The Design of Severance
Lumon Industries has better taste in furniture than most museums. Dieter Rams, Shiro Kuramata, Joe Colombo, Warren Platner. The severed floor is a mid-century collection that nobody inside the building chose and nobody inside the building will ever leave. Jeremy Hindle designed the world. Andrew Baseman dressed it in Season 1, David Schlesinger in Season 2. Between them they built one of the most complete designed environments in recent television, and one of the most unsettling.
As Hindle has put it, Lumon "is a massive pharmaceutical company with deep pockets. They are rich in history and design. They love the best and want the best." So the severed floor becomes a kind of corporate collection, rare objects arranged not for admiration but for compliance. Outside the building, in the homes of the outies, many of the same designers appear, but the context changes everything.
Bellworks in Homdel, NJ, and the former headquarters of Bell Labs
Bell Works
The foundational design decision was the building itself. Lumon's corporate headquarters is filmed at Bell Works in Holmdel, New Jersey, the former Bell Labs complex designed in 1962 by Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche. Two million square feet, symmetrical and imposing, the kind of mid-century corporate monumentalism that was meant to communicate innovation and now communicates something closer to dread. Saarinen and Roche built it for world-changing research. The show turns it into a company that surgically alters its employees' memories.
Hindle was drawn to Saarinen and Roche from the beginning. Their John Deere World Headquarters in Moline, Illinois gave him the blueprint for Lumon's interior aesthetic and the idea for the show's most important prop: the MDR desk. "There was a powerful gesture in their designs," he has said. "Bell Labs was a place to really be creative. I find offices now are so uncreative." That tension, between a building designed to inspire and a company that uses it to control, runs through every episode.
Most of the interiors were built on soundstages at York Studios in the Bronx. Hallways were constructed in 140-foot runs around the perimeter of the stage and rearranged between scenes to create the illusion of an endless labyrinth.
The Fabricated World
One of the show's sharpest design ideas is that Lumon makes its own objects. Severed employees can't be exposed to anything from the outside world that might trigger a memory, so the logic demands that nearly everything on the severed floor was manufactured by the company. Schlesinger estimates 30 to 40 percent of the set dressing was fabricated in-house. "We wanted everything to be a little off and not recognizable," he has said, "because, in theory, most of the things on the severed work floor would have been made by Lumon."
MDR office
The computers in the MDR office were built from research at the Rhode Island Computer Museum, with functional keyboards, trackballs, and touch screens the actors actually operate. The modular furniture in Gemma's suite on the testing floor, her sofa, chair, and bed, was 3D-printed, imagined as something Lumon's own Optics and Design department might have produced. The art on the severed floor, posters modeled on WPA designs from the 1930s, was created by graphic designer Tansy Michaud. The "Kier Pardons His Betrayers" mural in the lobby elevator bay, depicting four people buried to their necks in sand, was developed by Hindle and an in-house illustrator. The only exception is the iceberg painting in Milchick's office, by local artist Lisa Lebofsky. Tramell Tillman, who plays Milchick, suggested the concept. Most of an iceberg sits below the waterline, unseen.
This mix of real design pieces and Lumon-manufactured objects is what gives the severed floor its particular unease. You can't tell what's sourced and what's fabricated, and neither can the people who work there.
Color
Schlesinger describes a strict palette on the severed floor: blues, greens, and grays. Red appears sparingly. When it does, it means something. Gemma in a red dress in the Christmas Room, forced to write thank-you notes for a holiday she doesn't remember. A single red letter in a line of poetry on a bed. The final scene of Season 2, where Hindle wanted red to mean love.
Green dominates the interior. Hindle chose it deliberately: "Green is the most common color to your eye. The theory is it's calming, it makes you feel calm." The MDR office has green carpet. The boardroom has green carpet. The Break Room has green carpet. It reads as nature. It functions as management.
The Visitation Room takes the palette further. Nearly every surface, the Nimrod chairs, the fabricated table, the walls, shares the same color. The chairs were custom-dyed. The table was powder-coated. Depth collapses. People sitting in the room look absorbed into Lumon itself.
Even the town of Salt's Neck isn't spared. The Drippy Pot Café in Season 2, Episode 8 appears ordinary, but count the colors. There may be three in the entire space. Lumon's reach extends past the elevator.
