Where There's Smoke

Designers are adroit at getting inside a client's head. But what happens when the client is a TV series?

Mark McMenamin -- Interior Design, 3/1/2011 1:24:00 PM

Ever since a project by Poesis appeared in The Luxury Bathroom by Samantha Nestor, she'd been keeping tabs on the firm's progress, even stopping by when married principals Robert Bristow and Pilar­ Proffitt were working on their latest furniture line for Ralph Pucci International. When Nestor's marketing and events firm, Chrysanthe­mum­ Partners, was assembling participants for the Showtime House in New York, she phoned Bristow and Proffitt, who promptly agreed to design a 1,200-square-foot penthouse informed by the suburban drug-dealing intrigue­ of Showtime's Weeds.

Designers are adroit at getting inside a client's head. But what happens when the client is a TV series? "Weeds opens with shots of cookie-cutter houses on a web of roads, so the graphic motif of the web emerged," Proffitt says. Thin strips of black tape, applied to a wall in the pale purple living area, spun the illusion of mystery. "There had to be a feeling that everything isn't what it seems," Bristow says. Opposite the black-tape web, another wall sported an assortment of "stash boxes" with padlocked walnut doors labeled for "weed," "blow," and other illicit substances. But furniture was strictly on the up-and-up: about half the pieces came from the Ralph Pucci collection.