Hasta La Ideas

This is great. If you were fortunate enough to have caught HBO‘s dramatized version of Grey Gardens recently (and you should have because it was one of the best films we’ve seen in a long, long time), you were likely as bowled over as we were by the production design work. As luck would have it, we ran across this great interview with Kalina Ivanov, the set designer, who took the two Edies’ estate across a slew of decades and various states of disrepair, all while maintaining remarkable accuracy to what you see in the original documentary. Ivanov talks about the difficulty in accurately recreating the house, as well as where she found the furniture, the various fabrics they used, etc. A must read for anyone who saw the film, we promise. Here’s a bit about the purchasing:

Most of the furniture was antique; all the paintings were from the period or earlier. We did buy some Chinese pieces of furniture and aged them to look older. We used different vendors from Toronto (the film was shot here) and Montreal. For the wallpaper, we used sources like Second Hand Rosein New York. We also made some of the furniture the beds in the yellow room are so well known from the documentary, they had to be re-created.