The MDR Desk
The most important object in the show is the one that was built for it. The Macrodata Refinement desk is a single plinth supporting four back-to-back workstations. Hindle got the idea from the John Deere headquarters. The producers called it the Cadillac of desks. It sits in the center of an 80-by-40-foot room with low ceilings and green carpet, deliberately scaled to make four people feel small. In Season 2, a three-sided variant was designed to spin, and when a marching band appeared in the finale script, Hindle finally got to use it. The chairs are Blu Dot Daily Task Chairs from 2016, contemporary and generic, chosen because they carry no history. The innies don't get history. They get a seat.
The Reception Area
Exiting the elevator onto the severed floor, you encounter a pair of Henry Glass lounge chairs from the 1950s. Glass spent his career making furniture with quiet mid-century authority, the kind of thing that reads as tasteful in a showroom and institutional in a lobby. At Lumon, even the waiting area feels like it's waiting for a verdict.
Dieter Rams at Lumon
No single designer's work appears more often in Severance than Dieter Rams. A Braun FS-80 television, the 14-inch CRT in injection-molded plastic that Rams designed in the 1960s, sits in the Christmas Room where Gemma is held. Hindle wanted it badly enough that the production had it loaned from the Braun museum in Berlin. A props person flew to collect it.
A wall-mounted Braun stereo unit with Vitsoe shelving hangs in Gemma's suite on the testing floor. In another room, a Vitsoe 620 chair re-upholstered in aqua holds a character in place. Rams spent his career arguing for "less, but better." Inside Lumon, that clarity turns clinical. The objects are perfectly rational. The environment they serve is not.
Eames Executive Chair, Herman Miller
The Management Office
Season 1's Management Office features the Eames Executive Chair, also called the Lobby Chair or the Time-Life Chair, originally created in 1961 for the executive floors of the Time-Life Building in New York. It has been shorthand for corporate authority ever since, showing up in the Mad Men boardroom among other places. At Lumon, it does what it has always done. It sits behind the desk of whoever is giving orders.
Season 2 upgrades the room. Hindle and Schlesinger brought in a Warren Platner desk, circa 1965, from the Lehigh Leopold line. Platner had worked under Saarinen and Roche, the same architects behind the real Bell Labs building that serves as Lumon's exterior. The desk threads the fictional company back through the real architecture it inhabits. Schlesinger called it "the lynchpin. It carries the entire design DNA of the show." He found it at Merit, an antique store in Los Angeles.
The Olivetti drafting tables scattered throughout the show, in the Mammalians room, the management office, a closet, came from a line of Italian office furniture that was never imported to the United States. "I wanted to find things that people didn't recognize," Schlesinger said. "I thought it was amazing, so I just started buying them up."
Shiro Kuramata's Apple Honey Chairs
The Boardroom
A 45-foot resin table, gleaming and alien, under a metal ceiling with bespoke overhead lights. The chairs are Shiro Kuramata's Apple Honey Chairs from 1985, sourced through auctions. Kuramata made furniture that behaved more like sculpture: thin metal frames, minimal presence, shapes that seem ready to vanish. Around a table that long, in a room carpeted in Lumon green, they suggest a place where decisions are made by people who don't stay seated.
The Nimrod Chairs
Marc Newson's Nimrod chair (2003, for Magis) shows up in the Break Room and Visitation Room. The Break Room was originally imagined with beanbags. Schlesinger replaced them with something sculptural. He added a repainted 1960s projector fitted with a fabricated control panel, balloon lamps, and lava lamps sourced from Ukraine. "I wanted things that felt a little foreign," he said. The whole room was revamped for Season 2's "new and improved" Lumon.
Nimrod Chair designed by Marc Newson, Visitation Room.
In the Visitation Room, the Nimrods reappear, this time custom-dyed to match every other surface. Table, walls, carpet, chairs, all the same color. A recognizable design object, made to disappear.
Joe Colombo on the Testing Floor
Three Colombo pieces land on the testing floor: the Universale Chair for Kartell (1965), the first mass-produced all-plastic chair; the Coupé wall light for Oluce (1967); and the Triedro suspension lamp from the early 1970s. Colombo's entire body of work assumed the future would be modular, adaptable, optimistic. Lumon's testing rooms are modular and adaptable too, and they're used for clinical experimentation on people who don't know they're being tested. The optimism doesn't survive the context.
