possible.
09:31 This raised platform area,
09:33 these are all ways to like sort of maximize your space.
09:36 When we're finished,
09:37 this will strike a perfect balance of modest,
09:40 yet attractive and charming and tasteful space.
09:43 Welcome to the Gooseberry Theater dressing room complex.
09:51 So the Gooseberry Theater is a fictional Broadway theater
09:55 in the heart of Midtown,
09:57 like most all of the other theaters
09:59 built at the turn of the century.
10:01 When we see the house of the theater,
10:04 it has a very Moorish style.
10:05 It's very opulent.
10:06 Above us, these vintage overhead fixtures
10:12 have a theatrical quality themselves
10:14 as if possibly from a movie palace era.
10:17 So the research of all these theaters
10:19 really reflected just how old they are
10:22 and how long they've been around
10:23 and that they have some original elements
10:26 of hardware and plumbing from very far back.
10:30 So let's have a peek at Kimber's dressing room.
10:33 Kimber is an ingenue on the show.
10:36 Very excited for this Broadway part that she's gotten.
10:39 She's youthful, energetic.
10:41 - I didn't realize we had any love scenes.
10:43 - We're in the middle of one right now.
10:45 - Oh.
10:46 - It was important to me to reflect the characters
10:49 that we have in the show in their dressing rooms.
10:51 The mirrors do what we call gimbling.
10:53 So they tilt a little bit
10:55 and we can tilt them in both directions.
10:56 That helps with camera reflections
10:58 as we're filming in each of these rooms.
11:00 And of course, this is a very small space.
11:02 So each of these walls breaks away as well.
11:04 The ceiling stays put, but we can pull the walls away.
11:08 Kimber has a beauty product line.
11:10 You'll learn in the story.
11:11 She's actually camped out here quite a bit
11:13 with her side business.
11:16 So let's have a peek into Charles's dressing room.
11:18 It's right this way.
11:19 When we were in Charles's apartment earlier,
11:23 we saw all of the blue colorways of the living room.
11:26 Steve Martin looks good in these colors.
11:28 So I repeated those qualities here
11:30 to tag the consistency to this character.
11:33 And so we have these blue colorways of flooring
11:35 and furniture for his dressing room.
11:38 Here, what you see is the remnants
11:41 of Ben Glenroy's dressing room from opening night.
11:45 It's been preserved this way
11:47 because we were already into story past opening night.
11:50 These were all formerly fresh flowers,
11:53 of course, from opening night, but some time has passed.
11:56 So these are real arrangements.
11:58 Easiest way to make them look dead
12:00 is to have the filming time to let them die naturally.
12:03 So this concludes our set tour of season three
12:08 of "Only Murders in the Building."
12:10 Thanks for stopping by Architectural Digest.
12:13 (upbeat music)
12:15 [MUSIC]