How ‘Grosse Pointe Garden Society’ Erewhon’d Its Garden and Everything Else
Secrets and intrigue lurk beneath the dirt in “Grosse Pointe Garden Society.” But for as much as garden club members Birdie (Melissa Fumero), Catherine (Aja Naomi King), Brett (Ben Rappaport), and Alice (AnnaSophia Robb) find themselves drawn together in a metaphorical, murderous hot house, the team behind the series had to dig deep to make the NBC series look as fancy, frothy, and fun as the characters are meant to be.
Production designer Adam Davis and his team brought in 1,200 different plants, silk lookalikes, and pops of color to establish the garden in the pilot. But that was only the starting point for the show’s rich-looking facade. While every garden must be maintained, it’s especially tricky to do so over the course of a full season of television, with a break between the pilot and the remainder of the series. And even though “Grosse Pointe Garden Society” shoots in Atlanta, which has plenty of gracious mansions and fancy, manicured lawns, it’s not quite the same vibe as the affluent Detroit suburb on Lake St. Clair where the show is set.
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Davis and his team had to make some strategic design choices for the NBC series to fake the specific flavor of yuppie affluence that “Grosse Pointe Garden Society” needed — what he and pilot director Maggie Kiley started calling the “Erewhon-ing” of everything, after the upscale Los Angeles grocery chain.
Texture, color, and strong compositional choices all contribute to the Erewhonification of the show’s environments, and they have to, given that maybe only the “Game of Thrones” and “Rings of Power” of the world can actually shell out for $20 smoothies, in TV budget terms. So IndieWire asked Davis about faking affluence and building a real garden that acts as a character in its own right.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: How do you get your head around, OK, one of the characters and the heroes of this series will be a garden set?
Adam Davis: My background is in architecture. I was attracted to the project because I knew there would be some interesting architectural set builds and that the worldbuilding for this [series] would be potentially juicy. So I put together a big pitch deck with a bunch of ideas on how I would approach the visuals without having taken a trip to Grosse Pointe. I did a lot of research to try to understand what is the architectural fabric of the city? What is the tone of the city?
What did you find? What is that vibe?
[Showrunners Bill Krebs and Jenna Bans] and I talked quite about, “What is the garden?” and what’s the flavor of this place. For me, it was about, “This is an affluent community,” obviously, so they have some money to really do some planting. I wanted it to feel upscale, prestigious, something that potentially would win all the cups and the Michigan State Prize and that kind of thing. It’s formal. I didn’t want the garden to feel too wild. I wanted it to be organized.
Especially, you know, we’re in Atlanta. It’s landlocked. You don’t have any water nearby. So I had to divorce myself from that notion and start to find either the basis of a garden or a plot of land where I could go in and bring a garden to it. I also needed to find something I could potentially recreate for the series [if the pilot was picked up]. That was a big factor.
Yeah, I’d love to ask you about making pilot decisions and then having to adjust for the series.
I mean, the thing about a garden is they’re great when you’re in the growing season — if you’re filming in April through June, it’s a home run. Everything’s blooming. But when you’re doing a series, you’re going to go right through the middle of the winter, and you’re not going to have anything blooming. You have to lean into silks and things like that. So I had to find something that I could reestablish later on down the road.
After weeks of scouting, we finally landed on a place called Fraser Gardens in Atlanta. It’s a very formal setup where they primarily do wedding photography, so all the plants and flowers are cream colors, very light pastels. So my greensman and I started to figure out our approach. We brought in about 1,200 or 1,300 different plants, pops of color, and things like that to augment our garden and give it that rich, colorful landscape. I also brought in a landscape designer to help guide us as far as award-winning design, and it worked.
Especially because we were very restricted. We had to get in and out within a week because every weekend, they shoot weddings there. So we went in, and we established some things — and then we had to strike it immediately so that they could shoot a wedding on that next weekend.
Wow. That’s not an ideal setup for a series, probably.
My first reaction [to being picked up] was where are we going to do this? Is it going to be on stage? There’s really no land here. Ironically, we got permission from the studio to carve out a piece of grass that was… let’s just say, it wasn’t manicured, right in front of the studio gates. And they were on board with our pitch of, “Hey, we’ll build a garden. And if this show doesn’t get renewed, then we’ll leave it for you as a park.” So they worked with us, and they allowed me to come out there with my designs and build a piece of what we had established in the pilot, including a new pavilion entrance, which is essentially a 60-foot-long Beaux Arts facade that connects us to a stage build.
I love that such a statement bit of worldbuilding is serving a sneaky dual purpose. The Beaux Arts of it all is perfect for Grosse Pointe.
One of the things that Maggie Kiley, our director on the pilot, and I connected on immediately is our love of wallpapers, color, texture, and rich, rich-looking sets, you know? That’s been definitely one of the challenges of working with a tight budget but make this thing look like money. So everywhere I look for locations — I’m hunting down all the most elegant-looking mansions but every set, every location, that you go into, it’s not quite what you think. You have to dress it on a dime and be creative with it, so you’ve got to focus on the details. We called it the “Erewhon-ing” of everything. We started joking about it. “OK, this is the Erewhon of hardware stores, the Erewhon of doctors’ offices,” you know? Everything needs to have that upscale, affluent feel.
Well, you’re shooting in Atlanta, which has that — but definitely has its distinctive spin on it, too. So, I imagine it’s a challenge to translate it into the show’s Grosse Pointe vernacular.
For me, the two big hooks were brick and Tudor mansions. Brick is my connection to the Grosse Pointe world, wherever possible. You’ll find in just about every one of my sets there’s a brick wall. Then Tudor mansions are kind of the defining style of Grosse Pointe Shores and some of the other areas, so that’s always in my mind as I’m traveling through Atlanta. Because there’s brick, and then there’s brick, right? I also have a bunch of different styles of bricks. Some are more buttoned-up, kind of a federal style. In Alice’s loft, it’s kind of grungy. And, of course, we had to find the cheapest brick that was available. It was all foam and painted and plastered. Luckily, I have a great team across the board with the painters, plasters, and decorators.
That’s awesome. It’s always fun to look at shows that are, as you say, projecting a look of affluence, and you know that the production has had to be clever about how they do it and that they probably didn’t have a lot of time to do it.
Exactly. And the key for me was the seamless integration between the stage builds and the locations. When you’re a viewer, if you find that there’s continuity between the two and you can’t separate them out, then I feel like I’ve done my job.
“Grosse Pointe Garden Society” airs on Sundays on NBC.
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