Where Was Bridgerton Filmed? AD Goes Inside the Season Two Sets | Architectural Digest

Another new set is Will’s gentleman’s club, which the boxer has opened with his ill-begotten winnings from last season. The team built the entire club interior, taking inspiration from similar clubs of the era like the Reform Club and White’s but also bringing in a sense of Las Vegas style. The fireplaces—like all of the Bridgerton fireplaces—work, and the period-accurate glassware was procured from charity shops, eBay, and various flea markets. The pastoral paintings on the walls were custom-made by Bridgerton’s scenic painter Humphrey Bangham. But like the series overall, the club is both true to the period and a purposeful exaggeration.

Historically, for instance, a gentleman’s club wouldn’t have had an actual bar. The social elite would simply summon a drink. On Bridgerton, however, the script called for one. “We’ve done a sort of bar that’s not a bar,” Hughes-Jones says. “It works for the story, but it’s not so stretched that anybody who wants to be funny about period correctness could say, ‘Oh, that’s completely wrong.’ But it’s not completely right.”

He adds, “The thing about Bridgerton is that it’s a pastiche of the period. There are some things within the storylines that just don’t fit the Regency world. We’re storytellers, so you need to make it work for the story.”

Although the sets look disconcertingly real, the production design team has a few clever tricks up their collective sleeves. There’s fake ice in the champagne buckets at Will’s club. The expensive-looking chinoiserie that covers the walls of Lady Danbury’s dining room was painted by Bangham and then printed. The cobblestone street, which replaced several real-world locations in Bath for season two, is made of rubber so horses and carriages can easily move past Modiste and Gunter’s Tea Shop. The hundreds of flowers are fake, to prevent drooping. One thing is authentic: A massive Stanhope printing press borrowed from Reading Museum to print Lady Whistledown’s missives. The piece, of which there are only two still in existence, was so heavy that it had to be fork-lifted in and out of the printworks set.