Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a turning point for postmodern filmmaking. Kubrick’s cinematic endeavour redefined how space travel was, and still is conceived — a feat largely credited to the director and his team’s masterful set design. You can just close your eyes and picture the famous bedroom scene, with its sterile white angles redirected by neoclassical soft furniture in chartreuse and cream. The ethereal space almost glows.
Its impact extends to this millennium. There are homes, like the Cape Schanck house, and furniture pieces designed after Kubrick’s set, uniting the very human fascination with cinematic universes and the impulse to collect memorabilia. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a culturally significant carriage that brought sci-fi aesthetics into real, lived spaces, but the movement did not stop in the 20th century. Everyone has looked at a film set once and thought, “I could live here”.
Online home décor catalogue, Film and Furniture, is here to realise that desire. The website began as a blog by Paula Benson, partner at the London-based design and branding studio, Form. The film enthusiast was always passionate about interiors, so she maintained Film and Furnitures as a visual collage of the sets she loved, matched with the unique pieces she found in them. It has grown from strength to strength, recently rebranding as a web portal that allows you to shop for furniture from your favourite movie or television series.
There is a pretty limited range of cult films covered, but the site spans broad strokes across modern cinema’s popular hits, kicking off with Kubrick’s opus. You can purchase the Stanley Hotel’s murderous mod carpeting and make your house look straight out of The Shining, or acquire the Miles Van der Rohe Knoll Barcelona chair, which has more successful screen time in D.C. blockbusters than the Justice League actors.
If furniture is too much for your already-decorated home, then browse through the list of home accessories on the site to score finds like the steel-topped whisky tumblers used by the suave cast of Mad Men, alongside the red Valentine typewriter from Alex’s room in A Clockwork Orange.
Most of these pieces are not the exact ones used in the film. Plenty are vintage, though, and none are poorly-made replicas. Thanks to the keen eyes of Benson and the Film and Furnitures team, as well as the film professionals they’ve worked with, everything on the site is curated to be as-seen-on-screen.
For instance, you might not be buying the exact Lucatello desk used by Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades trilogy (literally why would you want that?), but you will be purchasing the same design. There are rare occasions where they host the real deal for sale, typically in the form of auctions. The last such piece was the Skyfall family estate sign, used in the James Bond feature with that namesake. Even if you missed the boat, chances are you’re bound to get lucky again on the website.
Beatrice Bowers
Features Editor
Beatrice Bowers writes about beauty, drinks, and other nice things. When not bound to her keyboard, she moonlights as a Niffler for novels and can be found en route to bankruptcy at your nearest bookstore. Don't tell her boss.
Most Popular
