Now, you can follow Upstaged by Design on Twitter. You’ll be able to see when a new post is up and I can tweet quick notes on historic design in movies.
Follow me by subscribing to “upstagingdesign” on Twitter!
Now, you can follow Upstaged by Design on Twitter. You’ll be able to see when a new post is up and I can tweet quick notes on historic design in movies.
Follow me by subscribing to “upstagingdesign” on Twitter!
Filed under News
Here’s a fun one: gummy bears. It’s weird how much they’ve been popping up in my life lately. I originally saw the chandelier below on a design blog, called Likecool, this past March. Then in August, I saw stills from Nickelodeon’s TV show, iCarly, of the main character’s bedroom and knew I wanted to write about it. In September, a friend sent me a link on giant gummy bears. I’ve since seen a commercial on TV for adult gummy vitamins. And finally, it culminated in a nostalgic discussion of the cartoon Gummi Bears and their Gummi Berry Juice with my co-workers. It’s funny how life works like that, as soon as you become aware of something, you see it everywhere.

Gummy Bear Chandelier, Designed and made by Kevin Champeny, Acrylic, Edition of ten, For sale at Jellio.com
Anyway, back to design. What is it about gummy bears? I’ve always liked them, and clearly, I’m not alone. I had a bracelet made up of acrylic gummy bears growing up. They’re like shiny, glowing gemstones, that are sweet and gooey. As a child, I don’t think it could get much better than this. And even though I was growing up in the 80s, thirty years later, they are still as popular as ever.
Of course, it’s not like I was the first child to have this fascination. In the early 1970s, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (based on the 1964 book by Roald Dahl) came out in theaters and we all caught our first glimpse of a Gummy Bear tree.
Carly Shay’s bedroom, is every little girl’s dream room. Colors abound, like an over-sized jewelry box, every surface in that room sparkles or twinkles.

Carly Shay's bedroom, and yes, that's a trampoline at the end of her bed. Photo Credit: Lisa Rose/Nickelodeon
While the chandelier is a known design object, as well as some of the other lamps, the rest of the set was created by a very talented and young-at-heart, art department. (Here are their credits on IMDB.com.) With Harry Matheu as Production Designer, Jason Howard as head of Set Decoration and Art Direction by Jim Jones, they managed to create a candy palace. A sort of Dylan’s Candy Bar as a bedroom.
These lights, pictured above, are also available at Jellio.com and are LED, battery operated lights. The practical adult in me thinks, “oh good, so there’s no electrical cord to mess with.” But, eight year old me thinks, “cool! so you can put them anywhere and take them with you anywhere too!” I like the eight year old me.
The plot of the episode of iCarly where the gummy bear room is revealed, “iGot a Hot Room”, starts with Carly’s older brother making her a gummy bear lamp of his own design, for her birthday.

Carly's birthday gift from her brother, Spencer, based on her favorite candy, the gummy bear. Photo Credit: Lisa Rose/Nickelodeon
But when Spencer’s gift ends up setting her room on fire, her bedroom is re-created into the gummy bear wonderland that we see pictured.

And just in case your sweet tooth wasn't filled with a cavity yet, there's this setee that looks like an ice cream sandwich. Photo Credit: Lisa Rose/Nickelodeon
If you’re wondering how to make this room in your own house, Nate Berkus created his version on his show.
Now …who else has a craving for gummy bears? What’s your favorite flavor? Mine’s pineapple.
Filed under As Seen On TV
It all begins with an architect.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s lead character in the film, Inception, used to be an architect. But now, sometime in the near future, he’s an Extractor. He can enter your mind through dreams and see your subconscious and thereby know your deepest secrets and inner-most thoughts. It is up to the Architect of the dream, played by Ellen Page (Ariadne), to create the built world of the dream.
The idea of inception (and don’t worry, I’m not going to give any spoilers) is to plant the seed of an idea in a person’s subconscious, but in order for the idea to take root, it must be in the simplest form, and if the Extractor can do that, then the idea can grow, organically in the person’s mind when they awake.
From the first scene in the movie, I knew I was going to have to write about it. That first scene takes place as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, is escorted into a Japanese dining room. The first shot we see of this room includes a view of the back of a large half-circular chair with lattice work design at the head of a table, lined along the sides by a dozen or so, smaller, half-circular chairs with vertical rails.

