Meet Me at Crafty

Prime Video’s The Girlfriend drops the lower-class and slightly gauche Cherry (Olivia Cooke) into the boho chic worlds of her boyfriend’s family: the color-soaked London life of his art gallerist mother, Laura (Robin Wright), and their sun-drenched Spanish villa where everything unravels. (If you have not yet binged the six-episode series, please do so. It’s poised somewhere between Sirens and The Hunting Wives.)

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For set decorators Katie Scopes and Pancho Chamorro, crafting those contrasting environments meant building not just homes but psyches—down to the shape of the wine bottles.

“[Laura] is controlling all her environments,” Scopes says. Every painting, every piece of furniture, every surface is a continuation of her role as a gallerist, removing any distinction between the public and the private personae. But the art itself posed the first challenge.

“ There are only a couple of places to hire art from here in the U.K.,” Scopes says. “And so you tend to see the same paintings recycled and recycled.” Scopes and production designer Niamh Coulter worked with art consultants and even commissioned pieces that reflected Laura’s slipping status: “It had to be good art, but not quite the art of the moment. She’s successful, but faltering.”

That tonal precision extended to the palette. Scopes initially considered the muted “quiet luxury” aesthetic, but the team quickly rejected it. Instead, color became the throughline between gallery and home, taking its cue from a painting hanging in Laura’s living room. “And then I’d found a blue velvet for that sofa that we loved. It was striking a balance between the color and the modernism,” Scopes says. “She’s not a 20-year-old. It’s making it classic contemporary.”

There’s also Scopes’ prize addition to the set: Laura’s midcentury desk from designer Vittorio Dassi.  “It was a bargain!” she says. “Those things cost a fortune, and we found one in an auction house in Yorkshire for peanuts. It was such a brilliant bargain because it was such a specific thing that we’d been after.”

The result is a home and office that radiates control and curatorial taste, making Cherry appear even more out of place in her bandage dresses, all nighttime makeup in a daytime room. “Everything sticks out in Laura’s domain,” Scopes says. “ Whereas in the holiday home, [Cherry] can relax into the background a bit.”

When the story shifts to Spain, Chamorro took over, designing a villa that both mirrors and softens Laura’s control. “Their London home is very modern, very cold,” he explains. “But in Spain, we wanted warmth. It’s their holiday home, so it needed to feel like history—antique Spanish furniture, but balanced with modern art they brought from London.”

Every object was chosen, adjusted, or rebuilt. “We emptied the villa and started again,” Chamorro says. “We changed the lights, the rugs, the curtains—85 percent of the pillows were handmade. I did a casting for the wine bottles! The graphic designer designed the label, but the bottle itself… You see the bottle and say, ‘Look at the size of this bottle. Look at the thickness of the glass. Look at the shade. Look at the weighty.’ All these details show you ‘money.’ If it looked cheap, it didn’t belong.”

That obsessive attention to detail—the casting of a bottle, the right ceramic dish for chicken milanesa—forms The Girlfriend’s hidden backbone. “If nothing [grabs] your attention, OK, we did a good job,” Chamorro says with a laugh.

And if you want to move in, even better.

Katie Scopes’s set decorator credits include World War Z,Disclaimer, and Call the Midwife. Her craft services go-to? “ Always a coffee to keep the spirits up. I’ve got such a sweet tooth, so it’s normally the sweet things when they do a little pot of sweets. Maybe the fresh fruit salad bowls.”

Pancho Chamorro’s set decorator credits include Pennyworth, Disclaimer, and Kraven the Hunter. His craft services go-to?  “I’m going with fruit and ginger shots.”