Film and Furniture

11/01/2026

In Bugonia, Michelle’s home is immaculate, controlled and quietly intimidating. She may be suspected of being an alien… but if this is alien taste, we wouldn’t refuse a dinner party invite.

What makes it even better is that the filming location is a real contemporary house in Surrey, not a built set.

In this clip from The Film and Furniture Podcast, production designer James Price () talks through how Michelle’s pristine house was designed in deliberate opposition to Teddy’s chaotic, cluttered world — and how furniture choices quietly
shape character and power.

From the commanding Imola Chair to the rare Jan Bočan armchairs by the pool, this is a house designed to be seen.

Directed by
Set Decoration by .howard

👉🏼 Watch the full video podcast — LINK IN BIO

🎧 Also available on all usual podcast platforms.
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10/01/2026

Michelle’s (Emma Stone) house in Bugonia is… a lot.
Stunning architecture, jaw-dropping furniture, zero visual clutter — not a cushion out of place.

She may be suspected of being an alien, but honestly? If this is alien taste, we’ll happily take the keys.

Every room feels razor-sharp and deliberately controlled, and the furniture does a huge amount of heavy lifting.

That Imola Chair by Henrik Pedersen? Pure sculptural drama. High-backed, enveloping, and oddly commanding — it frames Michelle more like a Bond villain’s throne than somewhere you’d actually relax.

By the pool, the rare Jan Bočan armchairs are sculptural and gloriously unfamiliar on screen, they signal serious taste — the kind that doesn’t need explaining. These aren’t trend pieces; they’re collector territory.

Even the gym refuses to behave like a gym. The NOHRD treadmill and weight system turn exercise equipment into furniture you wouldn’t dream of hiding away. Fitness as design object: disciplined, elegant, and very on-brand for Michelle.

None of this is accidental. In our new Film and Furniture Podcast episode, production designer talks through how Michelle’s immaculate spaces were designed in direct opposition to Teddy’s chaotic house — and how furniture becomes a quiet but powerful storytelling tool throughout the film.

🎧 New episode live now on YouTube (link in comments) and all usual podcast platforms.

Bravo.
Set Decoration: .howard
Director:

08/01/2026

Our latest video podcast is now live!

Host Paula Benson sits down with BUGONIA production designer James Price to unpack the quietly unsettling visual world of Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film.

In this episode of The Podcast, host Paula Benson sits down with Bugonia production designer James Price to unpack the quietly unsettling v...

07/01/2026

🎧 The Design of Bugonia: Conspiracy, Chaos and Alien Logic

In our latest episode of The Film and Furniture Podcast, host Paula Benson sits down with Bugonia production designer James Price to unpack the unsettling visual world of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia. This one is for true film obsessives: unapologetically nerdy and endlessly illuminating, it goes far beyond surface aesthetics to explore how furniture, design and architecture shape the film’s gloriously bonkers logic.

👉 Watch the full video podcast now — LINK IN COMMENTS

BUGONIA is now streaming on key platforms and has received multiple nominations in the Critics’ Choice Awards, Golden Globes, and nominations for production design and set decoration in the SDSA (Set Decorators Society of America) Awards and the BFDG (British Film Designers Guild) Awards.

With thanks to Focus Features

05/01/2026

This time of year has a strange elasticity to it. The calendar insists we’re moving forward, yet everything feels suspended — days blur, routines soften, time stretches and contracts. Winter lingers, the light never quite settles, and reality feels slightly misaligned. It’s a season that makes ordinary life feel faintly unreal.

Which brings us to Eraserhead.

David Lynch’s 1977 debut exists in a world where time doesn’t behave properly. Days and nights slip into one another, spaces feel unfinished, and domestic interiors become sites of low-level dread. Shot in stark black and white, the film transforms rooms, corridors and radiators into psychological landscapes — places where anxiety seeps into the architecture itself.

Henry Spencer’s apartment is barely a home at all: a boxy, industrial shell filled with humming machinery, rough textures and oppressive silence. Furniture is minimal, functional, almost incidental. What should offer comfort instead amplifies isolation. In Eraserhead, interiors unmoor us.