Japanese dining room in Inception with Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ken Watanabe (Saito) and Leonardo DiCaprio
And just as nothing is as it seems in a dream, the same is true of this room. While it is set in Japan, the chairs around this table are not Japanese. In the image above the lattice work chair is not visible, but Arthur and Cobb are both seated in the side chairs. [You may need to click on the image and follow it to its original link to see the chairs more clearly.]
The lattice work style chair, whose back is to the audience in that first scene is a chair designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1903, called the Willow Chair.

Mackintosh's Willow Chair, designed in 1903 for The Willow Tea Room on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, Scotland.
The side chairs were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in 1937, for the Johnson House, called Wingspread in Racine, Wisconsin.
That these two chairs, designed by a Scot and an American, fit into a Japanese setting, is of no surprise. Both Mackintosh and Wright were greatly influenced by Japan, its architecture and design. The elegant simplicity and minimal decoration of Japanese design was admired and copied by both of these architects.
Even the light fixtures, both in the Japanese dining room and in the main hall (as seen in later scenes, and below) contain light fixtures that are unmistakably Japanese in style, but appear much like fixtures by Mackintosh.

Leonardo DiCaprio stands in the main hall of a Japanese house under Mackintosh style lighting fixtures.
Notice the similarities in the lighting fixtures between the Japanese house above and those in The Hill House, designed by Mackintosh in 1903, below. Gabriele Fahr-Becker, talking about another building by Mackintosh in Art Nouveau (Könemann: Germany, 1997) stated, “The Glasgow School of Art, Mackintosh’s most famous building, belongs to architecture and architects, or rather to building and the future. This manifesto of simplicity, warding off all false pomp with its block-like, self-contained composition, has become a model for future generations of architects.” (p.53) I like thinking of this quote in relation to the dream architect of the movie.

The light fixtures in the library at The Glasgow School of Art, 1909, are modern interpretations of the more traditional cluster of lanterns that hang above the table in the Japanese dining room in the movie.
And since we seem to be covering all 20th century architects that were influenced by Japanese design, it only seems appropriate to include California’s Greene and Greene.
Charles and Henry Greene were also influenced by the elegance and simplicity of Japan, although their work tended to focus on the craftsmanship rather than the functionality of Mackintosh and Wright’s works. And while I tend to think that Mackintosh and Wright looked more to the future and rejected Historicism more than Greene and Greene, all four men held true to their shared beliefs in simplicity, unity and nature.
And while dreams can combine ones ability to re-live memories of the past with wishing for the future, so did these architects. Henry Greene was quoted in 1912 as saying, “the idea was to eliminate everything unnecessary, to make the whole as direct and simple as possible, but always with the beautiful in mind as the first goal…” (Greene & Greene Masterworks, by Bruce Smith and Alexander Vertikoff, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1998, p.27)
It is so perfectly fitting, then, that the former Architect, Cobb, and his wife share a house outside of Los Angeles, that was built by Greene and Greene. This house, the Freeman Ford House, is a metaphor for the beauty of simplicity in design and in the dreams of Inception. Cobb may appreciate the house’s simplicity as a former architect, but he can also see the necessity in the simplicity of ideas.
While Pasadena is proud to claim the Freeman Ford house for it’s own, there are not many interior photos of it available online. But it’s characteristics are similar to those in many other Greene and Greene houses.

This window, actually at the Ford House is a common design element, horizontal bands of windows with stained glass. A window like this is visible in the scenes that take place in the Cobbs' dining room.

