Country Homes, Pink Poolhouses & Chintzy Bedrooms: Production Design Notes From Rivals Season 2

Have you tuned in to the new season of Rivals? Jilly Cooper’s hit drama returned to our screens earlier this month with all the polo, scandal and Cotswold splendour we’ve come to expect, plus a fresh round of country piles for us to fawn over. Putting it all together – the houses, the wallpaper, the whole sweep of Rutshire – is production designer Dominic Hyman, whose work on season 1 earned him a BAFTA. ‘It was very exciting,’ he tells Country & Town House. ‘And we knew the stakes had to be raised [for the new season], we knew we had to do even better. I certainly feel that we gave more.’ We sat down with Dominic ahead of the release of Rivals season 2 to talk Cotswold mansions, 1980s nostalgia and the spaces that brought the Jilly-verse to life.

Dominic Hyman On Designing Country Estates For Rivals Season 2

What was it like to return to Rivals for a second season?

It was very exciting. We knew the stakes had to be raised – the audience had really locked in to the first season, so we knew we had to do even better with season 2. That was a really great challenge, a really great start. I could tell from the scripts, and from talking to the execs and the directors, that they just wanted more – and I was very up for it. 

So I hope that the audience will feel that they’re getting more. I certainly feel that we gave more.

Alex Hassell returns as Rupert Campbell Black in Rivals season 2 (c) Disney

You and the team won awards for production design for Rivals season 1 – has this impacted or influenced your work at all?

The BAFTA was a real honour. It was really rewarding to receive something voted on by our peers as a recognition for hard work and for getting it right – and it became even more reason for us to get things right again in season 2. We’d set the bar, and now we either needed to keep it up or go beyond it. We had all the same people and the same sense of discipline, so we knew we could make it work.

As with any TV series, there isn’t an endless budget, but there is a very tight schedule. You only have so much time and money, but you’ve got very well drawn characters – so you just focus on what’s important, which is being respectful to the characters, the storytelling, the time period, and, in the case of Rivals, to the world of Jilly Cooper.

For many people the 80s is still such a vividly remembered period of time – was period accuracy an important factor for you when designing the sets?

I feel very lucky, because I was very much alive and doing stuff in the 1980s. I was a teenager at the time, and I just remember it so well. The things we did on the show come from lived experience – as well as photographs, slides and videos.

And it’s really fascinating, because people have different ideas about what period means. Usually, it’s Victorian or Edwardian or Georgian or whatever – but actually, anything before our current time can be period. The 1990s is considered period, so is the 2000s. 

The 1980s is definitely period. It’s in living memory for some of us – a lot of us – which means we have a bit of pressure to get it right, since people remember it so well. But that’s also the beauty of something ‘recently’ period – you can have fun with it, leave those easter eggs and triggers there that make audiences nostalgic and feel like they’re back in a room from 40 years ago. We wanted people to suddenly remember that VCR player, that telephone, that car, that television – or maybe a specific pattern on the drapes or cushions. That chintz!

We’re throwing these callbacks out there and letting people find them, and the responses have been really delightful. It was a real privilege to be able to do that, and to have such a good team to do it with, who also understood the importance of accuracy. 

Emily Atack as Sarah Stratton, Katherine Parkinson as Lizzie Vereker & Rufus Jones as Paul Stratton in Rivals season 2. (Disney)

Does period accuracy sometimes get in the way of storytelling?

Going into Rivals season 2, we were set new challenges. Our approach was this: start from the ground up, work out what it really would have been like, and be truthful. And then, at times, just turn the dial up a bit – heighten it if it’s necessary – to just lift the scene or get something about the storytelling or the characters across better. But we also knew when to be quiet and not shout with the design – because, at the end of the day, it’s about the performance we see onscreen. We just want to set the scene in a really believable way, and make the audience go, ‘Okay, I’m in 1987. I’m in Rutshire. Let’s go.’

A big part of why audiences love Rivals is that we get to go behind the scenes on some really beautiful estates and houses in the countryside. What was it like choosing and dressing the ones featured on the show?

I worked very closely with the supervising location manager [Joel Holmes]. We talked about the brief and what the character’s houses need to be – as well as the differences between each setting. [Holmes] put forward ideas for each location back in season 1, and slowly, we whittled our choices down until we agreed on the best version. From there, we’d work between the actual locations and a soundstage [sets built for the purpose of filming scenes] that would match.

