lowelldown

Hey Everyone,

We have a busy rest of the month coming up. Getting our little showcase home in Santa Fe ready for filming next month has been a great process. I say ‘little’ because I’ve always believed that principles done right in small spaces can easily be enlarged and reinterpreted to bigger ones versus the other way around. If you can meet a great pampered living standard in a small home and defy square footage by being clever, then going bigger is a breeze. Plus, smaller spaces look bigger on camera and work better.

So, we’re loading the filming location with not just furniture but the everyday things in pantries, drawers, closets—you name it. This is really where my years of being in other people’s homes, while designing sets for plays, movies and commercials have really paid off. It’s always been a fact (to those of us who have done character-driven set design) that what the camera sees when a character opens a drawer is often more revealing then ten pages of spoken dialogue. In truth, what every good set designer knows is that it’s harder to do “real” and really make it look real, then anything done for the cover of Met Home.

I remember doing the sets for a live TV revival of The Odd Couple in Boston during my theater days. I thought it would be a piece o’ cake to show Oscar Madison’s sloppy apartment. So I focused more on how the place would look once the fastidious Felix Unger moved in. Oscar’s a slob – how hard can that be? Just throw a bunch of stuff around, right? WRONG! Not only was it way harder then I’d ever imagined, but it also had to be recreated during shooting several times from various camera positions – the prop master was nervous and I didn’t know why? But I soon did!

What I learned in short order was that believable chaos and authentic mess happens out of one’s habits and over a course of time. And if that slow, layered process is not evident, the chaos looks stylized and fake. So I had to literally place myself into the characters shoes 24/7 to finally get it right—and re-produce-able, a lesson I never forgot. In past series where we’ve had to recreate a ‘before’, JB my art director (also a set designer like me) would cringe and plop her head down on the table. And we all knew why.

While our show and house will not be presenting “befores” per se, it will be our home for the first season in every respect. And it must accommodate everything most people own and need.

So, from the Band Aids and shoe polish to vitamins and Post-its it’s been a real job to create a home that looks personal, collected over time and authentically down sized—or should I say right-sized. So it’s a place where I myself would actually be able to live, entertain, cook and chill while also answering many of your questions. In short, teach the basics and the real along with the bold and the beautiful.

More Later!
CL

PS: Here’s a link to a recent web cast I was interview for. It’s self-explanatory. Enjoy!

http://bit.ly/dkKHgp