How to Recreate The Five Star Weekend’s Dreamy Nantucket Layering In Your Own Summer Retreat
The production designer and set decorator behind Jennifer Garner’s new Peacock series share where they shopped, what wall colors and paper they chose, and which artists captured their vibe
The Five-Star Weekend is the closest thing we’ll get to a coastal-chic Nancy Meyers movie this summer. Just don’t say that to the makers of Jennifer Garner’s new Peacock series based on Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket-set bestseller.
“When we were first talking, it was like, ‘We cannot do a Nancy Meyers show,” set decorator Barbara Cassel says of her early conversations with production designer Scott Dougan. The picture-perfect décor for the writer/director’s odes to the Hamptons and Santa Barbara (Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated) was inspiration, for sure. But they knew they needed a different touch for the home of Garner’s Hollis Shaw, a grieving cookbook author and lifestyle influencer who invites four pals to her stunning island estate overlooking Dionis Beach.
“I’m from Massachusetts and Barbara went to Boston University, so a lot of the design came from this sense of place and loving the place,” Dougan says, “both Nantucket and all of the patterns and colors and textures of that classical New England world.”
While exterior scenes were filmed on location at 45 Eel Point Road, interiors were constructed on soundstages in Los Angeles. Cassel perused West Coast prop houses and antique shops such as The Agoura Antique Mart to dress the sets, but island-themed accessories were also shipped in from local gems such as Nantucket Looms, Bodega, Nantucket House Antiques, Antiques Depot, Four Winds Gifts, It’s a Shore Thing, and Hospital Thrift Shop. “If it was a sailboat, a lobster…” says Cassel. “Everything is fishing and beach and fabulous.”
Once they established Hollis’s late husband, played by Josh Hamilton, was an avid birder, feathered friends became another prominent motif, with a flock of gulls that Cassel collected from shop-to-shop perched on small individual shelves on an office wall and John James Audubon’s American Flamingo hanging in a game room. “That’s one of my favorite things in the whole world,” Dougan says of the hot-pink print.
Art was a particular muse for the production designer. He saw the work of painter Fairfield Porter, whose view of Maine’s Penobscot Bay adorns a mantle, as a benchmark. “There’s a way in which he understands this relationship between the plush, homey lived-in suburban world that is very much Nancy Meyers and the sort of harshness of a windswept, sunbeaten island,” he explains. Images by American photographers such as Joel Meyerowitz (whose iconic 1978 Cape Light photo book is reissued this month), Mitch Epstein, Stephen Shore, and Nan Goldin were among his research, Dougan notes, and you’ll spot tomes on artist N. C. Wyeth and architect Robert A.M. Stern on a table.
From left: Chloë Sevigny, Regina Hall, D’Arcy Carden and Gemma Chan face Jennifer Garner
Abstract landscapes by Massachusetts-born artist Eric Aho, meanwhile, were selected to line the hallways of Hollis’s home, while others from Brooklyn-based Shane Neufeld punctuate the dining and mud rooms. A special Sheridan Lord work crowns Hollis’s bed. “It’s the rooftop of a white house. Is it Nantucket? I don’t know. But it’s gorgeous, and it gives you the same feeling,” Cassel says. “This wasn’t just about finding art that the colors worked. Every piece meant something.”
Embracing what Dougan describes as the “severity” of New England led to bold color choices on the walls, which pop with the use of Farrow & Ball’s Stone Blue and Benjamin Moore’s Bainbridge Blue and Fair Isle Blue. (For fans of the dreamy forest green cabinets in the kitchen of Hollis’s Wellesley, Massachusetts home, that’s Benjamin Moore’s Cedar Path).
Wallpapers catch the eye, too. Bathrooms are covered in whimsical prints like Schumacher’s Canopy – Multi-Birds collaboration with Abel Macias and Susan Hable’s Floating Lotus for Soicher Marin, while Chesapeake’s Imperial Garden Green Botanical and Leeward Sailboat in navy help make the sunroom and a guest room cheery and timeless.
For textiles, Cassel visited the showrooms at the Pacific Design Center to pull fabrics — from Brunschwig & Fils, Cowtan & Tout, Clarence House, and Pindler, among others — that could be used for custom bedding and pillows or to reupholster furniture. The day before they started filming in the cozy living room set, Cassel realized their enthusiasm at having chosen a rug with the exact same colors as the memorable Lee Jofa Nympheus Print on the lounge chairs had been misguided. “It’s too busy, it’s too much pattern, it’s overpowering the room,” she remembers thinking. She quickly nabbed two additional options and laid them out for her set dressers: “I’m like, ‘A? B? or C? Vote on it!’” she recalls with a laugh. “And we all went with B, from Lawrence of La Brea, which was subtle, had a great texture, and just pulled everything together. I was kind of panicked, but it worked out.”
With Hollis’s Nantucket kitchen stocked with a Wolf range, Sub-Zero fridge, KitchenAid wood bowl stand mixer, and Williams Sonoma dinnerware, the ladies didn’t have to leave the house. But they do, frequenting spots like The Chicken Box, a real Nantucket roadhouse recreated on a soundstage, and a spa that was built with nods to the wellness spaces at The Nantucket Hotel and The White Elephant (The Summer House in Siasconset doubled as the spa exterior).
Anytime Cassel herself felt the need for rejuvenation, she looked to her personal inspiration, Ralph Lauren Home. “When I was having a day of block, I would just go online, I have Ralph Lauren books around my place,” she says. “I have a lot of Ralph in my heart.”