This interior image is of Greene and Greene's most famous residential structure, the Gamble House, 1909.
The image of the Gamble House above shows the dominance of woodwork in the interior and the use of low ceilings and constricted space opening up into larger rooms and more open space. We got to experience this every time Cobb walked down the long, narrow corridor to his dining room that looked out over a large backyard.
Another area of the movie Inception that I want to mention is the music. I can’t talk about the musical theory behind it, but as I was watching the movie, in the theater, the soundtrack blew me away. It was those two deep beats played by an ear-piercingly loud horn every time it was all about to go to Hell, that made me jump and stay on the edge of my seat. I found an interesting article about how those two notes mimic the two notes played in the Edith Piaf song used to wake the dreamers, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” The music is by Hans Zimmer and it’s brilliant, not only in its ability to captivate but in the symbolism of a song about no regrets being used for a movie about continuously re-living dreams. There’s something about the music (and this whole movie) that reminds me of Vertigo (or maybe it’s the cymbals in The Man Who Knew Too Much), which just makes me love it all the more.
Filed under In the Cinema, Music
Here’s a quick one. After writing a previous post on Pedro Almodóvar, I decided I needed to see all his films. My latest one is Talk to Her (Hable con ella), and just like the others before it I was intrigued, amazed, shocked and delighted. His story telling, the look of the film and his actors are all superb. So, it was truly an added bonus to see another famous chair in this movie.
This chair was designed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1956 for the Herman Miller furniture company.
And now that I’ve noticed this chair once, I must notice it somewhere at least once a week. It’s in movies, on TV, in print advertisements. It even appeared in a Cole Haan ad on the side bar of my email.
You might also notice a famous table in the scene from Talk to Her. It is Eileen Gray’s chromed steel side table from 1927. Built for the E 1027 house in the South of France, these tables were likely inspired by the chromed tubular steel furniture of the Bauhaus.
Filed under Double Takes, Foreign Film, Modern Film
This is my first entry under the new category of “Favorite Rooms.” This category is for all those homes I see in movies that I love and make me think, “I could live there.” While I like to focus on historic and famous furniture design and architecture, sometimes a good room is just, well, good. So, it’s a little selfish, but hey, why not share? And as I started to research Meryl Streep’s character’s house in the movie It’s Complicated, the more I realized – or so I hope – that perhaps this isn’t a selfish entry at all. A lot of other people have written about Jane’s house and how fabulous it is too. So, if you share our sentiment, let me know.
Jane, who is now divorced from Jake, still lives in the family’s house in Santa Barbara, California. The Spanish Eclectic style of the exterior of the house is common in the Santa Barbara area, and was probably built sometime between 1915 and 1940.
But, I think it’s the interior of her house that turned me into a fan. I love that it’s cluttered and yet clean, how warm and inviting it is and how much it makes me feel at home; it’s just like how a mom’s house should look. I like the color palette and how the background surfaces of the walls, floors, trim and furniture remain neutral in creams, whites and natural wood tones. The color in the room, and its warmth is in the bursts of color in the seat cushions, the table runner, plants, paintings and the food. And it’s those bursts that bring a vibrancy to the space.
I like how even though there is something everywhere you look, it’s all organized and it feels like everything is in its place – kind of like the story line of the movie. It’s complicated, but it’s just as it should be. I just can’t imagine why Jane wants to have an architect come in and redo the whole thing! (Don’t worry, if you haven’t seen the movie, I haven’t spoiled anything.)
Here are some of my fellow bloggers who are also loving this house! Cathy Whitlock has written about the set in Traditional Home and has an amazing design blog of her own about movies called Cinema Style. Rooms to Rave About and Design-59 also love it and Remodelista will show you how to copy the look. Beth Rubino was the set decorator for this film as well as Nancy Meyers’ movie, Something’s Gotta Give. Nancy Meyers also directed The Holiday, which, no joke, is going to be my next entry in this new category for me. If there’s a little English cottage in the movie, I’m going to love it.
Filed under Favorite Rooms, In the Cinema
Now this is going to be tricky. First of all, I am not a costume historian, I just like clothes and fashion history. And secondly, I’m going to try not to gush over Alfred Hitchcock, let me just say this now: I ADORE his movies.
So, not surprisingly, I’ve watched Vertigo (my favorite movie of all time) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (the newer version, and by that I mean the 1956 version with James Stewart) multiple times. It occurred to me during my latest viewing of The Man Who Knew Too Much, that Doris Day’s suit was awfully similar to Kim Novak’s in Vertigo.

Kim Novak in Vertigo as Judy as Madeline...
I’m going to assume that this coincidence is no coincidence at all, and rather has everything to do with the fact that Alfred Hitchcock used the same costume designer in most of his movies: Edith Head. The Man Who Knew Too Much came first in 1956 and Vertigo soon followed in 1958, and both were costumed by Ms. Head …and starred James Stewart.
I found some references to these costumes on IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base). According to IMDB, “Edith Head and Alfred Hitchcock worked together to give Madeleine’s clothing an eerie appearance. Her trademark grey suit was chosen for its colour because they thought it seemed odd for a blonde woman to be wearing all grey.” But, they had already given this look to Doris Day, a blonde, two years earlier.

Jo McKenna at Ambrose Chapel in her gray suit and black hat
The one difference I notice straight away is the use of a hat. Doris Day’s character wears a black pill box hat with her gray suit and white mock turtleneck. Kim Novak’s character’s hairstyle actually plays an important role in the movie – as she is copying the style of a woman’s hair in a portrait. Kim Novak’s Madeline is also much more sensual and less proper than Doris Day’s Jo.

