Every Room in Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights Is Trying to Tell Yo

Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights is not a period film. It plays one on screen, loosely, the way someone might play dress-up in their grandmother's closet and then set it all on fire. The interiors are the tell. Production designer Suzie Davies, working from a script that Fennell conceived as the memory of a fourteen-year-old reading Brontë for the first time, built two houses that function less as settings and more as psychological portraits. One is cold, damp, carved from rock. The other is saturated in color, dripping with texture, and covered, in one case literally, in skin.

The entire film was built on soundstages at Sky Studios Elstree in Hertfordshire. Both estates, their gardens, their yards, their stables, all constructed from scratch. Davies, who is Oscar-nominated for Conclave and previously designed Fennell's Saltburn, didn't recreate the Georgian period so much as distort it. "Although we acknowledge the period aspect of the film, we then went and twisted everything," she has said. "Proportions are all out, textures are exaggerated. If we could do Smell-o-Vision, you'd be able to smell it."

This is not a film where the furniture tells you which catalog to shop. It is a film where the rooms tell you who is losing their mind and why.

Wuthering Heights (2026), Earnshaw home: The Farmhouse, Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights: The Farmhouse

The Earnshaw home is built to feel hostile. Not just cold or sparse but actively resistant to the people inside it. The parlor's fireplace looks as though someone chiseled it directly from the rock face behind the house. The walls sweat. Davies wanted the stone to feel like it was "bleeding or crying," and the production team gave every surface a damp, almost biological quality. Triple-height ceilings make the room feel cavernous. A "Doom painting" of the Seven Deadly Sins hangs on one wall, barely visible, never referenced in dialogue, just present enough to make you uneasy.

Wuthering Heights (2026), The Kitchen, Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

The kitchen was designed to make Heathcliff physically uncomfortable. Davies built the ceilings and doorways just an inch too short for Jacob Elordi, who is notably tall. He can never fully stand upright. "He needed to feel uncomfortable in the environment, sort of subconsciously," she explained. It's the kind of detail that doesn't register consciously but makes the body language on screen feel slightly wrong, slightly compressed, which is the whole point.

Cathy's Bedroom Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

Cathy's childhood bedroom at Wuthering Heights has dolls suspended from the ceiling, an image that came directly from Fennell's script. Davies added varied floorboard widths to suggest decades of wear, and the walls hold the moisture of Yorkshire weather. A line of poetry runs along the end of the bed, with a single letter in red. Small highlights of red appear throughout the film, and they start here. Looking out, the window faces the stable.

Heathcliff's room above the stables, Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

Above the stable sits Heathcliff's room. His window looks back at Cathy's across the yard. Parts of the ceiling are missing, which allowed the cinematographer Linus Sandgren to let shafts of light in, and also rain. When it rained on set, it really did rain into this room and down into the stables below. His bed isn't a bed. It looks like he found a spare door, some animal skins, and a chair, and assembled something to sleep on. It's improvised shelter, not a bedroom.

Everything at Wuthering Heights is about exposure. The house does not protect. It participates in the weather.

Thrushcross Grange: The Grand House

Then there is Thrushcross Grange, and the shift is immediate. Where Wuthering Heights is raw and wet, the Grange is saturated, layered, almost hallucinatory. Davies described the transition through Cathy's eyes: "It's technicolor. It's like she's never seen this before." The entire interior was designed to be felt before it was understood.

The entrance hall is dominated by a staircase that Davies says she simply built "as big as I could." Red covers the walls and climbs to the ceiling, where a chandelier hangs encircled by sculptural hands. The hands motif appears throughout the Grange, a Victorian decorative convention that Fennell amplifies until it becomes surreal. In the library, hands hold candles from the walls and make shadow puppets above the bookshelves. The fireplace mantel is also formed from hands. It is ornamental in the way that something can be ornamental and deeply strange at the same time.

