guadagnino, lynch, and the movie directors who design interior spaces

Int. Home – DAY… interior design by Movie Directors

At the end of September, film director Luca Guadagnino and designer Stefano Baisi will release a line with Zara Home that includes nearly 200 sumptuous pieces of interior décor, from squiggly couches that recall Italian Radical Design to tableware that feels snatched from an Italian villa. Through this collection, there is a chance to bring a bit of the energy of Queer, Call Me by Your Name, Challengers, or one of the director’s many other films into a domestic space.

This meeting between interior design and film is not a new one. The visually seductive worlds of David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Wong Kar Wai have inspired the likes of hotels, home goods collections, and even train cars. For these directors, their cinematic worlds have homes both on and off the silver screen.

Studio Luca Guadagnino, Zara Home, and the Dior Runway

A few years ago, when Luca Guadagnino was brought up in conversation, those in the know would share, ‘and you know he has an interior design studio!’ The Milan-based director has brought his aesthetic sense to runways, hotels, and villas through Studio Luca Guadagnino, where he began working with Baisi, who would later go on to collaborate with him on Queer, After the Hunt, and Jonathan Anderson’s S/S 2026 Dior runway in Paris. In Rome, monumental spaces within the Palazzo Talìa hotel were redesigned by his studio, complimenting the building’s rich history with contemporary styles.

David Lynch’s things and places for thinking and listening 

‘Every film is going into a new world,’ remarked the late American film director David Lynch at the 63rd Venice Film Festival. He talks about following one’s intuition as they navigate the world that is set out in front of them—a world of actors, costumes, dialogue, and sets. Lynch, whose films are characterized by rich colors and liminal spaces, has created a few interior spaces. In 2024, he created A Thinking Room within Milan’s Salone del Mobile. The club Silencio, created in Paris in 2011, features glittering gold walls and takes its name from the Club Silencio in his 2001 thriller, Mulholland Drive. On a smaller scale, the auteur also created a line of speakers with Bang & Olufsen in 2018 that feature his visual art.

Bar Luce and the Cygnus Carriage of Wes Anderson

A Wes Anderson movie is so visually particular that it sparked a whole social media trend of creating short videos with symmetrical compositions, a hazy pastel color palette, and yellow, overlaid sans serif text. It makes sense that he would be tapped to create real-life spaces that bring that dreamy cinematic space to real places. At Fondazione Prada’s space in Milan, Bar Luce’s pinball machine and candy-colored seats welcome guests to experience his quaint world over a gelato or espresso macchiato.

Anderson, who staged almost an entire film aboard a train for The Darjeeling Limited, also redesigned the Cygnus carriage for the Belmond train, the British Pullman. In giving the history of the locomotive, Belmond writes that it’s, ‘a carriage built in the 1950s – [which] has its fair share of cinematic history, featuring in the 1972 film ‘Agatha’ starring Dustin Hoffman and Vanessa Redgrave. It is one of eleven on the British Pullman, whose carriages have hosted royalty, carried statesmen and survived World War II bomb raids over the years.’ A very Andersonian space!

Wong Kar Wai at Prada Shanghai

Fondazione Prada, which has long championed the cinematic arts, created a sister space to Anderson’s Bar Luce in the form of Wong Kar Wai’s fine dining space, Mi Shang Prada Rong Zhai. The Hong Kong director has long enchanted audiences with his rich, neon images. Think the romantic, intimate space of In the Mood for Love or the luxurious lights of his TV series, Blossoms Shanghai.

Pedro Almodóvar and Roche Bobois

If there’s one thing that unites Pedro Almodóvar’s movies, it’s the primary color palette that runs through his films. There are some films, like The Room Next Door or The Skin I Live In, where he takes a more restrained approach. But in his other films, like Kika, Volver, or Parallel Mothers, this intense use of color in the sets brings the stories forward, making his films seem more like a dream than a retelling of reality. In 2025, the Spanish director created a line with interiors company Roche Bobois, famous for its Bubble Sofa, designed by Sacha Lakic, that brought Almodóvar’s eye-popping palette off the screen and into some of the company’s most iconic silhouettes.

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project info: 

directors: Luca Guadagnino, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Wong Kar Wai, and Pedro Almodóvar