The series premiere of The Residence introduces viewers to a cast of characters straight out of a classic screwball whodunit. There’s the detective, Cordelia Cupp (Emmy-winner Uzo Aduba). The victim, charmingly stern chief usher A.B. Wynter (Emmy-nominee Giancarlo Esposito). Then there are all the suspects Cordelia comes across as she works to crack the case — to say nothing of all the red herrings she encounters along the way.
Yet there’s one character that’s more iconic than any other: The White House itself. The first shots of The Residence take the audience on a tour of the historic mansion — its sweeping staircases, long hallways, shadowy corners, and busts. It’s an instantly familiar setting, and yet truly singular in its presentation.
“The Residence wasn’t just about re-creating the White House,” production designer François Audouy (A Complete Unknown, Ford v Ferrari) tells Tudum. “It’s about showing audiences a version of the White House that they’d never seen before — one that matches the story’s eccentric tone as a murder mystery.”
Audouy and the entire Residence team approached that goal with a meticulousness that would even impress A.B. Wynter. The series filmed at Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles, although the cast often forgot they weren’t at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“The set was not only a replica of the house itself, but also measurement-wise equivalent to what is absolutely already there,” Esposito tells Tudum. “And I’ve been in the real White House, so I know what it looks like. It just deepened my performance to feel like I was in the real place.”
It’s no surprise Esposito had such a visceral response to the spacey. Audouy and his team — in close collaboration with series creator Paul William Davies and White House consultant Haley Rivero O’Connor — ended up building the largest re-creation of the White House “ever attempted,” Audouy says. They filled seven stages, used 10 miles of molding, 200 working doors, 144,000 pounds of flooring, and many, many more painstaking details all rendered in the service of authenticity.
“We ended up building pretty much the entire executive mansion from the third floor all the way down to the basement, and the South Portico and the South Lawn,” Audouy explains. “It was just an insane scale that required a lot of planning and management.”
While a visual marvel, the crew’s work wasn’t completed purely for aesthetic reasons. The mechanics of the White House — its layout, colors, and secrets — are integral to the mystery at the heart of The Residence. So how did Audouy, Davies, and the rest of the Residence team pull it off? Keep reading to find out.
WELCOME TO
THE DOLLHOUSE
Episode 1 opens with a tour through various rooms in the White House, as thunder booms ominously in the background, and ends with a “game board view,” Davies says, which delivers an incredibly detailed bird’s-eye view of the first floor. “I wanted to be very transparent with the space.”
Inspired in part by a real-life White House dollhouse from the 1970s, Season 1 is also peppered with “dollhouse shots,” Audouy explains. “They are cutaways where the camera literally pulls out through the walls and travels through this gigantic house as if it were all connected.” The visual not only turns the sprawling manse into something more visually digestible, but helps viewers understand where characters are and how each room in this locked-house mystery relates to one another.
It was crucial to Davies to demystify the internal layout of the oft-photographed property, so that viewers could be fully oriented in the setting and in the story. “When you see any big place, but especially the White House, you don’t really know where you are,” the writer says. “It was really important to me for this show to really understand the house and be like, ‘These are the number of floors. That’s what they look like. This is where these stairs go. We’re on the second floor right now.’”
Davies and Audouy are proud of the effect their dollhouse shots give The Residence, and agree it was a labor of love — emphasis on labor. During production, they decided it would be “fun” to make it appear as though all these sets were really built on top of one another. That meant Audouy’s team had to design all 132 rooms to be able to fit together physically across the seven soundstages at Raleigh Studios and visually, once it was time to connect them all in post-production.
“That was a big effort over the year and a half of work that I did on The Residence,” Audouy says. “I don’t know if anything at that level of complexity has actually ever been done before in a television show.”
Davies reveals that the flow of The Residence’s White House determined how he wrote the series’ murder mystery. The beats of this whodunit, he explains, are possible only because of the layout of this singular house. “It wasn’t like you could have done this exact same story somewhere else. It wouldn’t work,” he says. “The show is more fun if it feels specific that way.”
THE RESIDENCES
Welcome to the Morgan Administration
Davies knows viewers have seen countless takes on the White House in film and TV — including his fellow Shondaland series Scandal — but he wanted to explore another side of it, one rarely revealed. “The Residence shows us a part of the White House people just don’t see,” he said. “It’s about life in the residence — the mansion, where the president lives — and it’s unusual that way.”
The second and third floor of the White House reveal the domestic and personal life of POTUS, here depicted as the charming and obsessive Perry Morgan (Paul Fitzgerald). Audouy relished the challenge of figuring out how President Morgan would design his space. “We used heightened colors and more of a seductive aesthetic,” Audouy says. “Perry’s style is respectable and chic, and not stuffy.”
