DECOR of the Tudors
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Season 2 "I can remember walking onto the set of Anne Boleyn's chambers, at the beginning of shooting this season [2]. The art department decorated it to Anne Boleyn's taste and style, and it almost brought me to tears, because they had captured so much of the detail of her personality. It was exactly how I imagined I would have decorated those rooms myself, had I been Anne Boleyn. It felt as if it was Anne's home.- Natalie Dormer | ||||||||||||||||
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Production Design Tom Conroy has been Production Designer for all four seasons of The Tudors and the exceptional quality of his work on the show has brought two Emmy nominations for Seasons 2 and 3 (‘Outstanding Art Direction for a Single Camera Series’) along with nominations from the Art Directors Guild and Gemini Awards. Surrounded by scale models, hundreds of drawings and props in his studio workshop we asked him about the tasks and challenges in bringing Season 4 to the screen.Whitehall palace obviously remains the central set for The Tudors. How was its design altered for season 4? TC: Overall, the sets remain the same but different allowing for the passage of time and people’s circumstances. There is this ongoing layering that reflects the increase in the wealth of those in power. More specifically, Henry gets married to Katherine Howard so we felt - both from the way the action was described in the script and from the way Dearbhla Walsh, the director of those particular episodes, saw the character of Katherine - that we needed a much bigger and brighter set for the Queen’s apartments, to allow for much more movement. Because she was only 17 we wanted to give her much more scope to be a younger woman with a lot of youth and vitality. Then when Catherine Parr came on the scene, we took the same chambers and gave them a much more sober look, using less colour and frill and excitement to it. Do the sets change in the final episodes of the season, as we approach Henry’s death? TC: Yes, the great thing about working with Michael Hirst is that there’s a very open relationship with him. He doesn’t write all the episodes at the start but he gives us a sense of what’s coming. Quite early on he gave us an indication that the final episodes were to be quite contained and much more psychological in a way. He wanted a situation where the sets would almost reflect Henry’s state of mind which is a bold thing to do because it doesn’t always work. So what we did was to make the tone of everything much darker, but we still retained elements of gold and silver and come out of the darkness and gloom. And again we reconfigured the sets to make the King’s apartments to make them bigger and give them the sense of a figure in a large room which feels quite lonely and reflects a sense of isolation. What were the other challenges in season 4? TC: Well, the season starts with the King going on a ‘Progress’ around his kingdoms, like a royal tour. In those days something like this would take a few months and he’d have a huge entourage with him. We did a huge entourage with all the people he’d need to carry his belongings, cooking implements food and everything else. We had to have a lot of carriages and carts as well as a crowd of people. You have to think of it like, how do you read a column of people in a landscape. So basically we had about 200 people and what we did was gave them large vertical banners to hold at regular intervals in the crowd, so as you looked down you could see spots of colour in the background, so the whole thing became a quite impressive heraldic progress. We also had to tell something of Katherine Howard during this part of the season so we tried to make the spaces work to suggest that she was being observed. She was naïve and very young and she tried to conceal her affairs but was being watched. So we constructed sets in such a way that there were key foreground elements but there would be someone in the background observing, so gradually the tension built up through these physical observations. | ||||||||||||||||
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| Elements of Tudors Style in Interior Design |
"...whole palaces were ablaze with the vivid colours of Tudor heraldry. Rooms were hung with costly and marvellous tapestries of pure gold and fine silk garnished with pearls and precious stones, and at Hampton Court there were entire suites done in blue and crimson cloth and lush velvets of green, and brown, and yellow....In marked contrast to gilded ceilings, costly tapestries and princely attire were stark floors covered with rushes, trestle tables, and wooden benches in the great hall and draughty corners. Chairs were a rarity and reserved for women, who generally preferred to sit on pillows and cushions on the floor." ~ Lacey Baldwin Smith A Tudor Tragedy |
| Walls - most commonly covered in dark rich oak paneling which feature carved designs & usually extends up the wall about two-thirds with stone or plaster. |
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| Wall hangings - tapestries, rugs & paintings. |
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| Windows - often stained or painted glass window panes with heraldic designs or portraits & mullioned windows made of leaded glass |
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| Window coverings / Curtains - rich fabrics like velvet, brocade, and damask usually in jewel tone colours. |
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| Flooring - typically a hard surface like wood, brick, tile or stone with wool rugs |
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| Fireplaces - the focal point for any Tudor room provided necessary heating. |
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| Chandeliers - hanging & large standing candelabra in wrought iron with many candles to provide lighting. |
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| Furniture |
| Heavy wooden pieces with carved details & iron hardware like pulls, hinges, studs, & latches.
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| Beds |
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| Tables, Chairs & Sideboards |
 Carved chair detail |  |
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| Dishware & Glassware |
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| LINKS: | Sources: |