With their expert blend of factual and faux, the production design team for “Palm Royale” made a very believable make-believe world.
That world is 1969 Palm Beach, the setting for the Apple TV+ comedy about the lengths the high-society set will go to preserve power and status. Starring Kristen Wiig, Ricky Martin, Laura Dern and Carol Burnett as grande dame Norma Dellacorte, the series plunges into a world of vast wealth and intrigue.
Beginning in early 2022, production designer Jon Carlos led a Los Angeles-based team including set decorator Ellen Reede that conjured opulent mansions, a pristine country club, elaborate galas and even the Apollo space capsule.
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“We set some fundamental rules for ourselves in terms of design,” Carlos said. The teams assigned color palettes for each character and an aesthetic divide between earthy West Palm Beach and glittery Palm Beach.
“In Palm Beach, all colors were very luxurious and rich but muted so the women stood forward,” Carlos said. “That was an intimate collaboration with our costume designer, Alix Friedberg. Every single costume and set we discussed in insane depth. For instance, if a character sat in a chair, we knew that the chair matched or complemented what that character was wearing.” They even calibrated the stripes on upholstery so it wouldn’t detract from characters and their costumes.
“We’re neurotic,” Carlos half-joked.
Their Palm Beach, especially the Dellacorte mansion, reflected the maximalist, international style of decorator Tony Duquette and his famed Dawnridge Beverly Hills estate. The production’s colors and feel drew from society photographer Slim Aarons, who documented the international rich and famous in the trappings of their wealth.
“The Dellacorte mansion was one of the most beautiful sets I’ve seen in my entire life and I’ve been doing this for 30 years now,” Friedberg said.
The palettes help tell the story too. The set for Norma Dellacorte’s mansion was drenched in dark, rich greens and decorated as if she’d hired Duquette himself. Her assistant, Robert (Martin), lives in her pool house, which has Norma’s green walls, “but the couches are orange because he’s a West Palm Beach transplant,” Carlos said.
In an “only in L.A.” moment, while Reede was shopping for set pieces at the Beverly Hills estate sale of Yvette Mimieux, who died in January 2022, she discovered that the actor was friends with Duquette.
“He had helped design her place. Many of the items she had were perfect for what we were looking for, so much so that Norma’s bed was Yvette’s bed,” Reede said.
Simultaneously, Carlos was scouting for a particular style of mansion for the character Evelyn Rollins, played by Allison Janney.
“Our location manager sends me a text and said, I think I found a house that you might be interested in,” Carlos recalled. “She sends me a link to the exact estate sale that Ellen is shopping as we were texting.”
Like a magician finally able to reveal secrets to his tricks, Carlos delights in describing how he and the team created their stunning sets.
When an outdoor pool location became untenable for the Havana Nights ball in Episode 4, Carlos transformed the Emerald Ballroom at L.A.’s Biltmore Hotel. When Wiig’s character Maxine Simmons enters, she gasps at the spectacle. Costumed dancers sway from the decorated balconies while dozens more swirl across a bridge that spans a reflection pool with fountains.
Structural engineers had to determine if the ballroom could take the weight of the water, pumped in from a tanker truck. “It wasn’t just blowing up a kiddie pool,” he said.
The scene also included palm trees with fronds made from custom-dyed ombré ostrich feathers assembled to stretch 8 feet, created by L.A.’s Mother Plucker Feather Co.
The series was full of big production challenges, like the Moroccan party tent in the final episode. Carlos first sketched it on a napkin; five weeks later, a precisely orchestrated team built the elaborate tent, including a team of seven who draped the frame with 7,000 yards of fabric. It spanned most of two Paramount stages.
Central to the action is the lush Palm Royale pool, which was filmed at a country club in arid Camarillo, Calif. “Everything you see is basically a build around it,” Carlos said. Reede coordinated custom finishes for the pool’s cabanas, furniture and for the umbrellas, custom, period-correct frames and fabric.
Reede supplied many details to make the ‘60s sets come alive, even stuffing hotel dresser drawers with vintage postcards. She enhanced the country club plates with individually applied logos; reupholstered vintage furniture to match the color palette; found lightweight towels to match those of the era; and added props to subtly tell each character’s story.
At Norma Dellacorte’s mansion, a wall is covered in exotic puppets because, “Norma is the puppeteer of Palm Beach,” Reede said.
Janney’s former showgirl character populates her mansion with taxidermy birds who reflect the plumage of her old career and because, “she is kind of a prisoner in her birdcage of a house with her marriage.”
“We created our own taxidermy flamingo because there was not a taxidermied flamingo to be found in this town,” Reede said.
The father-daughter duo discuss how ‘Palm Royale’ brought them together on screen, how Bruce Dern doesn’t rehearse, and the ‘Dernsie’ that made it into the show.
The team made smaller moments matter as much as the big ones. For the first time, Laura Dern and her father Bruce Dern acted together, playing father and daughter. She’s an activist; he’s a hippie tycoon.
“She wanted to make it a memorable experience in terms of what surrounded him,” Carlos said. “She gave us a lot of information about Bruce personally and what would be fun things to include. When he used to run a lot, his diet consisted of olives, Coca-Cola and sheet cake.”
So in a meta twist, the team wove those odd, real-life items of his history into this fantasy story, where they looked fresh out of 1969.
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