The Bridgertons' Home Is Meant to Look Like a Wedgwood Ceramic
Blue is the signature color of the Bridgerton family, but, according to Bridgerton production designer Will Hughes-Jones, it's not just any shade of blue. It's a very particular pale hue: the color of Wedgwood, the iconic British ceramics brand.
"The Bridgerton house for me is like being inside a piece of Wedgwood ceramic. It's that beautiful, beautiful soft blue and lots of creams," Hughes-Jones said.
It's a design choice he says he lost sleep over. "I sort of went cross-eyed looking at blue colors," he said, speaking with Town & Country over Zoom ahead of the show's premiere. "I'd settle on a blue and then I didn't sleep for three nights worrying about whether I'd chosen the right blue or not. It's a bold statement that we're trying to achieve. And I think, I hope, we pulled it off."
The color, he explained, is present in every family member's room—for instance, there's even a Wedgwood piece on Daphne's dressing table—but it's styled differently to suit his or her personality. In Eloise's room, for example, the wood is a darker shade, and the decor includes a portrait of a feminist icon.
"We felt that Mary Wollstonecraft would have been her hero so we made sure there was a painting of her in [Eloise's] room," Hughes-Jones said. "[Eloise is] the outspoken detective; she’s well-read; she’s opinionated and feisty, but she is still a Bridgerton, so her room always had the basic palette of the Bridgertons, which is the powder blues."
The soft, subtle nature of the Bridgerton aesthetic is in direct opposition to the bold design of the Featherington home. "Very quickly, we created a difference within the confines of the two families," Hughes-Jones said.
"The Bridgertons, they are a historic old family, money from many generations. So the props and the furniture within their house has a history to it. Whereas the Featheringtons, they're much more ostentatious. For the Featheringtons, it was all about having the best things and being seen. For the dressing within the Featherington house, we had cabinets with lots of interesting objects from travel within the cabinets. There was a lot of gold in there as well, and really strong colors."
He said, in designing these characters homes, you "almost inhabit them."
"Your choices become their choices. You choose things that work for you when you're in your Bridgerton head, and then when you're in your Featherington head, you're looking at things slightly differently."
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