In 1915, Frank Lloyd Wright came to California. He’d just experienced a great tragedy—his partner and six others were murdered at his Wisconsin home and studio, Taliesin, and the house was set ablaze. He began spending more time on the West Coast, and during the early 1920s, built five Los Angeles homes in a new and unique style called Mayan Revival, inspired by pre-Columbian architecture.

At this same time, the movie business was budding. And in the fictional world of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s new Apple TV+ comedy The Studio, Wright also constructed the executive office building at Continental Studios, using his signature concrete textile blocks to erect a dramatic, imposing “temple of cinema” which, if it were real, would be mentioned right alongside the Hollyhock House or Ennis House. “A lot of the major studios have very beautiful old lobbies and offices—cathedrals to filmmaking. It was a new and exciting industry, and early studio heads wanted to show the artistry and grandeur of their ambitions through the architecture of their offices,” Rogen tells AD.

Rogen in front of the façade of the Continental Studios office building, which was created on the Warner Bros lot.

Courtesy of Apple

When the show begins, however, it is the present day, and the legacy movie company is grappling with how to maintain its dominance in a rapidly changing industry. Rogen’s character Matt Remick has just landed the top job after former studio head Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara) is ousted. He wants to make “the next Rosemary’s Baby or Annie Hall or, you know, some great film that wasn’t directed by a f—ing pervert,” but is forced to greenlight “the Kool-Aid movie” and take meetings with Rubik’s Cube and Jenga. “Temple of cinema,” Matt says. “And they want me to make movies out of f—ing wooden blocks.”

Building Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Temple of Cinema”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile blocks famously featured cutouts of different designs. Production designer Julie Berghoff created ones with a C-motif cut into them for Continental Studios.

Courtesy of Apple

Rogen and Goldberg, who wrote the show along with Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck, and Frida Perez, are quite design-minded—remember, these guys are the founders of the luxury cannabis accessory brand Houseplant—and as they began to unfurl the backstory of their fictional studio, they recalled the Artbound episode “That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright In Los Angeles.” In addition to being historically accurate for their timeline, Wright’s Mayan Revival work struck them as the perfect illustration of the heart of the show: “Wright came to LA to build in the wake of a terrible personal tragedy—and the result was the Mayan Revival buildings that were at once both very temple-like and also very tomb-like. This really worked as a perfect narrative metaphor,” Rogen says. “The characters are trying to live up to the grandeur of the early days of Hollywood, while also feeling trapped and suffocated by their responsibilities.”

Rogen in his character’s office—at a desk custom-made by set decorator Claire Kaufman—alongside Kathryn Hahn and Ike Barinholtz.

Courtesy of Apple

Making the office building two stories allowed for scenes where the executives peer down at the Hollywood talent waiting to meet with them in the lobby—something lifted from Rogen and Goldberg’s own experiences. “Everything was based off their stories,” Berghoff says.

Courtesy of Apple

Production designer Julie Berghoff and her team brought this vision of a Frank Lloyd Wright–built office building to life on the Warner Bros lot, creating an 8,000-square-foot, two-story structure inside Stage 23 for the interior and creating a new façade on an existing structure for the exterior. Like Wright, she used prefabricated blocks to construct her masterpiece, only these were built out of plaster instead of concrete and were made by a combination of casting, lasering, and CNC routing (a computerized cutting machine). “If I wanted to shift anything, it was a big deal because everything was built on the 18-inch blocks,” she recalls. “It was a very technical, difficult building, and we built it in six weeks.” Also taking a page out of Wright’s book, set decorator Claire Kaufman created custom furniture pieces for the space.

The Harvey House and the Foster Carling Residence

Rogen and O’Hara in the yard of the Harvey House, which looks out over Los Angeles.

Courtesy of Apple

Matt Remick (Rogen) works with a stacked lineup of actors and directors, all played by themselves. Just a few of the cameos in The Studio include Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Charlize Theron, Greta Lee, Steve Buscemi, and Olivia Wilde. His role on the business side of things means he is constantly the bad guy, having to crush dreams, let down his idols, and sometimes make a fool of himself. But it’s clear that both he and his former boss Patty (O’Hara) love movies and have a deep admiration for creativity. The show creators wanted to convey this in their homes, so Berghoff, location scout Stacey B. Brashear, and their team set out in search of standout architecturally significant dwellings fit for movie executives. “For some of these homes, we were just putting letters on their door and hoping they would answer,” Berghoff says. “Stacey was very persistent.” It paid off in the form of three striking and historic midcentury-modern dwellings built by innovative American architect (and student of Frank Lloyd Wright) John Lautner.

