Barbie’s Dreamhouse is not a place for the faint-hearted. “There are no walls or doors,” Greta Gerwig says via email. “Dream Homes assume you never have anything you want to be private – there’s nowhere to hide.” This layered domestic metaphor has proven rich for the filmmaker, whose live-action tribute to the iconic Mattel doll hits theaters on July 21.
To translate this panoptic game world to screen, Gerwig enlisted production designer Sarah Greenwood and production designer Katie Spencer, the London-based team behind period realms such as Pride & Prejudice and Anna Karenina. Both drew inspiration from Palm Springs’ mid-century modernism, including Richard Neutra’s 1946 Kaufmann House and other icons photographed by Slim Aarons. “Everything about that era was perfect,” says Greenwood, who strove “to make Barbie real through this unreal world.”
Neither she nor Spencer had ever owned a Barbie before, so they ordered a Dreamhouse from Amazon to study. “The scale was quite odd,” Spencer recalls, explaining how they adjusted the original proportions of his rooms to be 23% smaller than human height for the whole thing. According to Gerwig: “The ceiling is actually quite close to the head and it only takes a few steps to cross the room. This has the strange effect of making the actors appear tall in space but small overall.
Erected on the grounds of Warner Bros. studios. outside London, Barbie’s movie house reinterprets Neutra’s work as a three-storey fuchsia fantasy, complete with a slide that winds into a kidney-shaped pool. “I wanted to capture what was so ridiculously fun about Dreamhouses,” says Gerwig, alluding to past incarnations like the 1970s bohemian model (equipped with trompe-l’oeil Tiffany lamps) and
the Queen Anne Victorian mansion from 2000, with Philippe Starck lounge chairs. “Why go down stairs when you can slip into your pool? Why plod up the stairs when you’re taking an elevator that matches your dress? His own references ranged from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Wayne Thiebaud’s pie paintings to Gene Kelly’s painter’s little attic in An American in Paris.
For Barbie’s bedroom, the team paired a velvet-covered clamshell headboard with a sequin bedspread. Her dressing room, meanwhile, reveals coordinated outfits in toy box windows. “It’s most definitely a house for a single woman,” says Greenwood, noting that when the first Dreamhouse (a cardboard flier) was sold in 1962, it was rare for a woman to own her own home. Spencer adds, “She’s the ultimate feminist icon.”
In Barbie, as in previous films like Little Women and Lady Bird, Gerwig set out to realize a whole world. “We were literally creating the alternate universe of Barbie Land,” says the director, who aimed for “authentic artificiality” at every opportunity. As an example, she cites the use of a hand-painted backdrop rather than CGI to capture the sky and mountains of San Jacinto. “Everything had to be tactile, because toys are first and foremost things you touch.”
Everything also had to be rosy. “Maintaining the ‘kid-ness’ was paramount,” says Gerwig. “I wanted the roses to be very bright and almost everything to be too much.” In other words, she continues, she didn’t want to “forget what made me love Barbie as a little girl.” The construction, Greenwood notes, sparked an international race over the fluorescent hue of the Rosco paint. “The world,” she laughs, “has run out of pink.”
Originally appeared on Architectural Digest
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