8 great TV shows told through their homes and offices

Bojack Horseman lives in a house that doesn’t really reflect his character, but rather reflects the image he has of himself. He lives in a classic Los Angeles actor’s villa, perched on the hillside with a great view and a swimming pool, furnished in a modern, yet unimaginative way, with pieces of furniture a few steps higher (only in price) than Ikea. There are photos of him, grotesque portraits (when they are not fake pop art paintings) and a lot of room for hosting parties. But there’s nothing that tells us about him. And this actually does tell us about him.
The whole series aims at digging deeper into Bojack’s heart to see, under the many layers of cynicism, wickedness, meanness and alcohol, what is left in this terrible, frustrated and full of trauma person, suffering from toxic self-worship and loss of fame. The house very much reflects the “Bojack mystery”.
As I said, it does not resemble him, but rather the successful image he has of himself. It looks bare and minimalistic while he actually is a hoarding maniac, he even has an office with a desk that he absolutely does not need. This is a house perfect for maintaining the appearance but is lacking all the warmth of a home furnished with passion. It is just a very expensive object.

Few things are more bitter and sad than Joyce’s living room in Stranger Things. Very useful in its first season as a communication platform, it now looks just as resigned as its owner.
It’s the ’80s, but it looks like the early ’70s. It looks like the house she lived in with her mother, with blankets on the armchairs, ugly wallpaper and almost nothing on the walls.
Carpeting reigns supreme. It has the classic Spielberg’s cinema layout: a small house in the suburban centre, with a round table in the middle of the kitchen and small rooms filled with objects that make them look even smaller. Objects piled up without a particular style, from art-deco-looking lamps to consumer electronics displayed as furnishing elements. The most imaginative details are those that shouldn’t be, like the cushions. An endless sadness in a house that is a means of communication with the upside down.

If we hadn’t already experienced decades and decades of horror cinema, this Tudor-style manor would ooze an incredible charm. But this architectural style has been associated with Gothic tales and thus with horror cinema since the ’50s.
The house isn’t inhabited by the owner, but by a large family whose parents are renovating the whole villa.
In a certain sense, however, the house tells a lot about the series: it tells us what we are going to find there and, already from the first episodes, it sort of foreshadows what is going to happen. The statues, the inlays, the embellishments, the columns, the wood and even the very heavy handrails of the large staircase that looks like the one in “Gone with the Wind” or the massive balconies (the only thin and light detail seems to be the wrought iron spiral staircase, main protagonist of the finale) infuse a looming sense of tradition and connection with an ancestral world.
Contrary to the usual apartments we see in TV shows, Hill House does nothing to look mundane, and everything to look exceptional. It does nothing to seem really lived by someone, but rather rejects any intrusion. It is furnished in a perfectly consistent way as if it were a painting and looks as if it exists in a time that is not that of the story. And those who have seen the series know that this temporal detail is fundamental.

The furniture in the great Anacleti family’s house is unbeatable, and one of Suburra’s best inventions. Contrary to the usual TV series settings, this suburban cottage has a crazy personality that combines opulence and poverty in many ways that are new to TV but familiar to the viewers.
Abundance and above all heaviness. We’ve gone beyond the baroque style, as the golden fangs details on the back of a sofa tell us. Gold is everywhere, and most importantly on old-fashioned pieces of furniture that don’t really look like old-fashioned pieces of furniture. It’s simply all wrong, but it goes very well with the costumes and traditions of the Anacleti family.
Mirrors, crosses, inlays, tapestries... It is already incredible that the large reception area, the large living room from which you can see the dining room and the kitchen, looks like an underground floor. The very low ceiling helps to give this impression and the few windows combined with the abundance of columns almost confirm it.
On the walls, a collection of improbable and colorful paintings; on the floor, old carpets. Spadino and his gaudy outfits seem to perfectly match the upholstery and the reflections of the many lights.
Gypsy mafia is very rich and at the same time totally uncomfortable with this wealth – lots of money coming from loan-sharking –  and it doesn’t know what to do with it, it doesn’t even know how to spend it, it just knows that it can spend money, and that’s what gypsy mafia does: it would like to live in a place that tells its rise, but it only manages to accumulate pricey objects, more than precious furnishings.

