That TV Mansion You’re Coveting? How Series Like “Loot” and “Bridgerton” Film at Luxe Real Estate

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.)

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.

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."

Production designer David Ingram ran into similar mansion-related issues when he was scouting historic English estates for Netflix’s Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. Given that the show is (loosely) about the British aristocracy in the late 18th century, he was already bound to a particular aesthetic and scale when it came to choosing locations. He was also limited by the number of actual Georgian and Regency estates even available—there are only so many U.K. castles and grand palaces available for rental, especially if you’re considering what’s within a convenient distance from London’s production hubs and what hasn’t already been featured in scores of other shows and films.

When scouting for a stand-in Buckingham House, gifted to the real Queen Charlotte in 1762 (now Buckingham Palace), Ingram looked for the building’s original U-shape, ultimately landing on Blenheim Palace near Oxford (the actual family seat for the Dukes of Marlborough). The 300-year-old, 775-room estate has been featured in everything from Cinderella to Harry Potter; Ingram says the Charlotte team knew it was right for them, too, not just because of its size and Baroque styling, but because of the sheer variety of filmable on-site locations. "The gardens are parallel to Versailles and the grounds are just exquisite, so we thought, ‘Well, this gives us a lot of latitude for garden scenes,’" says the production designer. "Once we were inside, the foyer was beautiful, and because I know the show likes to do a lot of ‘walk and talk,’ we found a lot of corridors we knew we could shoot in."

While Ingram says the team at Blenheim was professional and relatively easy to work with, any historical property of that magnitude always comes with some boundaries. Most historic estates and palaces won’t let productions anywhere near the home’s beds because of their fragile overhanging canopies and original period fabric, and because dismantling the centuries-old wood frames to move them is just too risky. That means bedroom scenes generally have to be shot elsewhere, so all those spicy Bridgerton sex scenes took place in replica bedrooms built off-site on a soundstage. Similarly, if any rugs, carpets, furniture, or paintings needed to be moved, that had to be discussed with the on-site preservationists. Beyond that, Blenheim is also open to the public much of the time, so the show had to work around the palace’s schedule.

The 17th-century Belton House near Lincolnshire, which stands in for King George’s Kew Palace, was a little harder to film at, according to Ingram. Located about three-and-a-half hours north of London, the site wasn’t as accessible, meaning they had to house the crew and cast at nearby hotels for the duration of the two-and-a-half week shoot. Also, because the home is owned by Britain’s National Trust, Ingram says there was "a lot of negotiation to move statues or paintings." Ultimately, the parties came to see eye to eye, with production using not just the interiors of the Belton House to sit in for King George’s quarters, and the home’s "old, abandoned kitchen," as Ingram calls it, as Doctor Monro’s torturous chamber, but also the estate’s conservatory, which doubled as Queen Charlotte’s orangery. Ingram says that while shooting at the show’s many historical locations was costly, he thinks it was important. "Queen Charlotte has a healthy budget compared to other shows, but doing a period drama in London is very expensive," he explains. "The money’s on the screen and it’s well spent."

Elsewhere in the U.K., another hit Netflix series recently relied on a stately home to tell a very different story. For You’s fourth season, the show decamped to Knebworth House in Hertfordshire for about a month. (On the show, the house is the country estate of one of Joe’s rich London socialite pals where the entire gang sneaks off after they’re seemingly threatened by an "eat the rich" serial killer.) Location manager Casper Mills says that pretty much every scene set at the socialite friend’s home was shot at the historic English country house. "We used most of the main rooms downstairs that are open to the public, as well as a couple of bedroom spaces upstairs," says Mills.

Of course, all of that required negotiation and foresight. "There’s always protected floor covering and foam cladding on banisters and the uprights on the stairs," Mills says. "Sometimes we’ll remove paintings, partly for copyright reasons and partly because of the risk of a lighting pole poking through some old family portrait. Some houses are really used to shoots like ours and even have a person in each room solely to watch our every move and make sure that, say, we don’t light candles unless we’ve got permission. We couldn’t use any atmospheric mist for You because it might have set off the fire alarms, for instance. All those little things have to be considered." Mills also had to make sure the show stuck to its schedule, getting in and out before Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher started prepping for a massive performance on the estate’s grounds, lest their mics start to pick up sounds from rehearsals.

Getting into a house like Knebworth isn’t cheap, either. Mills says Britain’s Historic Houses Association, a collection of about 1,000 independently owned stately homes, estates, and gardens across the U.K., sets a base daily rate of about £4,000 to shoot in any of its members’ properties. "It can go up to £50,000 per shooting day depending on where you are, how big the venue is, and how experienced they are," says Mills, estimating that setup or teardown days run about 50 percent as much.

There’s also insurance to consider, in case production breaks a priceless vase or, say, burns down a national landmark. Mills says that in most cases, productions have to carry about a £10 million insurance policy when they shoot on any U.K. historic site, though that can go even higher depending on the location’s size and scope. The same would be true in the U.S., where production insurance is de rigueur, though how much a show like Succession would carry, with its famously luxe locations, is notoriously hard to glean from its creators. At least in the states, productions presumably have to deal with fewer precious, centuries-old family artifacts.

"The first question from property owners when we’re pitching them is always, ‘What’s your insurance like?’" Mills jokes, adding that he understands because "it’s not just the house that’s at risk, it’s those portraits that have been in the family for hundreds of years." 

"Some of those," Mills says, "you just can’t put a price on."

Top image courtesy Netflix.

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