The Real-Life Inspiration for Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House in ‘Barbie’

When Barbie production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer set out to create Margot Robbie’s Malibu mansion, they were coming into the world as fresh as, well, Barbie herself. They’d never owned one of the dolls or her Dream House. Their first inspiration was director Greta Gerwig’s script, and then came their shared love for vintage Americana—its simplicity and joy, as applied to a pink, toy-like wonderland. They based their paradise on the great dream houses, like the famous Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, and placed this idyllic paradise inside the dot on Barbie’s “I.”

One of Barbie’s greatest feats is the immersive world that its production team created. From the nostalgic, eye-popping costumes to the candy-colored world that Barbie and her friends call home, the movie is a delicious feast for the eyes. Everything in Barbie Land had to look a little bit like a toy, so Greenwood and Spencer scaled everything down by 23 percent to make the human actors look just a bit oversized. There were also no walls in Barbie Land’s houses, allowing viewers to see from one place to another. As Spencer told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, “Barbies have no self awareness. They have no embarrassment. They have nothing like that.” Greenwood likened their purity to an “Adam and Eve quality.”

…And then, the Kens moved in, and it all had to come crashing down.

Tired of being sidelined in favor of the women in their lives, Barbie’s Kens (led by Ryan Gosling in a ridiculous mink coat) eventually quit their “beaching” and decide to assert their dominance, plastering Barbie Land with all of their tacky accoutrements. Oversized electronics, workout equipment, dark colors… you know the vibe.

Speaking with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed about their design process, Spencer recalled the moment when she and Greenwood contemplated the destruction they were about to wreak upon their gorgeous creation. They asked Gerwig, “Do you really mean this ugly?” As we can all see from the toxic-male paradise that made it to screen, her answer was a resounding yes.

Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House is an unholy blend of dark woods, horse imagery, and leather. There’s a saloon door in front, one of those giant and hideous ergonomic gaming desk chairs in the living room, and way too many cowboy hats on the wall. And of course, there’s a giant punching bag out back. Andrew Tate would feel right at home.

But where did the idea for all this hideousness come from? As it turns out, Greenwood and Spencer came at this project with a specific reference point in mind—the pop artist Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing. Like the Mojo Dojo Casa House, the collage is a dissonant amalgamation of imagery, all slapped together around the image of a nude muscle man who is holding a big, orange lollipop in front of his junk. It’s a sublime feat of gorgeous ugliness.

Describing the collage, Greenwood noted admiringly that “everything is just stuck on. Nothing’s blended. It’s just stuck onto this environment. And that was the key thing about Ken, was that everything was brought in and stuck on.”

Ken never dismantled anything about Barbie Land. Instead, he just superimposed all his stuff over hers, obscuring her identity by asserting his own. One thing Gerwig knew she wanted? TVs—TVs everywhere, as far as the eye could see. In the end, Greenwood reported, 21 televisions made it onto the set. “Of course, we didn’t have any walls to put them on, so you put them on a chimney, you put them on a tree, you put on a hedge. They’re all playing the same footage. You’ve got these beautiful horses galloping slowly toward the camera, and it’s just the most poetically melancholic image.”

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Anyone could probably draw a direct line from this horrible aesthetic to any number of people in their lives, Spencer said—“your worst boyfriend, or your younger brother, or whoever it is.” In the end, however, “you pull all these things together, and then you find there’s a kind of beauty in ugliness. You know, there’s a sort of melancholia that comes with all that—inspired by everything you probably didn’t want.”

As eye-gouging as many of us might find this décor scheme, Greenwood admitted that after a while, she came to recognize that “it did have some real aesthetic qualities.” When asked if anyone they knew actually wanted to live in the Mojo Dojo Casa House, Spencer cited a shocking statistic—50 percent of the crew. We’ll give you one guess as to what these undisclosed people might’ve had in common.

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