John Paino has mastered the look of the coastal elite. As the production designer for Big Little Lies, he made the show’s version of Monterey lust-worthy, despite the murder and mayhem. Now, in Sirens, premiering on Netflix today, he brings his keen eye to an equally luxe beach community on the opposite coast. Indeed, Sirens’s unnamed island destination (essentially a Nantucket—Martha’s Vineyard hybrid), does feel like a direct descendent of Big Little Lies, but upon closer look, there’s something different, stranger, and almost surreal to the new series and its spaces. Think: birds, cavernous hallways, and Greek mythological motifs.
The show follows Devon (Meghann Fahy) as she tries to convince her sister Simone (Milly Alcock) to leave this upscale beach town during the last days of summer. Simone has been unreachable for months, working for the mysterious billionaire Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore), who is married to a scion of an old New England family, Peter Kell (Kevin Bacon).
Fahy and Alcock in Sirens
The scenery is marked by a sense of conformity that wavers between humorous and terrifying; Paino emphasizes that “sameness,” as an alert to something possibly lurking below. “It’s the veneer of wealth that covers everything,” he tells ELLE Decor, “everything is clean and everything is the best, top of the line model, even in the guest house and staff quarters.”
Over the course of the series, in no small part due to the set design, Devon begins to wonder if cultish forces are afoot in this supposed fantasyland. To create this eerie feeling, Paino and his team brought in the most expensive kitchen appliances, curated suffocatingly organized closets, and designed overly manicured gardens to create a sense of perfectionism that bordered on overbearing. Yes, there are still the classic hydrangeas, wicker baskets, and long sandy beaches—but these motifs stand out for their absurdity rather than their beauty.
The production and set design teams spent two months scouring New Jersey and Long Island for locations. They eventually found the perfect house in Northport, Long Island. It was big, but it needed to be bigger—the team constructed extensions to the home. The long sandy walk, however, which cast members run up and down to both comedic and scary effect, was already in place.
“It’s the biggest thing [physically] set wise, I’ve done,” Paino says, “We were really having fun with the scale of things, with this big 60-feet foyer.”
Below, Paino tells ELLE Decor more about this complex undertaking, and points to the references and design elements that make up the world of Sirens.
Of the planning process, Paino notes, “I had two months, which was great. We had to really make a house and find a location. We were shooting in the summer, so right off the bat, we weren’t going to go to Nantucket. When people buy a house out there, they want to use it.”
The Northport house “wasn’t as large as we needed, and we built heavily, but it already had an incredible cliff.” The resulting Kell house, Paino notes, “has all the colonial classical trappings of a house in the Cape, but when you go inside, it’s not exactly like The Shining hotel; there’s a strangeness.” For the Kell house, Paino’s team added pergolas and a turret. “We brought it up to what Molly said was an ‘oligarch-like house,’” Paino says.
The interior decor heavily references the Kell family’s background, their relationship with the island, and with whaling, in addition to Michaela’s love of birds—there’s a one-of-a-kind bird-covered chandelier.
The house’s art is more modern, with lots of museum quality pieces, including portraits of Michaela and Peter Kell that look like they were done by Alex Katz. Of Michaela’s curatorial style, Paino notes, “I think she would like it like a showcase, so she chose the most expensive artists; beyond the Katz portraits, there are references to Damien Hirst and the like.”
One of the series’ most apparent design details is the massive anchor sunken into the front of the house, a reminder of the family’s ownership in the island, and their history there. Paino notes, “Since the family comes from old whaling money, it’s possible that a whaling ship would have an anchor of that size, and it’s conceivable that Micaela would have had a giant anchor in the front yard.”
John Paino’s Moodboard
Dorothy Scarborough (she/her) is the assistant to the Editor in Chief of Town & Country and Elle Decor.