All these different houses have such different personalities. From the physical houses that we actually found through the location department, to the way that we then painted them, built into them, decorated them, dressed them. You’re building characters with architecture that are significant to the storytelling – but must never overwhelm the storytelling. We find the balance, the sweet spot, where you’re propelling the story, but you’re not overwhelming it.

And all the main houses were done on location. We would decorate rooms, we would change the wallpaper, do our own drapes, put floor finishes down. There were only a few locations where we were on a soundstage. 

Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara and Danny Dyer as Freddie Jones in Rivals season 2 (c) Disney

Tell us a bit more about some of the houses we see onscreen. Can we start with the Priory, the home of the O’Hara family?

It was always meant to be this crumbling, 11-bedroom mansion [the family] couldn’t afford to keep the roof on. As Maud asks, “Why have you brought me to this gilded prison? Why have you taken me from West London, where all my Thespians are?”

It was this sprawling space that the O’Haras would never be able to keep up with. And the building itself had the quality of an ancient, overgrown, tumble-down place and that was wonderful. So we leaned into that Elizabethan feeling for the Priory kitchen and the sitting room and so forth [which were separately built on a sound stage].

Claire Rushbrook as Monica and David Tennant as Tony Baddingham in Rivals season 2 (c) Disney

And then there’s Tony Baddingham’s sprawling estate, The Falconry.

It needed to be magnificent. We played a bit with Tony and Monica’s dynamic when dressing this location; he’s a grammar school boy whose father made a fortune in armaments, so although the house was always meant to have been through Monica’s family, we wanted to get this sense of it being Tony’s Nero’s Palace, his own golden temple.

There are the big pillars out front, that big pediment and the raised steps as you come into the house. We also added Roman statues in the hallway, and that deep, blood red carpet that goes up the stairs. It’s very Romanesque – and in a way, classic. We are trying to talk about power and that, in the context of Tony and his red Rolls-Royce, all kind of works together.

Alexander Hassel as Rupert Campbell Black in Rivals season 2 (c) Disney

How would you compare Rupert Campbell-Black’s family home, Penscombe?

We wanted Rupert’s family seat to have a similar scale, stepped up again, but this time in a much more relaxed, patrician way. It is effortlessly elegant and full of real history – and maybe austere, as well, in the way that we feel Rupert maybe wasn’t loved enough by his parents. They were never there. He was brought up by nannies. He went to boarding school.

We wanted to get that sense of history across – which the house naturally had already – so when Rupert walks in and out and around the house, you can feel the 250 years of history before him. Inside, we had portraits of ancestors looking down at him. He is surrounded by these rather solemn looking faces with wigs, going back to the 18th century.

The house itself felt bedded into the landscape, and you can feel that Rupert knew every inch of it.

Freddie and Valerie’s home in Rivals season 1 (c) Disney

Freddie and Valerie Jones have a new pad this season – what can you tell us about Bella Vista?

They finally get to the centre of Rutshire society this season. They’re these self-made kids who grew up together; Freddie’s now hugely successful as an early tech mogul, and Valerie’s really taking pleasure in this new lifestyle they have.

Bella Vista itself is an architectural mash up of styles – the phrase ‘Bella Vista’ simply means ‘nice view’ in Italian. There’s something rather Viennese about it, mixed with something slightly Georgian and something a little bit Spanish.

It’s Valerie’s dream come true – but it’s a new build. It’s the biggest [house] of all of them, because Valerie wanted that. You walk in and there’s a staircase in the hall that’s fit for a 1940s Hollywood epic, where Valerie could imagine parties where she walks down and makes her entry. And of course, that’s exactly what she does at parties: she makes her entrance.

But, because they’re slightly separate from the established crowd in Rutshire, we took steps to make things feel a little off. We got the colours a little bit wrong, the drapes are bigger than they should be, the pinks are pinker than they should be, there’s a bit more gold than we really would like… But it’s done with love, not in a way that mocks Freddie and Valerie. She’s thrown her heart into the decorating of this place and we go with them on that journey, so we are happy for them. But then also, it’s satire, so we feel the tragedy as well.

Lisa McGrillis as Valerie Jones in Rivals Season 2 (c) Disney/Robert Viglasky Photography

Bella Vista is also home to a pretty cool poolhouse, where some of Rivals early season 2 drama kicks off. How did you go about setting up the scene?

