‘The Good Fight’ Set Decorator On How You Can Create Camera-Ready Spaces at Home

Some spoilers for “The Good Fight” below.

TV show sets are meant to build a world, to add context to a character, and to tell a character backstory visually, all while the actors are performing their dialogue and moving within it. To be able to create these spaces that tell stories is a true talent, and it’s why “The Good Fight” set decorator, Beth Kushnick, is one of the best in the business.

Kushnick has been a TV and movie set decorator for 35 years, but it wasn’t until she started working with showrunners and executive producers Michelle and Robert King on “The Good Wife” in 2009 that her career got kicked up a notch: The Emmy-winning drama and its spin-off “The Good Fight” are the only TV shows in history to have a licensed home decor line. Kushnick designed the pieces with Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams so that fans of the shows (and fans of chic furniture) could bring a piece of it into their homes.

Fresh off wrapping season three of “The Good Fight” (currently airing Wednesdays on CBS All Access), as well as a CBS pilot with Michelle and Robert King (her fourth collab with the team), Kushnick chatted with Apartment Therapy about the ins and outs of her job, her favorite sets on “The Good Fight,” how the home decor line came to be, and how some of her set dressing rules can apply to those of us decorating our not-fictional spaces.

“Everything that I do starts with the script,” Kushnick says. “In the world of TV, we have things that are called ‘concept meetings’ and in those concept meetings each department really gets an opportunity to hear what the writers are thinking.”

From there, Kushnick focuses on the character and how that character can be expressed through the set: “The actors don’t get involved in my process, I get involved in theirs. I dive deep.” And it all starts with a color story. “We [base] those color stories on what [is] happening the script, what [is] developing with the characters.” For instance, Kushnick brings up a character introduced in season three, attorney Roland Blum (Michael Sheen). Blum is over-the-top and extravagant, and his apartment reflects exactly that. “His whole world exists in red and gold,” Kushnick explains. One look at his apartment—the paintings, the sculptures—and you know that bringing Blum to life was a treat: “To be able to visually display what we did and go over the top the way we did for his character was incredibly fun.”

But more than just building character, there is also a practicality that comes into Kushnick’s job, after all, these spaces are the characters’ homes and offices: “I push my crew to sit down at a desk and put the phone where somebody would use it and really pick it up […to] think logically about who these people are and what they do.”

Every piece placed into a set has a purpose, a function, and a story behind it. Even something as simple as a gold antler tray to sit in a cabinet, like the one in Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) and her husband Kurt’s (Gary Cole) apartment: “Oh, look this is what you gave Kurt for Christmas and he put it in the cabinet,” is how Kushnick explained the piece to Baranski. Every last detail is meant to divulge information about the characters: “We start with an empty stage and I fill every drawer and fill every cabinet. Everything is conceived of for who they are and what the story is that we’re telling visually.”

“My team, the biggest department on the show, starts at 6 a.m.,” she says of her team’s hectic schedule. When there’s a new set being used for the first time (or they are going to “open” a set), Kushnick makes sure she’s on-hand to “make the director and actors feel comfortable and that they have everything that they need.” Mostly, she says, the days are anything but typical and schedules can completely change last minute, which is why she makes sure she’s surrounded by a top-notch team: “I will tell you, it takes a village […] Our last day of shooting, […] we needed a completely new set up for this one shot, and literally 18 minutes later, we had a girl’s bedroom [set up] over at the stage that they were shooting in. [It was] all hands on deck.”

“We had this opportunity finally to design for our number one, Queen Baranski,” Kushnick says of the fact that at the end of season two we saw Diane Lockhart and her estranged husband Kurt McVeigh finally make real amends and move in together, permanently. Fans of the show know that Diane, a progressive lawyer, and Kurt, a conservative ballistics expert don’t always see eye-to-eye, and Kushnick wanted to play up that dichotomy within their bedroom, which we finally got to see in season three. “Literally, we did it where it’s obvious what side of the room is hers [and what side is his.]” If you pay attention, you can see there is a play on the masculine versus the feminine, co-existing right there in the room. “At this point in my career, I like to push the envelope and we’re allowed to do so, so [we played with] this concept of an old black and white movie, where you see both characters having their dual sides of the room.” Kushnick wanted to make sure that you could see Diane and Kurt’s two separate worlds coming together in this space.

There’s one piece in particular that she’s proud of: “I found these real old Abercrombie display cabinets and we turned them into his gun cabinets. How beautifully ludicrous in a way that in their well-developed, beautiful bedroom with floral paneled wallpaper, here exist two velvet-lined gun cabinets […]I can’t say I’ve ever designed a set, a room, a house, an apartment that is a bedroom with an Abercrombie gun cabinet. That just about tops it this season.”

Kushnick admits that thanks to the popularity of both “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” and their lauded aesthetics, her budget on the show is “manageable.” Even so, Kushnick employs the “high-low” design principle on her shows, with private clients, and in her own home. “I just think it’s really about making the right choices: where to spend it, what’s the biggest bang for your buck.”

Another piece of advice she has for any designer comes from the fact that she has to think about what the camera sees, which is different from what a set looks like when you’re just standing in it. “When I dress [a set], I’m kind of in every corner, I see what the camera sees. I think that’s also another part of how people do [themselves a disservice] when they’re designing a space. You have to really be in every corner and sit at every level and focus on how you move in a space.”

She also encourages people to not just let the way items are shown online or in a store dictate how you purchase them: “The way everything’s merchandised to the customer, it’s already done for them, so I think they feel like they have to accept it that way, whether it’s a suite of furniture or the way it’s presented […] I challenge everyone to not accept that. Stick your toe in the water a little bit and just buy one piece in the collection, not the whole entire thing.”

Soon after “The Good Wife” premiered, the show began to get noticed for its gorgeous set decoration and, as Kushnick puts it, “[the fan] interest really propelled the network to come to us and say that they wanted licensed product.” But they weren’t looking for just “The Good Wife” printed on an apron—they wanted to allow fans of the set decoration to bring pieces from the show home with them. So Kushnick teamed up with one of her vendors, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, for what she calls “an unequaled opportunity” to design pieces that would work both on the show and in an actual home. “I had found myself, after 35 years of being a set decorator, learning a whole new industry: furniture design, home decor licensing, product development, product placement.” And because of that, you can purchase Alicia Florrick’s sofa, among other pieces that are still available online (and can be special ordered in a whole array of fabrics). And the line continues with “The Good Fight;” since season three began, you can now purchase Diane and Kurt’s sofa from their bedroom (they have one on each side), as well as the purple velvet sofette at the end of their bed, should you want to feel like Queen Baranski in your own bedroom. Who doesn’t?

Want to keep up with Beth Kushnick’s designs both for her line and on “The Good Fight?” Follow her @BethKushnick on Twitter and @BAKHomeDecor on Instagram.