Third floor
The third floor is where the president’s guests (both permanent and temporary) live in the White House, including President Morgan’s mother-in-law Nan Cox (Jane Curtin), his closest adviser Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino), and his little brother Tripp (Jason Lee). And they should count themselves lucky that they’re in this residence, because Audouy believes this version of the floor is an improvement on the real one.
“There is a lively palette with yellows and blues and greens,” he explains. “It’s going away from the muted browns and beiges of the actual White House. I was so surprised by how boring the real third floor is.”
This floor also houses the Game Room, which is where Nan stumbles upon A.B.’s body. Davies confirms the existence of the actual White House Game Room is what inspired him to create The Residence in the first place. It’s also the writer’s favorite room in the whole show.
“I heard about the Game Room and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s like Clue. That’s a murder mystery,” Davies says. “We made the room a little bit bigger in the show. But when you have a big billiards table and some dark moonlight coming through, that’s the genre.”
To create the eerie space, Audouy and set decorator Halina Siwolop painted the walls charcoal gray to conjure a sense of darkness. “I wanted the Game Room to be spooky because that’s where they find the body. It kicks off the whole mystery,” he explains.
They also outfitted the room with a star-spangled deep blue carpet and hung photos of presidential sporting moments on the wall. You can spy images of Richard Nixon aiming for a strike in the Truman Bowling Alley and of Ronald Reagan throwing out the first pitch of a baseball game. “I wanted that room to be imbued with history,” Audouy says. “It makes you realize where you are — that there’s this weight of tradition in that room.”
The secret staircase
Audouy lights up like the White House Christmas tree when asked what he thinks about the pocket staircases of The Residence, which covertly connect floors of the building. “I love secret passageways, especially in movies and TV shows — the mystery of it,” he gushes. “That was one of my favorite parts of the story. We get to show the audience these little secret passageways and stairways that no one knows exists — but [that] do exist in the White House.”
The production designer likens the staircase, and their uses, to board games. “A lot of the fun of the mystery that Paul’s written is that the house has all these hallways and shortcuts. It’s like Chutes and Ladders,” he says.
But where will Cordelia end up at the end of The Residence?
Second floor
By creating a fictional president like Perry Morgan, Davies allowed the production team to push their imaginations even further. Audouy imagined the new commander in chief hired his own interior designer, just as President Barack Obama did with Michael Smith in 2008. Davies and Audouy devised a style backstory for President Morgan to home in on his domestic tastes.
“Perry is from Washington state. He’s an outdoorsman. He and his husband have sophisticated tastes,” Audouy says. “We created a very fresh and contemporary look that would fit into Architectural Digest.”
Their art collection includes works from the late 19th century into the early 20th century; in the world of The Residence, the pieces are on loan from various museums. Viewers will notice traditional furniture that’s been reupholstered. The carpets have contemporary finishes. “It’s all a little fresher and newer, but still classy,” Audouy says.
THE FIRST FLOOR
Welcome to what Audouy calls the “showpiece” of The Residence. “We took two of the largest stages in Hollywood and combined them. It was massive,” he says. In fact, the set spread across 20,800 square feet. “It was almost the same size as the real White House.”
The space was not only vast, but filled with incredibly sophisticated touches worthy of the State Floor. Rooms were bathed in jewel tones, silk drapery, and luxury finishes. In the State Dining Room, a specially made marble fireplace boasts a hand-carved inscription above the hearth. In the cross hall is a handmade bust of General Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat who joined the Revolutionary War.
“I’ve never had an opportunity like this before where there’s so much support for excellence,” Audouy says. “It was really, ‘Let’s see how good it could be. Let’s see how many details we can put into it. How much sophistication and layering can we add?’ ”
Color story
Whimsy is the name of the game when it comes to the red, blue, green, and yellow rooms of The Residence. All four of these spaces exist in the White House, but Audouy’s team gave them some extra panache. “I think they’re improvements over the rooms that are really there,” he says with a laugh. “The White House is a beautiful building, but [inside,] it’s very beige.”
The Blue Room — which is actually mostly cream-colored — gets its name from touches of a deep ocean hue. The Red Room is doused in a rich cardinal tone. The Green Room is plastered in Moret wallpaper that was shipped from Italy. And, Audouy explains, the Yellow Room hits the “sweet spot” of the shades of its namesake color.
All together, Davies hopes viewers take pleasure in seeing these rooms. “The operative word for this whole show was fun,” he says. The beauty and scale also helps drive home the style of the series.
“When I was [on set], I was like, ‘Oh, these rooms are really fun because they’re very tall,’ ” Davies says. “The way the high ceilings were shot accentuated the depth and the height. It just had that murder mystery feel.”
The Chief Usher’s Office
One of the Residence team’s favorite real world–to-screen touches is the addition of the chief usher’s office — including its mail slot, which overlooks the grand foyer, and serves as A.B.’s own personal peephole. “You can’t find any photos of the Chief Usher’s Office on the internet. If you search, you will not be able to find it,” Audouy says, “It’s a private part of the White House.”