When creating something for the screen, we do tend to flit between onsite locations and soundstages. So, for the houses in Rivals, audiences are seeing either houses that we’ve done a full treatment on, or combinations of different houses and stages.

The latter was the case for Bella Vista. The main house was one location – the exterior, the hallway, the sitting room, the bedroom – but for this epic indoor swimming pool and hot tub, we needed to look elsewhere.

We ended up finding a pool house about 50 miles away, which had the right bones for the scenes we were shooting – and the owners were happy for us to do a full makeover. We painted it pink. We had extraordinary nets and drapes made for all the windows. I wanted it to feel like a Las Vegas funeral parlor. That was my reference for it, hitting those mint green colours. We painted the lounges and the dining furniture in that green that kicked off the pink in there. And then, of course, there’s the overwhelmingly glorious foliage: the banana palms, the kentias, the birds of paradise; it’s all there.

Gabriel Tierney as Patrick O’Hara, Bella Maclean as Taggie O’Hara and Catriona Chandler as Caitlin O’Hara in Rivals season 2 (c) Disney

We also get to see a lot more of Paul and Sarah Stratton’s house – or rather, their kitchen – this season. 

Yes! It forms this really fun ensemble sequence in episode 2. The house was just outside Bath, and the lady who owned it was happy for us to completely gut her kitchen and do a whole makeover. 

I wanted it to be a kitchen that was unlike the O’Hara kitchen, which is the heart of that house with that feeling of warmth, intimacy and emotional honesty. The Stratton kitchen I wanted to feel more like something out of a catalogue, as if Sarah had this idea of blue scumble glazed walls like the Mediterranean, Casa Pupo china lemons (very 80s), and yellow drapes just to hit off the blue perfectly. Sarah can’t cook, never intended to cook – she’s not interested. So it also needed to reflect a kitchen that’s never used.

For the ensemble, we built bits on location – the larder, the storage room, the wine cabinet – and the challenge was getting it to work within the existing geography of the house. But our team is great at finding spaces that work, and our director, Elliot Hegarty, is also great at reccy-ing places. When he shows us around, he’s already thought about how the sequence will work, which really helps us refine the design. We’ve been really lucky so far. We’re telling big stories in big environments that, in the end, often are very intimate.

Emily Atack as Sarah Stratton and Oliver Chris as James Vereker in Rivals season 2 (c) Disney

If you were to give our readers some tips on how to bring Rivals style into their homes, what would it be?

Don’t be afraid to embrace chintz. I think it would be really fun to do a Monica Baddingham bedroom. It’s a chintz on chintz paradise. 

Our wonderful set decorator, Holly Thurman, and I collaborated a lot throughout the Rivals process, and for Monica’s room we wanted to really enjoy her love of flowers and gardens and all things colourful and innocent. We see Monica out in the garden in the show, picking roses. She loves that fresh, floral look and smell – and we wanted to play with that in the bedroom.

We started with the wallpaper; we chose a floral print wallpaper from the time with lovely little posies which didn’t feel too overwhelming. And from there, we could build on top with chintz – Colefax and Fowler fabrics, also in floral patterns, on the curtains, the bed cover, the headboard and the drape behind the headboard. It’s just chintz on chintz. 

And then, in the windows, we added these wonderful coral pink fabrics – I suppose they’re blinds – and then behind that are these net curtains. In the 1980s, there was this real emphasis on layering the windows, and then carrying that fabric through to other areas of the room. For Monica, this translated to the bed, the makeup dressing table (where we added a chintzy skirt) and floral paintings and prints on the walls. Scatter cushions in similar floral fabrics were also a great way to dress the space – we put them on the bed, on chairs, on a dog bed. 

We also added vases of freshly cut flowers on the bedside table and the dressing table – soft ferns on pedestals. So there’s this layering of greenery and exuberance and joy. That is Monica. She’s this warm, big hearted person who – and of course, that’s the thing about satire – is with a husband that’s so mean and awful. But we engage with her character through her room; it’s very much her room, and Tony is a guest in it. It’s a real reflection of her character.

And it’s so true to the period. So, you know – I would say, if you want to embrace the full Rivals experience, tap into Monica’s bedroom.

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Rivals season 2 is available to stream on Disney+. disneyplus.com