Thrushcross Grange: The Grand House, The Library, Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

The library floor is a glossy, arresting red. It came from a conversation between Davies and costume designer Jacqueline Durran about a dress Margot Robbie wears in the film, a red PVC-like skirt that gives way to a white bodice. Davies wanted the floor to merge with the dress. "The dress probably came first, and then my design responded to the dress," she said. "That never happens, really. But it worked perfectly." It's a useful example of how the film's design operates: clothing, architecture, and color all function as a single system.

Thrushcross Grange: The Grand House, The blue drawing room, Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

The drawing room is blue. Walls covered in vac-formed crystals, a type of molded plastic, layered over shot silk in varying shades. The crystals were actually a prototype for the rock face at Wuthering Heights. The prototype had been sitting around Davies's studio and Fennell kept noticing it. So it became something else entirely. Depending on where you look, the ombre effect makes the walls appear darker or paler. The furniture and carpet were reupholstered to match by set decorator Charlotte Dirickx. Even the lamps coordinate, shaped like traditional British boiled sweets.

Thrushcross Grange: The Grand House, The dining room, Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

The dining room is silver, every surface covered in it. The walls are dotted with small plastic half-spheres meant to look like condensation. "We had the idea that the wall had started to sweat," Davies said. "The whole film has a feel of moisture throughout it, so this is like posh moisture." A blue dollhouse in the corner contains a miniature replica of the very dining room it sits in.

Thrushcross Grange: The Grand House, Edgar Linton's Green Bedroom, Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

Edgar Linton's bedroom is green. Every surface, including the fireplace, the doors, and the moldings, has been covered in fabric using a technique called gainage. The bed, found at auction in Scotland, received the same treatment. Thick shag pile carpet adds another layer. It's the room of a man who can afford to be enveloped.

Thrushcross Grange: The Grand House, Isabella's Purple Room, Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

Isabella's room is purple, folded silk on the walls, filled with small knicknacks and seashell boxes that are deliberately period-inaccurate. Davies wanted it to feel like a young girl's room on the edge of growing up. Lavish but girlish, curated by someone whose father wants her to have everything.

Thrushcross Grange: The Grand House, Cathy's Bedroom, The skin room, Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

And then there is Cathy's bedroom at Thrushcross Grange. This is the room that has gotten the most attention, and deservedly. Fennell's script described it as "covered in skin that looked like Cathy's skin." Davies started with a swatch of flesh-toned PVC that had been sitting on her desk from an earlier scene. People kept touching it when they visited. She had Robbie send photographs of her forearms, her freckles, the veins visible under the skin. Davies's graphics team blew these up to larger than life size, slightly enhanced the veins, and printed them onto stretchy fabric, then covered the panels with the PVC. The result is a room that looks alive. Walls that pulse faintly with someone else's biology.

Thrushcross Grange: The Grand House, Nelly's Bedroom, Wuthering Heights (2026), Emerald Fennell, Emily Bronte

Nelly's Room, and the Exception

The servant Nelly Dean, played by Hong Chau, gets the most restrained room in the entire Grange. It is sparse where everything else is excessive. It has a polished purple plaster ceiling, which a team applied by hand from scaffolding. And it is the only room in the film that uses real wallpaper. Every other surface in both houses is fabricated, sculpted, painted, wrapped in fabric, or covered in skin. Nelly's room alone has a wall treatment you could actually buy.

What the Rooms Are Doing

Fennell's direction to Davies was to think of "a mash-up of brutalist references, Kubrick, period drama." That combination sounds incoherent on paper but makes sense on screen, because each house operates as an argument about its inhabitants.

Wuthering Heights is a house that refuses to be domesticated. The architecture physically denies Heathcliff ownership. The weather gets in. The stone sweats. Nothing is comfortable and nothing is pretending to be. Thrushcross Grange is the opposite: a house that tries to absorb you. Every room is a different color, a different texture, a different kind of excess, and together they form a world so fully designed that it becomes its own kind of trap.

Two houses, no home.

Every Room in Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights Is Trying to Tell You Something