Like this stretch of the year, the film resists resolution. Nothing quite resets. Time loops, stretches, stalls.

A reminder that not all seasons — or spaces — are designed for clarity. Some exist simply to be endured.

Happy New Year! 😂

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04/01/2026

It may be Dry January for many — but never ones to follow the crowd, we’re taking a different route. Instead, let’s look at Mrs Robinson’s bar in The Graduate: a Film and Furniture favourite, and one of cinema’s great expressions of 1960s aspirational living.

Separated by glass walls and framed by lush greenery beyond, the bar is a drama in monochrome. White bar stools sit in crisp contrast to relaxed black leather armchairs with slender metal legs. It’s controlled, stylish, and faintly performative — a space designed to impress rather than to comfort.

The bar itself is dressed like a stage set for a professional drinker intent on making an impression. A black and white bar sign takes pride of place, joined by a black ice bucket, oversized decorative bottles, an ornate silver cocktail shaker, a black Bakelite telephone and, of course, zebra print — from cigarette lighter to throw. Every object reinforces the same message: sophistication edged with excess.

This is entirely in keeping with Mrs Robinson, played with cool, predatory assurance by Anne Bancroft, whose control of space mirrors her control of the men around her — not least Dustin Hoffman’s adrift Benjamin Braddock. Under the direction of Mike Nichols, whose work on The Graduate earned him the Academy Award for Best Director, interiors are never neutral; they sharpen character and mood.

Beyond the bar, the house continues this visual rhythm — black floors, stair rail and banister set against white walls, finished with a dramatic chandelier. Luxury, yes — but also carefully curated and emotionally cool.

A reminder that in The Graduate, interiors don’t just look good. They tell us exactly who these people are.

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03/01/2026

January is an odd month. We’re told it’s a time for reinvention — resolutions, fresh starts, personal transformation — and yet here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re still deep in winter. The light is low, the days are short, and the body hasn’t quite caught up with the optimism of the calendar. There’s a quiet dissonance between the idea of change and the reality of stasis — a kind of existential disorientation.

Talking of which…

Few films capture that feeling of existential disorientation more unnervingly than Seconds (1966), directed by John Frankenheimer. Part psychological horror, part film noir, it’s a film obsessed with the promise — and the cost — of reinvention. Its visual language is as destabilising as its premise.

Shot in stark black and white by legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe, Seconds is defined by extreme wide-angle and fisheye lenses that bend space, distort faces and make interiors feel actively hostile. Walls curve, rooms loom, corridors seem to press in, creating a fractured sense of self.

The film follows a bored, middle-aged banker who submits himself to a mysterious organisation offering a “new life,” emerging reborn as a younger, freer version of himself — played by Rock Hudson, cast deliberately against type. The promise is liberation; the reality is alienation. Even as his identity shifts, the environments remain deeply unsettling.

In Seconds, design and cinematography don’t just reflect psychological collapse — they help produce it. Which makes it a strangely perfect film for January. A reminder that transformation isn’t always clean or empowering — and that sometimes, the environments built to “fix” us are the very things that undo us.

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21/12/2025

What a year.
What did you read? What did you miss?
Our most-read Film and Furniture features of 2025 are all here 👇

Our 2025 Film and Furniture round up explores the most-read features of the year, from The Brutalist to Wicked — plus evergreen favourites

19/12/2025

THE FUTURE ON FILM (Part 11) >> HER (2013)

After the polished cruise-ship futurism of Passengers (see Part 10), Her brings the future back down to earth — and makes it feel close, recognisable, and quietly heartbreaking.

Spike Jonze and production designer K.K. Barrett craft a world that is not overtly dystopian, yet undeniably unsettling.
It’s a future defined not by technological collapse but by emotional drift — a society where people live and work in beautifully designed spaces, yet feel profoundly alone.