Once the seven seasons of Mad Men were over, all the props (strictly from the 60s) were sold on the internet. And not for cheap. Mad Men was a TV and costume triumph: it didn’t evoke or bring back the 60s, it celebrated them from afar.
There isn’t such thing as “the” office of Don Draper, there are many: we go from the very bare and essential (but very tastefully furnished) one of the very first seasons, to the change of agency and then to the quality leap with a studio furnished in a more fashionable way and with colors that match the colleague’s offices. Don Draper was unique, BUT now he has become like the others.
If in the beginning everything was essential and minimalistic, with ironed shirts kept in the desk drawer and the alcoholic beverages in the bar cart, at the end there are drawings of his children on the walls, a much better equipped living room, objects given to him and the signs of a life lived at its fullest, even though at first there was only a man who had stolen the life of another man, and still did not have one of his own.
Great table lamp though.

Walter White is one of the greatest transforming characters of all TV shows. He progressively gives in to crime and violence, but his home is not changing. After all, Walter’s residence seems more like his wife’s house. There is nothing that tells us of him, and this is in open contrast with the personality he develops, it is the most evident symbol of what he was before he started his criminal activity. Throughout the series, his house looks increasingly out of tune with what Walter is becoming. In that house, which is getting tighter and tighter and more and more ridiculous with his ducks on the table and the worn-in armchairs, with the counter overlooking the kitchen and the plaid curtains, Walter is an alien. It’s always quite dark, even though they live in a sunny place.
The house will be used as a safe, a threatening place and a façade. What for Gus is Los Pollos Hermanos, for Walter is a cottage made for a perfect wife and humble life.

We’re not talking about the place where Claire and Frank Underwood work when they come to the White House, or Frank’s offices when he becomes a senator, because these settings were furnished by using the actual furnishings of those kind of government buildings. We’re talking about CWI’s office (Clean Water Initiave), the non-profit company managed by Claire, whose plans are ruined almost immediately, at the beginning of the first season, when her husband Frank failed to get appointed Secretary of State.
Claire’s office seems freezing cold. The desk looks like one of those you could find in a luxury suite of a 4-star hotel, with the same cheap but tasteful furniture, with a lot of steel and all the cooler tones. In line with the dark photography style of the series, which bans all bright colors, even CWI’s furniture is designed to tell the story of a character who has no interest in the superfluous. A place conceived by a luxury bureaucrat, someone who’s more interested in knowing the rules in order to exploit them to her own advantage rather than to do something kind.
Probably the least fun furniture ever, even Ikea’s office showrooms manage to look a little more welcoming.

In sit-coms, the rooms are few and monotonous, moreover they are almost always framed from 2-3 angles. Basically, we see them only from a few points of view. In Friends, the apartments are fundamental, more than in the other series, because they are the place that really makes the series: the friends of the title are such because they are neighbors.
Monica and Rachel’s house is a mock-up full of heterogeneous elements, with a beautiful window wall that the show exploits for the recurring gag of the naked neighbor, sofas and armchairs, purple walls and a green door, tables in one style and armchairs in another, small decorative lamps... Everything seems impersonal and does not speak directly about those two girls, but the density of the pieces of and its arrangement actually communicate the comic confusion of their life. This is well explained by the kitchen, which seems crammed beyond belief (especially for a TV show in which the characters hardly ever cook), a delirium of utensils, ingredients and broken shelves.
But in addition to this, Friends’ furniture is the most traditionalist furniture you could imagine. All the details tell us “American mid-west”, and yet the show is set in busy New York. Traditional America is preserved in the decor of a TV show that wants to tell the story of the new “youngsters”.