Her glamorous Parisian f lat? It’s in West London
IT MAY be Villanelle’s outfits that have hit the headlines but her spacious, light-filled Paris apartment has also sent design enthusiasts wild, inspiring social media posts and blogs devoted to its artfully distressed wallpaper, mismatched furniture and stunning views of Montmartre.
Yet remarkably, it’s not an actual apartment at all.
Kristian Milsted, Killing Eve’s set designer, reveals that what looks like a dream property in Paris is a set he built in a TV studio in Hayes, West London.
‘It’s all smoke and mirrors,’ he admits, laughing. ‘The walls are built from plywood and timber.’
Kristian, who has also worked on films including 2016’s The Girl With All The Gifts, thought deeply about the kind of place Villanelle would live in before creating the flat. ‘She’s a fascinating character – young and wealthy, but also a psychopath,’ he says.
‘She’s got the money to live
somewhere very stylish, but she’s not a home-maker so it needed to be slightly dilapidated, with a sense of the history before she moved in.
‘We built holes in the walls to give them that aged look and used original wallpaper to make it look authentic. The bathroom was an original 1930s suite. Then we added furniture and art.
‘We tried to give it a bit of an edge, a bit of darkness.’
Eve’s cluttered house was also a set, which Milsted filled with ordinary, well-worn furniture in dull colours to reflect the mundanity of her life.
‘We wanted to show a woman a little bit trapped, longing for something else,’ he says.