You’ll find A.B.’s office on the mezzanine floor. Peeking through his mail slot, the usher can “keep an eye on who’s literally coming in through the front door,” Audouy told Netflix.
By exploring the office, the series was also able to show the usher’s staircase, which has also never been re-created for television. “[It] goes all the way through the White House, from the third floor all the way down to the basement,” he said. “There are lots of little details that the folks who actually work in the White House might get excited about when they see the show.”
THE GROUND FLOOR
Just like everyone’s deepest secrets and simmering resentments, the Ground Floor exists below the glittering surfaces — the State Floor, to be precise. It’s here that executive pastry chef Didier Gotthard’s (Bronson Pinchot) gingerbread house is brought after social secretary Lilly Schumacher (Molly Griggs) banishes it from its customary home, the illustrious State Dining Room. The Residence’s polarizing yuletide confection is inspired by the White House’s real-life annual gingerbread house tradition.
It’s unlikely, however, that the actual holiday treat has ever housed a sugary murder victim inside of it.
Although the China Room — where Didier’s gingerbread creation ignominiously winds up — is a source of pain for A.B., another room on the Ground Floor is his salvation: the library. It is, as previously mentioned, A.B.’s favorite room in the entire White House. He started and ended each work day there. A.B. aimed to read every book in the library, and his protégé, Jasmine Haney (Susan Kelechi Watson), believes he nearly achieved that goal before his untimely demise.
The Residence team took the library as seriously as A.B. does. Davies is a book lover and the set decorators managed to find a list of every book in the White House Library. A team was then dispatched to source a copy of each volume or get as close to that edition as possible, further deepening the verisimilitude of the set. “Those books are real,” says Audouy. “And they’re all by the authors that are actually in the White House Library.”
The crew decided to paint the library Audouy’s “favorite blue,” Farrow & Ball Hague Blue, and accent the space with a rich rust hue. The walls were decorated with portraits of Indigenous Americans that are part of the White House collection. The production designer says the “Americana feeling” of the space is a nod to A.B.
“He’s a traditionalist. He loves the White House,” says Audouy. “There’s a reason that he would go to the library secretly and put his clues in the books — because that room spoke the most to him.”
THE BASEMENT
Although the rooms on the residential floors are painted in President Morgan’s elegant color palette and the State floor possesses sparkling luxury, Audouy admits the basement of The Residence is what made him most excited about joining the series. “I thought it was really fascinating to peel back the layers of history,” he says. “The story, surprisingly, really focuses on the staff who keep the White House running. And their world has never been explored in such depth before.” Until now.
The basement is the staff’s headquarters and where a lot of their work is accomplished. “You get to see the electricians’ area and the housekeepers’ — all these little nooks and crannies were incredibly fascinating,” Audouy says. Unlike the rest of the White House rooms, the basement is done in shades of brown and gray. Its tile is an institutional green. It’s a little rusty. A little unkempt.
“Being able to go into the basement was a gift because it allowed me to create a visual arc,” Audouy explains. “The basement made everything else pop more. It really highlights the panache of the rest of the house.”
THE GROUNDS
While, yes, Cordelia’s main reason for going to the White House is solving the murder of A.B. Wynter, she also accepts the case because it represents an opportunity to follow her true passion: birding. “She always thinks about cases in terms of, ‘If there are birds there, that could be interesting,’ ” Davies says. “She shows up with that list of birds and it’s like, ‘I’m going to do some birding while I’m here.’ ”
This brings Cordelia past the residence, and onto the White House grounds (much to presidential adviser Harry’s chagrin).
“This huge murder case happens. Everyone’s like, ‘Where’s Cordelia Cupp?’ ” says Davies. “And the first time you see her, she’s standing outside on the lawn with her binoculars. That tells you right away who she is.”
The Residence follows Cordelia as she traverses the grounds, delving further into the case. Throughout Season 1, we also see the White House through the eyes of a falcon circling the building. “I realized, ‘Oh it’s fun to be out here and work things like the falcon and the gardening shed into the show,’ ” Davies says.
Upon mention of the gardening shed, Audouy has simply this to say: “That’s the most grand shed you’ll ever see in your life.”
Seeing all the pieces of The Residence set’s puzzle come together, it’s difficult not to get chills. After all, the show is as much the story of an eerie murder mystery investigated by a talented detective as it is a celebration of the often overlooked people who make the White House run. Each detail of the set had to exist in harmony with countless other moving pieces, just like the staff of the real-life residence.
“This show is about this murder mystery and Detective Cupp, but it’s also about the people who work in the White House,” Davies said. “Even though some of the characters do some sketchy things over the course of the night, the show really is a tribute to them and to the way that they make that house work, and make our country work by extension.”
For even more hidden details about The Residence, visit here.
