Patrick Bateman's living room in "American Psycho."
I was inspired by Flavorwire’s recent article titled, 15 Apartments on Film That We Wished We Owned, written by Colette McIntyre. It covered some of my favorite apartments and homes in movies as well, and I could happily write a post for each one of them (and who knows, I may!), but the first one I thought I would tackle is “Patrick Bateman’s minimalist bachelor pad,” as Ms. McIntyre called it, in American Psycho from 2000.
A view of Patrick Bateman's living room from the other direction.
When it’s not covered in plastic sheeting …(yikes!) we get to see the furniture, from all over the world, that makes up his house. To the left of his sliding glass doors, we see a chair from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House, in Helensburgh, Scotland.
The Hill House chair, 1904, in its original setting of The Hill House master bedroom.
I love the contrast between the master bedroom of The Hill House, with its stenciled walls, and stylized floral motifs, and Patrick Bateman’s cold, plain, white living room. It shows what an iconic piece the Hill House chair really is; it can stand alone as a piece of design.
The two black leather side chairs and matching ottomans were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1929 for the German Pavilion for the International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. The Barcelona chair’s original aesthetic matches much more closely the aethetic of Patrick Bateman, but they were still seen in a much warmer environment, with golden marble and rich woods.
The Barcelona chairs and ottomans in situ, 1929.
The third piece of famous design in Bateman’s living room is the coffee table. It was designed by Italian designer, Paolo Piva, c. 1980 for B&B Italia, and is called the Alana coffee table. From what I’ve been able to find, Piva seems to give his pieces human names. He was born in 1950, and his designs were most popular in the 1980s. The time in which he was designing is especially interesting in relation to American Psycho, because while the movie was made in 2000, it was set in the 1980s.
Alana coffee table, c. 1980 by Paolo Piva.
Bateman’s furniture tastes cover many countries and many time periods, but it is the Alana coffee table that would have been brand new when he purchased it.
Gideon Ponte was the production designer for American Psycho and Jeanne Develle, the set decorator. The American 1980s is not my area of expertise in decorative arts, and I wonder if the Hill House chair and Barcelona chairs would have been readily available for purchase at the time, and also if they would have been seen as the status symbols that they are now, and as I’m sure Patrick Bateman meant for them to be.
Upstaged by Design 