THE STORY
Cut to Interior: The Room as Screenplay
It’s a curious thing, stepping into a room and feeling, without knowing why, that you’ve already been here before — or worse, that you’ve been cast in it. As if the walls have been waiting patiently for you to arrive so that the scene can finally begin. This, I submit, is the point at which interior design stops being a matter of mere paint swatches and upholstery samples, and starts doing the real work of cinema.
Good design, like great filmmaking, is never just about what’s in the frame — it’s about the framing itself. The way a door lines up with a sightline across the room; the way a velvet armchair sits not in a corner but because of the corner. Wes Anderson knows this instinctively. He understands that a room is not merely a container for actors but a conspirator in the plot. Watch The Grand Budapest Hotel and tell me that the reception desk isn’t as much a character as Gustave H. Or in The Royal Tenenbaums, that Margot’s bathroom — nicotine-stained and stubbornly melancholic — isn’t delivering a performance every bit as nuanced as Gwyneth Paltrow.
Anderson’s symmetry is not an affectation, nor is his palette of sugared pastels a stylistic crutch; they are acts of narrative discipline. The same should be true of an interior. You don’t select a brass floor lamp because brass is “in” this season — you select it because it foreshadows the conversation that will happen beneath its light, or the shadow it will cast on a wall where secrets are kept.
Designers who fail to see this become set dressers for a production that never happens. They fill rooms with on-trend furniture and echoey gestures, but the script is missing. The real work is in the blocking — how a guest moves from hallway to kitchen, how a glance is caught across a table, how the distance between two armchairs turns a polite conversation into an intimate one.
There’s a scene in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou where the camera dollies laterally through the cross-section of Zissou’s ship, a giant dollhouse of human eccentricity. The viewer sees everything at once — bedrooms, labs, the cramped editing suite — but the genius is that it feels like one world. That’s good design: the capacity for a space to present its disparate parts without losing its sense of whole.
So, when we design at The Goose, we’re not thinking What colour should the curtains be? We’re thinking: What’s the establishing shot? What’s the pacing? Where’s the reveal? The sofa you sit on should be the plot twist you didn’t see coming but now realise was inevitable.
The room, like the best cinema, should leave you with the eerie sensation that it remembers you. That it will be here long after you’ve gone, rehearsing the next act.
Fade to black.