Patrick Howe On the Apartments of a Movie Star and An Aspiring Actress for ‘Only Murders in the Building’

There have been many comedies and television shows set in New York City, and the Big Apple always features enviable living spaces. You probably love the apartment of a character who lives in New York, and you wonder if you will ever have a space as beautiful or curated as the one you see on your screen. I am still bummed that I can’t take up residence in Only Murders in the Building’s The Arconia, and, for season three, production designer Patrick Howe creates gorgeous spaces for two performers at opposite ends of their careers.

As the crew rehearses the musical numbers for Oliver Putnam’s Death Rattle Dazzle, I noticed that there was a lap on the piano…shaped like a piano. I immediately needed to know where Howe found it, but he was keeping his lips sealed.

“I’m not telling you,” Howe says, straight-faced. “That lamp does make me laugh. Sometimes you can find it in a flea market, and some, to our surprise, you can find at a retail store.”

Every season a new person takes up residence in The Arconia’s penthouse, and season three yields the arrogant prowess of Paul Rudd’s Ben Glenroy. The CoBro is in the building! The gold, larger-than-life cobra in the entryway would make someone like me turn on my heels, but those brave enough to step inside would find…a whole lot of Paul Rudd on every wall. In addition to a lime green bust of himself, there seems to be a Funko POP! of Glenroy in a box in the background.

“There was one line from the writers that said, ‘We’re at the penthouse. Open on a Hard Rock Café level tribute to himself,'” he says. “That’s all they needed to say. John explained that the CoBro was one of his biggest parts, and John made an aside to me that there could not be too many snake references in the décor. I wanted something in the foyer, so I came up with this giant snake. I figured it would be décor from a movie premiere or from a set, and Ben took it home. Our set decorator, Rich Murray, did all the artwork with the artists’ rendering of Ben all over the place. It was fun to fill the space with CoBro references with made up movie posters and him as a celebrity represented in all these pieces of artwork. There was no end to those references. Nobody has a gilded snake that size except Ben Glenroy.”

By the end of episode one, we learn that one of our favorite residents, Mabel, plans on leaving The Arconia since the apartment has finally sold. If Mabel didn’t reveal that she was departing, we might think that she got the most gorgeous apartment makeover ever, and Howe details that it simply needed to appeal to a new buyer.

“What John Hoffman scripted was that it was a beautifully renovated apartment that, to the audience, was something that they wouldn’t expect from what they know from Mabel,” Howe says. “In a renovated apartment that you’re paying for, it didn’t look like Mabel’s personality. At the end of episode one, we learn that she put it up for sale. It’s fresh, and it’s got the newness of the most recent style. The color is all neutral, but, if I was ding it for Mabel, she would have a chartreuse bedspread or orange upholstery. I liked doing the clean palette, so I had to support the story for the kind of design choice when you are staging for mass appeal. You don’t want to present something extreme, so people can see themselves in the space.”

Howe’s masterpiece comes in the form of Loretta’s apartment. When the season first dropped, Howe revealed in other interviews that it served as a tribute to Meryl Streep’s career, but he doesn’t waste any inch of this space. The cozy reading nook is something that I have been searching for my entire life–I can picture Loretta falling asleep highlighting lines or dozing off when she stays up a little too late reading up on some research. The bookshelves slide up against each other to maximize her space. When her murphy bed comes down from the wall, there are small mirrors and pictures on the wall above her bed, and the Tiffany lamp and the narrow kitchen countertop indicate the true size of this space. It’s truly magical.

“The short answer is that I am very happy with everything we did,” Howe says, with a wry smile. “There was lot of story to tell with no dialogue to tell, but we had a lot of backstory to base that story on. John really wanted it to be a realistically sized studio apartment but show that she lived there for forty years. I didn’t want it to be a cluttered space, though, since that’s not who that character is. I wanted it to be charming, pretty, likable and well thought out. I imagined that Loretta has a lot of street smarts and she yearned to be an actor her whole life. She is very practical but creative, so she was able to make a sweet home for herself in what many other tenants would let that space be dumpy.

I developed that reading nook for someone who has been reading play after play after play, and that would be something that you’d make space for learning lines or researching a part. I did research on those bookshelves since Loretta is someone who would spend a lot of time collecting books, but she would never get rid of them. I wanted that for her. With the wallpaper, each wall is different pattern, but it reflects a quaintness for her. When you collage them together, it makes for a pretty space. I knew that we would always have the written gag of Oliver releasing the murphy bed to come down, so I wanted to show that all surfaces were important to her. Having artwork and mirrors when the bed is revealed, that matters to her, and she views every space as special.”

I couldn’t let Howe go without asking a quite important question: Is it difficult to keep The White Room clean?

“It is actually,” he says. “We had everybody wearing booties. It’s bright white paint, and in film lighting if you put a little bit of light on a white room, it pops. There could be some flaws or scars on those walls, you’d never know.”

Only Murders in the Building is streaming now on Hulu.