The Design Magic Behind the Oscar-Nominated Sets of Frankenstein

With awards season in full swing, it’s no surprise that Tamara Deverell, the production designer for Guillermo del Toro’s visual stunner Frankenstein, recently celebrated her first BAFTA Film win. For Netflix’s Best Picture contender, the Oscar nominee captained the construction of a 130-foot-long explorer’s boat trapped in an arctic homage to Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823–1824) and Owen Stanley’s HMS Terror watercolors. She designed the sets that form the lab where Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac, births The Creature, embodied by Jacob Elordi, who spent 10 hours in the makeup chair to resemble sculptor Marco D’Adrate’s Flayed St. Bartholomew (1562).

Half the fun of speaking with Deverell is dissecting those inspirations. A private tour of London’s Hunterian Museum to study the anatomical Evelyn Tables from the 1640s led to her team painstakingly crafting a fictional one of the lymphatic system (“It was like extreme knitting,” she says of the weeks-long process). Victor’s lab has nods to Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein illustrations, to ancient sculptures of fellow misunderstood monster Medusa, and to a patterned floor that Deverell and del Toro fell in love with at Hatfield House, north of London. The set for the Creature’s underground cell features a tiled, vaulted ceiling like the one she’d seen in photos of the indoor swimming pool at Mount Stuart House on the Scottish Isle of Bute.

“At some point, it felt very impossible what we were doing,” Deverell admits, “so it was nice for me to have that as a reference point, to know it exists.” Actually filming on location at other historic estates in England and Scotland added realism to the less fantastical scenes. Here, Deverell gives a tour of the houses that she and set decorator Shane Vieau utilized for the Frankenstein ancestral home and for the manor of Victor’s benefactor, Harlander, played by Christoph Waltz.

Gosford House

This neoclassical mansion in East Lothian, Scotland, is used for the estate’s exterior when young Victor’s intimidating father, played by Charles Dance, arrives home near the beginning of the movie and again for the ill-fated winter wedding toward its end. Filming those scenes on back-to-back days was its own challenge: “When the father arrives, it’s not winter. The next day, we had to do a huge snow dress, like all hands on deck, laying snow blankets and putting snow in, then the effects tying it all together,” says Deverell. “We ran around like crazy.”

She had an A-list of preferred locations and a B-list. Gosford House, which is also a popular wedding venue, was initially on the latter because she worried its majestic Marble Hall would be too bright for del Toro’s dark palette. She, however, correctly assumed the writer-director would go gaga for the grand double staircase, which makes the red gown worn by Victor’s mother even more striking. “I was like, ‘You know, it’s actually not white-white. It’s historic white, which is a very different quality,” she says.

Dunecht House

Deverell still remembers the first time she stepped into this 19th-century, 24-bedroom private estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. She saw the enormous ballroom that would make its screen debut as the library where Victor is schooled by his abusive father. “It was insane. Red walls, with streamers and kids’ toys everywhere—it had been used for a birthday party,” she says. “But the length of it had this really cinematic kind of beauty that Guillermo is drawn to. I knew as soon as we walked in that we were going to shoot there.” Her crew not only painted those walls, but they also lined them with bookshelves and redid the flooring that a leaking roof and indoor skateboarding had ruined. The owners were thrilled.

Wilton House

Del Toro originally wanted to build the Frankenstein dining room. Due to time, space, and budget constraints, he ultimately opted to employ The Double Cube Room at this Wiltshire, England estate, a favorite for period dramas ranging from 1975’s Barry Lyndon to Bridgerton and The Crown. Portraits by Sir Anthony van Dyck crown the 60’ x 30’ space. “You cannot touch those, so you get permission to show them as the Frankenstein ancestors,” says Deverell, noting that the massive 1634-35 peek at the 4th Earl of Pembroke and his family hangs above built-in seating that can’t be moved. She photographed the coffered ceiling, painted by Thomas de Critz to depict the story of Perseus, and used elements of it in Victor’s father’s bedroom—the one set they built for the Frankenstein villa.

Burghley House

Victor’s mother’s bedroom was staged in the Bow Room at this Elizabethan wonder in Lincolnshire, England. In 1697, French artist Louis Laguerre painted scenes from Roman history on the room’s walls and mythological figures on its ceiling. “It tied into our world so beautifully,” she says. One work of art that was added to the Bow Room: the Dark Angel figure sculpted by Mexican hyperrealist artist Ruben Orozco Loza. “Guillermo painted a lot of that himself,” Deverell adds.

Italian Baroque artist Antonio Verrio, meanwhile, painted the mythological murals in the Heaven Room, which receives screen time as a servant walks the length of it to get to a thirsty young Victor. “Guillermo choreographed this to show how big the villa was and the pomposity of this milk being delivered,” says Deverell. “We loved that room. We actually had another scene we wanted to do there, but in the end, it was cut from the script.”

Burghley House’s Great Hall stands in for Harlander’s impressive dining room, although the crew had to build their own giant table rather than use the one that is said to have hosted Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. “It’s funny, because we did have an incredible amount of food, and when we went to film it, Guillermo just kept stripping it back. He wanted it very minimal,” says Deverell. “It was kind of operatic, which is Guillermo.”

Hospitalfield House

The fact that the Picture Gallery of this Arbroath, Scotland, estate serves as the room in which Harlander attempts to photograph a memento mori is poetic. Hospitalfield House has been a gathering place for artists since the mid-19th century and still offers residencies today. “It felt very Harlander, all the wood and the paintings hung higgledy-piggledy all over the place,” says Deverell. “What I loved is we were supporting the arts by shooting there, giving the money to the right people.”

Del Toro spent time talking to the young artists there. He even allowed them to watch the filming.