In episode one, we see Matt visit Patty at her hilltop residence, where she welcomes him into a massive rounded entryway with stone floors and floor-to-ceiling glass windows all around. It is the Harvey House, built by Lautner in 1950 for aluminum producer Leo M. Harvey. One of the architect’s early commissions, it fell into disrepair in the 1980s, and in 1998 Charlie’s Angels actor Kelly Lynch and her husband, writer and producer Mitch Glazer, outbid Leonardo DiCaprio to purchase it. They lovingly restored it with help from Lautner Associates principal Helena Arahuete and still own it today.

The Continental Studios logo is based on the doors at John Lautner’s Harvey House.

Courtesy of Apple

It was at the Harvey House that Berghoff found a solution to a problem that had plagued her: what to use as the logo for Continental Studios. “The logo was really challenging to design because it had to be something classic for the ages,” she says. “We spent five, six weeks designing it.” And after Rogen brought up graphic design pioneer Saul Bass to her, she felt the pressure was really on. “I was like, he knows who Saul Bass is?” she recalls. “They must have rejected hundreds of logos. The graphic designer, Zach Fannin, and I were beside ourselves.” But when she visited the Harvey House and saw the heavy french doors with their sunburst motif and handles that resemble the letter c, she was struck with inspiration. “I took the John Lautner door and turned it sideways. We sketched on it and just kept working it and working it until we found something that fit our show.”

Later in episode one, Matt returns to his own home with his friend and coworker Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz). The pair lay back on a built-in sofa against a wood-paneled wall to watch the movie Goodfellas—after they’ve just come from completely screwing over Martin Scorsese. It is the Foster Carling Residence, a 1949-built hexagonal masterpiece with a boat-like design, an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, and said built-in sofa, which swivels outward along with the wall behind it to open up the entire room to the outside. Foster Carling was a film composer, but today the home is believed to be owned by none other than fashion designer and former Moschino creative director Jeremy Scott.

Asked if Matt and Patty even appreciate the beauty of their domestic surroundings, Rogen has thoughts: “I think they are enamored by artistry in general. They’re lovers of Hollywood and Los Angeles and are people who would appreciate the responsibility of owning architectural works of art that are anchored in their city,” he says. “I also think they very much enjoy the reaction people give them when they step into their homes. I think they’d revel in the idea that they seem more interesting as a result of living in these interesting homes.”

Silvertop

O’Hara and Rogen in a scene at Lautner’s Silvertop.

Courtesy of Apple

The third Lautner home in the series features heavily in episode two, when Rogen visits—and accidentally botches—a movie shoot taking place at sunset at the Reiner-Burchill Residence, also known as Silvertop. A majestic fixture of LA midcentury design, it took around a decade to design and build in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it was left unfinished when its first owner, industrialist Kenneth Reiner, went into bankruptcy. Still, it was a marvel of modern innovation featuring a sweeping arched concrete roof over a wall of glass, a cantilevered driveway that curves around the home, and a pool that has been called the first ever infinity pool. In 2014, the home was purchased by Beats Electronics president Luke Wood and his wife Sophia Nardin, who hired architect Barbara Bestor to give it a makeover. She pored over Lautner’s original drawings and, though some high-tech elements were added (a retractable wall in the primary shower) or updated (the sliding glass wall in the living room is now noiseless), stayed true to the original design. “I really think of it as the Fallingwater of the West Coast, you know, it really is that significant,” said Bestor.

Sarah Polley as a film director shooting a scene at Silvertop, with O’Hara and Rogen.

Courtesy of Apple

For Rogen, these homes, just like the fake Frank Lloyd Wright office, are symbolic of a larger message within the comedy. “The characters are nostalgic for the old days of Hollywood and are people who long for creating things that stand the test of time and leave a legacy,” he says. “The homes speak directly to their aspirations. They want to be a classic fixture in Hollywood.”