The Wellness Room
The Wellness Room is where innies sit and hear "facts" about their outie selves read aloud by Ms. Casey, equal parts therapy session and interrogation. The chair is a Karpen of California slipper from around 1960, low-slung, inviting, the kind of thing that belonged in a mid-century living room. Here, you sit in it because you've been told to, and you listen to information about a life you can't remember, delivered by someone who may or may not be your dead wife. The chair is comfortable. That's the worst part of the room.
Devon and Ricken's House
Then you step outside Lumon. Devon and Ricken's home is the Bier House in Usonia, New York, built between 1948 and 1956 by Kaneji Domoto. Domoto joined the Usonian housing community project in 1948 as a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, and though Wright reportedly didn't approve of some of his designs, Domoto completed 700 projects across a career spanning architecture and landscape design. The house is Usonian through and through: horizontal lines, natural materials, timber paneling in warm browns, a cantilevered living room, skylights, a dining terrace wrapped around a tree.
Inside, the set decoration reads like a dealers' fair. A Charlotte Perriand Cansado Console sideboard. A Hans Wegner CH07 Shell Chair. A Poul Henningsen PH table lamp. An Isamu Noguchi Akari floor lamp. A George Nelson Cigar Lotus floor lamp. Jens Quistgaard teak salt and pepper mills for Dansk. An Arthur Jacobs chain light for Modeline. Perriand, Wegner, Henningsen, Noguchi, Nelson: five of the most important names in twentieth-century design, sharing a single room.
The show plays Ricken's taste for light comedy, but the contrast with Lumon is doing real work. Every object in this house was chosen by a person, for a life that belongs to them. The Perriand console holds whatever they put in it. The Wegner chair gets sat in by someone who wanted that chair. The Noguchi lamp gives light because someone walked over and turned it on. At Lumon, none of that applies. The objects exist because the company decided they should.
Burt and Fields's House
Season 2 expands the outie world with the home of Burt, the former head of Optics and Design, and his husband Fields. They live in the Gerald Luss House, a modernist residence in upstate New York, built in 1955 as Luss's first residential project. Luss was an architect, sculptor, and furniture designer, and the house still contains his original pieces, including the iconic Time-Life couch. Above the dining table hangs a Notos Light No. 1 by Ben and Aja Blanc, a black steel fixture with a shade of hand-woven horsehair. It starts at around $5,000.
The Eagan Mansion
The Eagan family home, introduced in Season 2, was filmed at the Taghkanic House in upstate New York by architect Thomas Phifer. Hindle had been looking for something like the Farnsworth House, a glass structure with subterranean space where the uber-wealthy Eagans could live. The Taghkanic House offered 360-degree glass exposure above ground and an underground private level below. Hindle's framing: "When you start to become so wealthy that only the absurd becomes attractive to you."
Schlesinger placed a John Pomp Rift dining table inside, hand-blown glass thick enough to suggest permanence and fractured enough to suggest otherwise. The tableware tells its own story. Schlesinger found an 1860s AB Daniel and Son porcelain plate depicting figures restraining one another, dated to the era of Lumon's fictional founding. The director insisted they make it work with just one original. Paired with Reed and Barton silver and a TALA egg wedger, a vintage manual kitchen tool that looks almost surgical at this table, every object reinforces hierarchy.
Corporate Facsimiles
Hindle's guiding principle was to "create a world that's familiar, yet not anywhere you have seen or been." The furniture helped, but so did the architecture, the fabrication, the color, and the art. Every corridor, poster, and carpet tile on the severed floor was calibrated to produce a specific emotional effect in people who have no frame of reference for anything outside it.
Schlesinger put it most directly: "I imagined there was a severed set decorator working for Lumon. That's what these rooms are, corporate facsimiles of reality."
The Rams stereo in Gemma's suite is real. The Colombo chairs on the testing floor are real. The Kuramata chairs in the boardroom are real. But inside Lumon, none of them function the way their designers intended. They have been collected, arranged, and stripped of context. They are company property, the same way the people sitting in them are.
Outside, in Devon and Ricken's house, a Noguchi lamp sits on a table because someone chose it. In Burt and Fields's house, the Luss furniture has been there since 1955. These objects carry personal histories. They belong to someone.
Lumon's objects don't belong to anyone. That's the design.