Inside The Four Seasons Season 2 Destinations
The Netflix comedy series’s production designer and set decorator detail their efforts from the Catskills to the Italian Alps
The Four Seasons, Tina Fey’s ode to middle-aged friendship, marriage, and tension-filled group trips, has returned to Netflix for a second season. Over the course of the eight episodes, the gang—couples Kate and Jack (played by Fey and Will Forte) and Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani), along with bereaved Anne (Kerri Kenney) and pregnant Ginny (Erika Henningsen)—take sojourns to New York’s Catskills and Hudson Valley, the Jersey Shore, and Italy. Here, production designer Sharon Lomofsky and set decorator Jennifer Greenberg share what viewers tempted to follow in the characters’s footsteps need to know.
1. You Can’t Really Stay at the Midnight Ramble Motel
The first outing is a spring trek to the Catskills to spread the ashes of Nick (Steve Carell). Due to unforeseen circumstances we won’t spoil, they find themselves on lockdown in the main building of the Midnight Ramble, a classic ‘50s motel. The restaurant at the sprawling Blue Fox Motel in Narrowsburg, New York, was an ideal double with its large windows that overlook a road, distance from guest rooms and pool, and a cozy hearth to boot. The interior, however, needed a more vivid midcentury vibe, which sent Greenberg scouring Hudson Valley thrift stores such as Newburgh Vintage Emporium and The Antique Warehouse, as well as studio prop houses and Chairish, for atomic lamps and MCM furniture that could be reupholstered or painted (see: the orange hanging egg swing chair Anne commandeers).
The script calls for no sign of food in the building, so the team had to get creative with the restaurant’s prominent bar. They lined it with records and headphones. “Listening bars are very trendy now,” Greenberg tells Galerie. “There’s one in Tribeca that’s members only, and a friend of mine had just brought me there. It was perfect timing.” She converted the nearby wall wine rack into a display of old radios. “I was like, ‘What could be beautiful colors and shapes?’ And the copies are specific.”
The guest rooms, meanwhile, were built on a soundstage with additional vintage finds and murals of howling wolves and the night sky.
2. Pictures Don’t Always Match Reality
For their summer get-together, the pals head to the Jersey Shore, where they enjoy Jenkinson’s Boardwalk at Point Pleasant Beach and rent an Airbnb on Ocean Grove’s picturesque Ocean Pathway. Danny and Kate also tour a large Ocean Grove Victorian, fantasizing about someday turning it into a B&B. Porch scenes were shot on location, but Lomofsky and Greenberg transformed houses in Newburgh, New York, for the interiors. One home’s dark, woody, Moroccan palette got a bright, beachy makeover, while another, posing as the potential B&B, was overhauled down to the foyer wallpaper that designer Danny describes as “Midwest funeral home.”
“It was actually a very, very tasteful house that we picked for that, so we had to pull everything out,” Lomofsky reports. “I told the set dec team, ‘Go have fun. Go find us some of the most dramatically ugly beautiful pieces you can,’ and I think they accomplished it.’”
With that loose directive and their tight production schedule in mind, Greenberg targeted prop houses such as Eclectic/Encore Props, Newel Props, and City Knickerbocker and grabbed anything she found esoteric, vaguely Victorian, or slightly over the top. Think large sculptures of storks and cherubic angels; table lamps with crinoline lady or flamingo bases; and a floor lamp that resembles a cathedral and stands approximately Fey’s height. “When you have so little time, you need to over-shop,” Greenberg says. “You can’t be stuck without a chair when the music stops!”
3. Everything Old is New Again
The fall episodes return the action to Nick and Anne’s lake house in Putnam County, New York, where the series opened its first season. Lomofsky’s crew had researched roughly 100 waterfront properties for a place that would be both large enough to accommodate a vow renewal and pottery she-shed they’d built to explode and stay true to the collected home in Alan Alda’s 1981 film The Four Seasons. “Anne is an unfulfilled artist in some way, so I wanted it to feel like the house was where she had put her energy,” Lomofsky says. “And she’s kind of flighty, you know. So I wanted it to feel whimsical.”
The downstairs of the lake house was emptied and redecorated, while the upstairs was constructed on soundstages. Greenberg scouted NBCUniversal’s asset center for décor she could repurpose from the studio’s past shows and saw a familiar sight from her days working on 30 Rock with Fey: an orange velvet slipper chair that had belonged to Liz Lemon. “I threw that into the room used by Danny and Claude,” Greenberg says. “I don’t know if Tina even walked in there, and I didn’t tell her to because I was so busy, but she probably would have gotten a kick out of it.”
4. La Befana Doesn’t Come Until After Christmas
Avoiding spoilers once more, we’ll just say that the group’s winter escapades take them to the Italian Alps, where the cast filmed at the actual Christmas market in Trento. They shot early in the holiday season and therefore had to scramble to secure enough dolls of La Befana—the witch-like old woman who Italian folklore says delivers presents to children each January 5 (Epiphany Eve). The running joke is that she bears a striking resemblance to Anne, and the show’s crew went as far as commissioning a giant La Befana head from a sculptor in Rome for a scene in which it’s transported through the streets. “We showed Tina the scale of the truck and the head, and she was, like, ‘Bigger!’” Lomofsky recalls, estimating the memorable mug was five- or six-feet tall in the end.
As for where the friends stay when in Italy, Lomofsky says it’s actually a monastery turned city building. The interiors were again recreated Stateside, this time in an Airbnb in Fishkill, New York, that was layered with decorative nods to Danny’s love of Brutalism and some well-placed frescoes and tapestries to keep the illusion of being in Italy alive. “I think the key to the teamwork that Jennifer and I do is playing with texture, shape, and color,” Lomofsky says. “I once heard a designer say, ‘Oh, it’s so much easier just to do everything in neutrals.’ My God, that sounds like death!”