Next in our ICYMI series featuring Inside the Set episodes with the Set Decorator and Production Designer of Films Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Production Design! Presented in alphabetical order by title, daily this week!
Congratulations to Set Decorator Alice Felton SDSA and Production Designer Fiona Crombie for their Academy Award nomination for HAMNET!
Editor’s Note: They are also very deservedly nominated for the SDSA Awards and many others!
We are offering another look at one of the key sets, AND the full conversation they had with Rosemary Brandenburg SDSA about their collaboration with the amazing Director Chloé Zhao, for our Inside the Set video series!
Set Decorator Alice Felton SDSA and Production Designer Fiona Crombie have a history of notable films, several are awards-winning, including THE FAVORITE, for which they won a BAFTA and were nominated for an Academy Award. Thus, their incredible collaboration with Director Chloé Zhao for the exquisitely realistic and immersive sets of HAMNET is their second Oscar nomination.
A kinship was quickly established with the visionary director, as the team explored conveying the truth of the times and giving the actors grounded verisimilitude in the sets for emotions that play...and have so throughout time.
Editor’s note: Check the video for fascinating tales of creating these sets!
Shakespeare family’s Henley Street home interior. This house is where Will was born, as well as his and Agnes’s twins. It also holds his father’s glove-making/leather workshop. Photo by Fiona Crombie © 2025 Focus Features
“We did so much deep research,” Alice notes. “Chloé is really interested in the authenticity of that moment.”
Fiona observes, “The thing I think that makes all the difference is that we had reclaimed timber, so we built with beams that not only didn’t require aging, they’re also doing their own thing, bending in their own particular ways, they’re imperfect. So that, to me, really informed how the film should look. It’s almost like a shortcut, because the beams came with history. They were imperfect, they were scarred, they had a life before. And we’re putting them into a house that also has had a life....and Alice is finding appropriate things from all over the place. They all come together, and they have a cohesion.”
The attic of the Shakespeare family’s Henley Street home...
The heart of the home is said to be the kitchen...and certainly the daily living/working filled these spaces, but Anges & Will felt the dark, tightly defined areas to be restrictive & claustrophobic. The airy attic became their small family’s refuge.
The attic workspace...Will’s desk and Agnes’s table, as well as wash basin and dresser. Note the stubby candles. Candles were expensive, so were frugally used to the very core. Photo by Fiona Crombie © 2025 Focus Features
Children’s room under the gables. The twins share a sunny space in the attic. There is a niche above Judith’s bed that holds her treasures. Hamnet has carved toys at the foot of his bed, and a small chest for his. Photo by Agata Grzybowska © 2025 Focus Features
Children’s corner of the attic, after Hamnet dies...Judith’s lonely space. Courtesy of Focus Features.
Alice and Will’s bedroom space in the attic. The bright, earthy russet reds of the bed drapes & coverings Alice had brought in early on, have been replaced with the more somber, linen drapes and lifeless blues after Hamnet’s death. If you look closely, you will see the flowers that appear on some of the beams. See the video for the story of actress Jessie Buckley sleeping in the four-poster bed! of Focus Features.
A hint of so much more...
For Agnes, an herbalist healer, her beloved woods and gardens are her milieu, not the constraints of the household. The apple shed was her world – beauteous in its simplicity...the rows of apples laid out on stacked rough wooden trays, their colors like earthen jewels...the herbs drying, the mixture of scents almost tangible...the motes of light through slit in a rough-hewn door and a paned glazed window with worn muslin half-curtain...worktable partially covered with an old linen cloth...Agnes and her workroom exuding so much earthiness and natural beauty, that lust and love would come to life here.
Do watch the video above where you can hear so much more from Alice and Fiona's wonderful descriptions of how they went about establishing these immersive environments, generously giving the actors and director a naturalistic step into the time...and perhaps the experiences, definitely many of the emotions...of the life of William Shakespeare.
**All episodes were pre-recorded and also appear in the Inside the Set section of SETDECOR (Check the drop-down menu above.)
In addition, the episodes can be found on the SETDECOR YouTube Channel.
