Diana’s bedroom is supposed to be the one Queen Victoria slept in. Set decorator Yeşim Zolan furnished it with an eclectic mix of Empire, French, Victorian, and Louis XVI pieces to convey items collected over centuries, as would be the case at Sandringham. Most were sourced from the Berlin dealer Miri Antiques & Interior.
Courtesy of NeonTo achieve the film’s clean, slightly cold aesthetic, set decorator Yeşim Zolan adapted a less-is-more approach to decorating, feeling the grandeur of the rooms meant they could be furnished selectively, although the team didn’t skimp on symbols of Diana as a caged bird. The 16th-century Watts of Westminster tapestries covering her oversized custom bed and hanging on her bedroom wall depict what Zolan describes as “desperate” flying pheasants—perhaps to be hunted, as they are in the film, she says. In Diana’s turquoise bathroom, there’s an authentic freestanding Victorian ribcage shower, and the room’s walls are covered in hand-painted de Gournay paper with birds.
Finding a pool table in Germany—let alone an antique with uncommon burgundy felt—was difficult. Zolan had a 19th-century J. Ashcroft & Co. table shipped from a Liverpool dealer.
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The film’s many food sequences required a separate department with three food stylists and a team of painters. The color of Diana’s soup during a surrealistic dinner scene matches her green silk dress, and Stewart could actually chomp on Diana’s detested pearls because they were made of chocolate covered in a pearlescent candy glaze. “Every cake, every chicken wing, every piece of fruit was personally inspected by me and dressed into the set with specially designed edible glazes, shellac, and frosting,” Dyas says, adding Stewart told him how tasty everything was.
As for the scale Diana balks at being weighed on, it’s a Victorian jockey scale that the production rented from a private German collector. (Zolan says a similar piece recently sold at auction for £30,000, or about $40,467.) It closely resembles the Sandringham device Dyas says was given to Queen Elizabeth’s mother.
Nordkirchen Castle stands in for Sandringham behind Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana.
Courtesy of NeonAs minimal as the decor was, Zolan did commission over 60 framed paintings, each with its own story. One large work, which hangs in an opulent gold frame in the entrance hall of Sandringham in the film, was done in the style of 17th-century Flemish Baroque painter Jan Fyt and features a woman with dead animals after a hunt. It is somewhat ominous, but that’s the point. In fact, Zolan says she knew the creative team had achieved its goal after reading a review of the film that said, “If you are ever invited to Sandringham, don’t go there.”
Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas says “a rather creepy house” found by chance some distance from Berlin became Diana’s disintegrated childhood home. Stairs constructed of balsam wood and rubber meant Stewart could safely walk on them even as they collapsed under her.
Photo: Pablo Lorraín / Courtesy of Neon