Doris Day with Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart in the set of The Man Who Knew Too Much during her birthday

Kim Novak on the set of Vertigo with Alfred Hitchcock
So, the common denominator isn’t really Jimmy Stewart at all, but more likely, Edith Head. She was quoted as saying, “I don’t usually get into battles, but dressing Kim Novak for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” put to the test all my training in psychology.” I’m not sure if she’s talking about Kim Novak here or about how important the costumes were to the psychology of the movie and of the characters in the movie, I’d like to think the later.
Filed under Costumes, The Classics
About two months ago I saw a great movie called The Brothers Bloom and of course, out of no where, BOOM!, design. I was happy to spot a dining table surrounded by Bauhaus style chairs.
My first thoughts turned to Marcel Breuer. The design of the dining room chairs reminded me of his Wassily chair.
As a student and a teacher at The Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s Breuer helped to invent tubular steel furniture. His most famous and well-recognized piece is the Wassily Chair, originally named the Type B3 Steel Club Chair. The chair was later named for Wassily Kandinsky, who admired the chair and had one made for his own home, by the designer and fellow Bauhaus artist, Breuer.
And while the chair is most often seen in black leather, I’ve shown it here in white because it is most similar to the chairs seen in the movie.
But, after more investigation and reading, I learned about Mart Stam, a Dutch Bauhhous designer from the same time as Marcel Breuer. From what I have found, they both developed tubular steel chairs around the same time period, but it seems Breuer usually gets the credit.
And since The Brothers Bloom was all about the underdog or the over-looked getting his due credit, I’m going to give Stam the credit on this one.
Even as exact replicas of his Cantilever Chai S34 are sold today, they are billed as Breuer style chairs. (See the cream colored Director’s Chair above – it’s sold as a “Breuer Director Style Chair.”) To be fair, Stam and Breuer’s chairs are VERY similar.
So can we agree to disagree? I say Stam. But they are from the same school: Bauhaus, and they are from the same time period: the late 1920s. Maybe they helped each other? The difference seems to me, to be in the arm rests.
Another piece of furniture I noticed in that flash of a dining room scene was the table. Not that I recognized it, but I had to look into it after the chairs revealed so much. I could very easily be wrong here, but I’m going to guess this table is from Design Within Reach.
DWR describes the table on their website as having, “the angular beauty of …the strict architecture of Marcel Breuer’s seminal work and the clean geometry of Le Corbusier’s ‘equipment for living.’” I mean, it is a movie set after all and they probably are using modern reproductions, so I’m just going to go with the flow and say this isn’t a piece of historical design, but a modern one that works beautifully.
Even if it is only on screen for 17 seconds.
Filed under Double Takes, Modern Film
I remember watching Sleepless in Seattle when it came out in 1993 and thinking Jonah had the coolest chair I’d ever seen – and that was it.
But now, watching it again as an adult and as a follower of design, I had to find out more about it.
I started by researching “egg chairs” and soon discovered that term opened up a whole can of worms, or, rather, a whole timeline of chairs! His chair is the most recent in a long design lineage of chairs. Jonah’s chair, originally known as the Alpha Stereo Chair, was designed by Lee West (dates unknown) and was made for Krypton Furniture. It is now called the ModPod Egg Chair and they can now be purchased from a company called inmod.
But the story behind this “egg chair,” I think, begins in 1957, with Arne Jacobsen’s design of the first named Egg Chair.
Jonah’s egg chair has arm rests that are reminiscent of an Eames design.
Also from 1948, and also featuring a similar arm rest design is the Womb chair, designed by Eero Saarinen.
The final design component I noticed on Jonah’s chair was the base. This great swivelling base that makes the whole scene in the movie as he and Jessica spin the chair around using only the tips of their toes that touch the ground. This base must have been inspired by Eero Saarinen as well, in his Tulip Armchair from 1956.
And finally, there is another egg chair …not like Jonah’s and not like the original by Jacobsen, but one from 1968 designed by Henrik Thor-Larsen. It was first shown at a Scandinavian furniture fair in 1968 and became a quick classic – and let’s face it, shape-wise, it is the most deserving of the name, Egg Chair.
The chair was manufactured from 1968 to 1978 and has been so popular that the company re-released it in 2008.
The egg chair, not to be confused with the ball or globe chair, by Eero Aarnio from the early 1960s, is a term that encompasses more chair history than I would have ever thought of in 1993 when I just wanted Jonah’s cool chair.
Filed under Double Takes, Modern Film
