That TV Mansion You’re Coveting? How Series Like "Loot" and "Bridgerton" Film at Luxe Real Estate
The production teams behind major shows set at swanky homes and estates weigh in on what actually goes into shooting at prized properties.
When the creators of TV shows and movies look to elicit grandeur, luxury, and a sense of otherworldliness in their elaborate fictional settings, nothing sets the tone quite like a massive home. A glimpse of a swanky interior can give a sense of a character’s background almost immediately, and posh settings often serve to either transport or alienate the viewer, depending on the show’s point of view. (Think Bridgerton vs. Succession.)
Jeremy Strong and Hiam Abbass film a scene at a mansion as Kendall and Marcia Roy in Succession.
Photo by Peter Kramer/HBO
For instance, when Loot production designer Jennifer Dehghan was tasked with finding a Los Angeles home for Maya Rudolph and Adam Scott’s characters on the clever Apple TV+ comedy series, she knew it would have to be a doozy. After all, Scott’s character is a tech billionaire, with Rudolph playing his somewhat entitled wife. "The showrunners kept saying we didn’t want a millionaire’s house—we wanted a billionaire’s house, meaning a kind you’ve never seen." Dehghan says. "We had to push any kind of preconceived notions of what it should look like out of our heads, and only go for stuff we felt like the audience hadn’t seen."
The show ended up shooting at The One, a Paul McClean–designed Bel Air property that, at about 105,000 square feet, holds the distinction of being the largest home in the United States. It has 21 bedrooms, 42 full bathrooms, a sky deck with cabanas, a full-service spa, a nightclub, an outdoor running track, and even a moat. It’s real estate absurdity at its most opulent, which is why Dehghan says the property felt perfect for Loot. "It’s monolithic and brutal in scale, style, form, weight, and lack of ornamentation," she explains. "Even just the scale of the slab walls was overpowering." The production looked into other homes designed by McClean, the Dublin-born architect often referred to as "L.A.’s megamansion king," thinking maybe they could piece together a fantasy residence by shooting different rooms at each one. Ultimately, though, The One won out, in part because it had never been lived in at the time.
Joel Kim Booster as Nicholas, the loyal assistant of billionaire Molly Novak (Maya Rudolph), in Season 1 of Loot.
Photo Courtesy Apple TV+
The One’s developers may have accepted Loot’s proposal just to get some money moving: The home was languishing on the market, and Dehghan says that she heard that the water bill for the home, with its five pools no one had ever even swam in, totaled about $18,000 a month. In fact, Dehghan estimates that renting a mere millionaire’s home would cost somewhere between $18,000 and $30,000 daily, but The One cost production somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 a day, depending on whether they were prepping or shooting. That doesn’t include all the hidden costs involved in outfitting a home that massive.
"It’s up a winding road in Bel Air, so there’s no crew parking and base camp for all the trailers," Deghan explains. "There’s no parking lot to put all the trucks into, so loading equipment in or out is difficult. Even staging it costs more, just because of the scale. The art has to be huge, and the cost of that is considerable, not to mention the cost of getting enough lights to fill one of those grand rooms or having to lay enough cable for all the electrical generators, which have to be much farther away in such a huge space. It all just compounds upon itself."
Loot’s first season follows Maya Rudolph’s Molly Novak as she figures out what to do with her $87 billion settlement after divorcing her husband of 20 years.
Photo Courtesy Apple TV+
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