The future here is friendly on the surface, but quietly alienating underneath.
A world designed for connection — yet full of disconnection
Theodore’s (Joaquin Phoenix) apartment and workplace are curated with calm, thoughtful furniture (spot the Eames Aluminium chair) that appears to support intimacy.
And yet, the silence between people is deafening.
Public spaces are full but emotionally empty: individuals speaking more to devices than to each other.

The technology in Her is deliberately modest — a small earpiece, a pocket-sized device — allowing the emotional dynamic to take centre stage.
The future Jonze imagines is one where AI companionship becomes more fulfilling than human intimacy.
Samantha’s voice fills Theodore’s world, making his life feel expansive while simultaneously exposing the void left by real human connection.

Unlike the dystopias of earlier films in this series, Her shows a world that has not collapsed but has emotionally thinned.
Loneliness becomes the unspoken infrastructure of the future.

Her is a tender warning wrapped in warm interiors:
a reminder that technology may soothe our loneliness — even as it deepens it.

👉 Follow for the next post in this “Future on Film” series.

👀 Find furniture in film for your own home at FilmandFurniture.com
(WEB LINK IN BIO, then search Her)

17/12/2025

THE FUTURE ON FILM (Part 10) >> PASSENGERS (2016)

If Ex Machina (see Part 9) gives us the billionaire’s bunker, Passengers offers the opposite: a cruise ship in space, where the future is styled as an extended luxury holiday.

The starship Avalon’s bar is one of the film’s standout spaces. Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas wanted it to feel like the classic bar you’d choose on Earth — and landed on a New York Art Deco bar, then pushed it into sci-fi.

The result is a “jewel box” of pattern, light and glamour:

Art-deco-meets-sci-fi wall coverings by Astek
The friezes reference the industrial age but replace smokestacks with interplanetary travel — rockets, planets, trajectories woven into the graphic language of the walls, carpets and entry tiles.

Golds and reds bring warmth, seduction and a sense of Earthly hospitality to an otherwise cold, white, high-tech ship.

A homage to The Shining’s bar
The composition of the Avalon bar — the long counter, the mirrored back, the glowing bottles and THE CARPET — reads as a deliberate nod to the Overlook Hotel bar in The Shining. One of our client's loved it so much they commissioned us to create the officially licensed The Shining carpet in the same reverse colourways as Passengers for their basement bar!

Beyond the bar, the Vienna Suite gives us another layer of future-luxury.
Here we find Marc Newson’s Wood Chair for Cappellini — slatted beech wood, steam-bent into a double-curve or “alpha” shape — alongside a classic Warren Platner coffee table.

Passengers imagines a future where space travel isn’t about survival, it’s about lifestyle — until, of course, the story peels that fantasy apart.

👉 Follow for the next post in this “Future on Film” series.

👀 Find furniture in film for your own home at FilmandFurniture.com
(WEB LINK IN BIO, then search Passengers)

15/12/2025

As the nights deepen, lighting becomes essential: clarity at the kitchen counter, warmth beside a sofa, atmosphere around a dining table. Filmmakers know this better than anyone — light sculpts mood and defines character long before the dialogue begins.

In collaboration with , we’ve rounded up some unforgettable on-screen lighting moments — how to bring their cinematic ideas into your home — plus your chance to win a VP9 Flowerpot Portable Lamp worth £155!

Swipe to explore:
✨ Nemo’s Crown chandeliers, bringing sculptural drama to Christian Grey’s penthouse in Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed.
✨ PH pendants, adding charm to Paddington and becoming a bold focal point in Widows.
✨ The Atollo, glowing with geometric calm in Nocturnal Animals and appearing again in The Last of Us.
✨ Moooi’s Perch Tree, swaying poetically in the grand entrance of the Kell family mansion in Sirens.

🎉 GIVEAWAY!
Enter now to win an &Tradition VP9 Flowerpot Portable Lamp worth £155 — via the LINK IN BIO.
Giveaway closes Friday 19 December 2025, 12:00 midday.

• Open to all UK-based Film and Furniture members and newsletter subscribers.
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