I went to see Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie in the cinema, Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotas), this past weekend. Besides being amazed by his ability to tell a story and Penelope Cruz’s beauty, it delights me to report I spotted two chairs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh!
The chair, as seen in the image above,was designed to go in the master bedroom of The Hill House, built for Walter Blackie and his family in 1903. Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the chair and the house. Walter Blackie was a book publisher in Glasgow, Scotland. Many of the books he published were fairy tales. So, The Hill House, very fittingly, has a subtle theme of roses and Sleeping Beauty. The lattice-shape of the back of the chair fits both in dimension and theme the stencils on the walls of roses growing on trellises.
I was unable to find a still from the movie that included the Hill House Chair. It was the customary black, however, it had a red upholstered seat. There are two in Ernesto Martel’s dining room and they are visible in the scene pictured above.
This is my first post in my new category of “Double Takes” where I plan to document quick views of famous design in movies and not get into the history, philosophy or interpretation of it all.
Although I do have to say, besides having a chair meant for a bedroom in a dining room, there is an interesting layer here with the theme of this chair. As this chair was meant to evoke the feeling of a trellis where Sleeping Beauty’s roses might grow around her and cage her in with their thorns, so does Ernesto Martel to Lena in Broken Embraces.1
Filed under Double Takes, Foreign Film, In the Cinema
If you’re a fan of the CBS TV show How I Met Your Mother, like I am, then you already know all about Barney Stinson. If you’ve not seen the show, let me fill you in on a little background detail. Barney is the loveable chauvinist. He loves women, he loves Star Wars, he loves his friends and he loves his suits, but he loves nothing so much as he loves himself. Of course we all suspect there’s something deeper there than he lets on, but he is ever the showman and usually pretty good at hiding his true emotions. Back when he was in college and dressed like a Hippie, he had his heart broken, and so has since then decided to wear only suits and “be awesome.”
This, the 100th episode, of the sitcom finds Barney trying to woo a new woman to bed – as he does in every episode – but this woman is at the top of Barney’s list. She’s a hot bartender. Unfortunately, her last few boyfriends were Wall Street men who also only wore suits. So, the story finds the hot bartender resolved to never date a suit-man again and Barney struggling between his love of girls and his love of suits.
How then, you might ask, do we find ourselves looking at a book written by Bruno Taut, a late 19th/early 20th century German Expressionist architect and Utopian visionary?
Easy, when Barney decides to give up suits in order to get the hot bartender he dons a t-shirt and pair of jeans. The t-shirt he wears has this book cover on it.
Bruno Taut wrote this book in the mid-1920s (it’s earliest edition seems to date from 1924) to promote a new functional, modern design. Since women were the housekeepers and decorators of the home, he wrote this book to persuade them into accepting the modern interior, by seeing its benefits. Whereas Victorian interiors were full of fabric and dust-collecting knickknacks, modern interiors were simple, sophisticated and easy to clean.
As Barney’s story continues …he succeeds at getting the girl back to his apartment but when she mistakenly walks into his closet thinking it was the bathroom …well, I’ll let you see for yourself what happens next.
The reason I find this all so interesting is because of the clash between the meaning of this book and the philosophy of Barney Stinson. While Barney was doing everything possible to get this girl into bed, he was wearing a t-shirt that suggests women are the creator of the home, and yet when it came right down to it, when this woman suggested he change his home (i.e. throw out all his suits) he wouldn’t do it. OK, this is a bit of a stretch, since she was not suggesting he decorate in a modern style while he firmly held to his belief of a traditional Victorian interior, but I think the irony is still there. The character of Barney Stinson fears nothing more than a woman coming into his life and creating a new look for it.
Also interesting is the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence on Bruno Taut’s architecture and there is definitely a little Superman complex in Barney.
Whether the writers of my very favorite TV show meant for this irony and debate to come from the t-shirt worn by a character on the show, I would be curious to find out. But, no matter what, I love it a little more with every episode.

My favorite part of the song is when all Barney's friends ask him if he'd rather have riches, eternal youth, etc. or suits. And when Lily asks him if he'd rather have world piece or suits, Barney's answer made me laugh to the point of tears.
And finally, as a sidenote: I love Cindy and her roommate’s apartment! Random, but just thought I’d share. Nothing beats a warm yellow room.

Ted, the architect, and Cindy in the apartment Cindy shares with his future wife - but no one knows that yet.
Filed under As Seen On TV