In 'Saltburn,' Emerald Fennell Built a Manderley For Today

“They’re filthy rich. They have no real idea of what money means,” production designer Suzie Davies says of the characters in the new film Saltburn. “But it doesn’t mean they don’t have taste.”

That much is apparent. Saltburn, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, who made Promising Young Woman and played Camilla Parker Bowles in the third and fourth seasons of The Crown, is a dazzling new addition to the tradition of films about terrible things happening in grand estates. Saltburn follows an Oxford outcast named Oliver Quick (a brilliant Barry Keoghan), who befriends his rich, dashing classmate Felix Catton (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi) and finds himself spending a long, enchanting, and exceedingly unforgettable summer at the aristocratic Catton family’s sprawling estate. And while the cast includes a rogue’s gallery of gifted performers—Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Archie Madekwe, and Alison Oliver, among others—there’s no denying that the film’s painstakingly designed namesake pile is among its most formidable players.

Like Rebecca, Brideshead Revisited, and Gosford Park before it, Saltburn plays gleefully with the terror that can exist inside exquisite real estate. “Although it’s not a period piece, it’s like a timeless film,” Davies says. “It could be set in the 15th century or the 18th century, or really anytime, with this historical family that have obviously been there for years.” The designer played with art (“we delved into Caravaggio and the Pre-Raphaelites, all the way through Modernism and contemporary art”), garden accoutrements (a fiendish maze festooned with minotaur sculptures in the style of Nicola Hicks), and even food (“definitely shepherd’s pie, that had to happen”) to give the home—played by an actual estate in the English Midlands—the proper patina to both entice and unsettle an outsider.

“There’s something so enduring and seductive about the British country house subgenre,” Fennell says. “The containment, the unattainable beauty, the impossibly opaque rules, the sense of watching and being watched, the fear of being discovered as an interloper—all make a country house such a rich and gothic place to tell a story.”

To achieve that effect, Davies combined and invented rooms, dreamed up generations of design follies, and added such touches as overflowing Lalique ashtrays and priceless busts sporting party hats to hit the sweet spot between opulent and irreverent. The result doesn’t feel like a movie-set version of what it portrays but instead like the genuine article. “A place as unreal as Saltburn,” Fennell says, “always had to feel real.”

This story appears in the October 2023 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

You Might Also Like

• 12 Weekend Getaway Spas For Every Type of Occasion

• 13 Beauty Tools to Up Your At-Home Facial Game