‘Lady in the Lake’ Created a ’60s Department Store in an Under Armour Gym

We’re living in a post-“Mad Men” world — and that raises the difficulty level of production designing and dressing the sets of period series like Alma Ha’rel’s “Lady in the Lake,” currently airing on Apple TV+.

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“Shows like ‘Mad Men,’ the general public knows what mid-century modern is, and those things are very desirable, and people want to pay money to make it feel like, ‘Oh, my sofa feels like Don Draper’s sofa.’ It’s not as easy and accessible [anymore],” “Lady in the Lake” set decorator Karuna Karmarkar told IndieWire. “It requires really searching far and wide to get all the pieces that fit into the puzzle.” The hard work paid off; the production design of “Lady in the Lake” adroitly conjures up Baltimore of the ’60s in a way that is both stylized and character-defining.

Just look at how production designer JC Molina creates two very different worlds for Natalie Portman’s uneasy Maddie to exist in. First, there is the over-upholstered suburban home she shares with her husband and son, then, later, the dingy apartment she finds in downtown Baltimore. She seems equally adrift in both, until we see her making an effort to turn her new apartment into a home.

“In the initial conversations with Alma, we were trying to figure out how much of a contrast we wanted to draw,” Molina said. “And I think we ended up with a contrast that’s quite drastic. The point there was to show this 1960s housewife who would look at her magazines and be inspired by the images she would see. And then you contrast that with the world that she goes to when she leaves. You’re talking about cracks in the wall; you’re talking about fixtures from the ’50s that are old. There are things that are not as maintained and not as glossy.”

Molina points out that as the series progresses, Maddie’s apartment starts to feel warmer and more personalized, as befits her growing self-confidence as a single woman trying to carve out a career for herself as an investigative journalist.

That journey slowly brings her into the orbit of Moses Ingram’s Cleo, the titular woman found in the lake. Their first interaction is happenstance; Maddie buys the dress Cleo is modeling in the window of department store Hecht’s, a set that required quite a bit from both Molina and Karmarkar. But first, they had to find something in Baltimore that would work.

“I had met some friends in Baltimore, and we were out at dinner, and we kept on stressing about how are we going to find this Hecht’s department store?” Molina said. “It had to feel very grand, you really have to feel the power and the economy of Baltimore at that time. And my friends, they’re from Baltimore, and they’re like, ‘Wait a minute. One of my friends is the owner of Under Armour. I think he has a gym that is an old bank building.”

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Not only was it an old bank, but because it’s a historic building, the original floors were still there, waiting to be uncovered from beneath the gray carpeting of the gym.

“Everything that you see on that set, everything in that space was brought in by us, whether it was fabricated or found,” Karmarkar said. “To build these worlds, we wanted it to be true and feel real. We didn’t want a situation where our audience is watching the show and it’s purely about spectacle for the sake of spectacle. It’s about honoring the story and honoring the city of Baltimore. So we based what we did of off the photographic research.”

Molina and Karmarkar tried to source as much as they could from Maryland, but they ultimately pulled things from around the nation. And Karmarkar took it upon herself to spend her after-work hours with a glass of wine and Etsy, searching for more set dressing to fill out the show’s world.

Among those were glasses used in the Pharaoh Club, another one of the series’ major sets (and a complete build from the ground up). Karmarkar cites that one as her favorite set to dress. It’s also a great example of the collaboration between Karmarkar and Molina, whose production design bible offered up period-specific and detail-oriented inspiration. “There was this photograph that JC had in the [production design] bible where it was a cash register and some loose tinsel hanging down, and somebody stuck a photograph of their friend,” Karmarkar said. “And so I went back there and started sticking things up that I received inspiration from those photos, and I think that helped.”

Molina started compiling the bible as soon as he joined the project, ultimately creating a thousand-page document with hundreds of thousands of images. “It was very much about pulling references from photographers at that time in Baltimore, in New York, in Chicago, in the big cities and really making sure that we’re hitting those references as hard as we can,” Molina said. “I think for me and for Karuna, it’s really important, especially for this project, to keep very true to images of real life, never to reference film or TV.”

Episodes of “Lady in the Lake” premiere Fridays on Apple TV+ until the finale on August 23.