PIERRE | CHANNEL 4
Pierre is a six-part contemporary legal drama for Channel 4, produced by The Lighthouse and starring David Harewood as a West London duty solicitor drawn into the investigation of a young client’s death.
I led the Set Decoration team across the production, developing and delivering the dressing for its principal sets and locations. Mood boards and plans helped us build each space in layers around the characters, their circumstances and the wider visual language of the series.
One of our largest transformations was a dry cleaners installed inside an empty parade shop. Across successive script drafts, it had been a tandoori restaurant, removals store and pawn shop before finally becoming a struggling family business that seemed to sell a little of everything.
We filled it with hampers of dirty clothes, sellotaped laundry bags, overdue invoices, back-office paperwork, old stock and dated equipment. Our buyer even sourced the industrial machinery through an online auction and brought it across the country. The shop’s overfilled, slightly precarious character quietly foreshadowed trouble later in the story. Eagle-eyed viewers may also notice that the dry-cleaned shirts hanging in Pierre’s office came from this very shop.
Extensive research into police and solicitor procedures gave us a detailed understanding of how these environments function in practice. It informed the paperwork, filing systems, noticeboards, desk layouts, storage and accumulated working objects, allowing the dressing to support the action while remaining credible and specific.
With several sets and locations moving at once, the schedule demanded speed, judgement and a team capable of turning ideas into finished spaces without losing the detail. My fabulous Set Dec team handled overlapping prep, dressing and strike days, responded to inevitable last-minute changes and kept everything moving as the production travelled across London.
The variety of locations was one of the pleasures of the production. We sourced from charity shops, auctions, antiques markets, salvage yards and prop houses, finding pieces with enough age and personality to make the world convincing. For the domestic interiors, we combined found furniture with bespoke upholstery, using colour, pattern, wear and texture to make each home feel particular to the people living there.
At the other end of the visual spectrum was an underground illegal gambling club, intended to sit somewhere between mafia formality and a makeshift back-room operation. We wanted the space to reveal itself in fragments, with gaming tables, furniture and character details appearing in pools of light before disappearing into shadow. The result was one of the production’s most highly stylised environments, with darkness doing as much of the storytelling as the dressing.
The basements and hallways of a disused telephone exchange gave us a labyrinth of interconnecting rooms to explore and dress for camera. Go one way and you entered the main gambling hall; turn through another door and you found yourself inside a private blackjack den. Each new space needed to feel edgy, mysterious and unpredictable, as though the club continued far beyond what the camera ever fully revealed.