Production designer Jon Henson drew on minimalist Japanese architecture to create a house that acts “like the fourth character” for the set of the BBC television series The Girl Before.
Written by British author J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before is a psychological thriller novel set in a one-bedroom fictional home called One Folgate Street in Hampstead, London.
For the TV series, created by BBC and HBO Max, the majority of the interior scenes were filmed last spring on a purpose-built set at Bottle Yard Studios in Bristol, while the exterior of the house was privately built.
“I wanted that [the house] Sometimes it feels like a sanctuary—quiet and safe, almost zen-like—and then sometimes it feels like a castle or a prison,” Henson told Dezen.
“The note from the director is that he should be almost like a fourth character,” he said. “But I wanted to go further and create a space that could almost change atmospheric, depending on the landscape and what we need dramatically.”
The Girl Before follows two women living in the same house three years apart, under strict terms determined by the home’s architect.
The first tenant (Gugu Mbatha Rho), who was in a romantic relationship with the architect, died at the address under suspicious circumstances. A series of unsettling events in the home leads the second woman (Jessica Plummer) to wonder if she would suffer the same fate.
After reading the script and hearing details about the house — which is described as modern and simple in the book — Henson began doing extensive research into the architects and architecture of the four-part series.
He was particularly drawn to F Residence by Japanese architecture studio Gosize, a simple concrete house in Japan’s Heigo Prefecture.
“I’ve pointed out a lot of Japanese architecture,” he recalls. “If you look at the house in Hygo next to Gosize you’ll see a lot of his influence.”
A notable feature of the F Residence is a double-height patio with a single tree in its centre. The courtyard is surrounded by large windows that provide the occupants with multiple angles to see the tree from inside the house.
The production team at The Girl Before imitated this by building giant panes of glass and arranging them around a lone maple tree in the middle of the group’s concrete patio.
The large windows also served a functional purpose for the film crew: they provided plenty of angles to shoot from. This helped create variety in filming, which is significant as Henson estimates that about 60 percent of the series was shot at home.
“The biggest challenge on the set is that we’re going to be shooting there for six or seven weeks,” Henson explained.
He added, “I asked this question at the beginning ‘How do you create a space where you can shoot for that period of time without getting boring? “
“This led me to want to create a space that offered lots of different views, so we created vast expanses of glass overlooking the courtyard to give ourselves another dimension.”
Henson worked closely with series director Lisa Proelman to make sure the different perspectives worked before the cast arrived on set.
After marking blueprints on the studio floor, Brollman walked through the space, adjusting the placement of windows and doors as she walked.
While researching Japanese architecture, Henson also came across wood lattice details in many buildings and decided to incorporate them into the facade of One Folgate Street.
“I’ve seen that in Japan they often use corrugated board – narrow strips of wood with spaces between them,” he recalls.
As a result, he chose to make the house’s striking facade out of thousands of wood planks that the team had coated in silver.
In the book, Delaney describes One Folgate Street as being along a row of houses, but Henson decided that cul-de-sac was a more appropriate filming location.
The team found an existing plot of land on which to build the front of the house as seen in the series, even though the interiors were filmed at Bottle Yard Studios.
“We wanted it to be at the end of the impasse, so that it has a stronger perspective on it that really leads you home,” he said. “We found a street with some old garages at one end, so we demolished the garage and built the house.”
Like the facade, the production team also built many of the interior furnishings that appear in the set—including the sofa, dining table, and killer cantilevered stairs.
This was partly because Henson wanted to make sure every detail was accurate, given the limitations of furniture.
“I found out early on that minimalism is much more difficult than the opposite,” he said. “Every chair you choose, every light you choose is a strong focal point, so I found it more difficult to design it than to design something full of stuff.”
According to Henson, the most challenging part of creating the set of The Girl Before was trying to explain that the two women lived in the same house at different time periods.
“I was really worried that because of the two stories of the two women running almost parallel in the same house but three years apart, it would get confusing,” the designer said.
To avoid confusing viewers, Henson decided to employ effects that make it seem as though the women live in different seasons.
As the series moved from one character story to the next, the production team changed the tree in the yard from being in full bloom to being covered in fall leaves.
Henson also built rain rails in the main courtyard from which water could flow to make it look like it was raining. This meant that he had to place the entire group on a raised platform above an extraction tank under the stones in the courtyard, allowing the water to drain and pump it out.
“Maybe we shoot Gogo in the morning and Jess in the afternoon, so we had to find a window to change the tree in an hour,” Henson said.
“You can imagine what led to that,” he laughed.
The Girl Before was first released in the UK online on BBC One on December 19, 2021. The full series is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
Images provided by Jon Henson and HBO.