Late film director David Lynch adored design and architecture and mastered the art of wielding it to evocative effect, writes Anthony Paletta.
Any director of consequence will pay close attention to set design in their films, but few design interiors in the real world. Many directors are attentive to the furniture that appears in their work; few are sawing it in their own carpentry workshops.
David Lynch was different. Since his death there has been a torrent of heartfelt tributes to his legacy in all sorts of spheres. Let’s not forget his deeply informed enthusiasm for architecture and design.
With architecture and design his replies tended to be unusually precise – and unusually good
Lynch was not a man who explained himself much on most topics. That doesn’t just apply to interviewers trying to unlock some simple meaning from his surreal films; he painted prolifically but discussed it rarely. But with architecture and design his replies tended to be unusually precise – and unusually good.
Asked about his favourite architects by the German design magazine Form in 1997, he replied, “From Bauhaus, all the students of the Bauhaus School, and Pierre Chareau – he did the House of Glass in Paris – Ludwig Mies van de Rohe, all the Wright family, Rudolph Michael Schindler and Richard Neutra. I like really beautifully designed, minimal things.”
In the same interview he recalled a lunch with Charles Eames: “He was one of the most intelligent, down to earth, greatest persons I ever met. He was just a pure, kind of happy person, somehow childlike, enjoying life.” He went on to cite Vladimir Kagan and Charlotte Perriand as other favourites.
Lynch bought Lloyd Wright’s Beverly Johnson House in 1986. Lloyd, the son of Frank, was a highly impressive architect overshadowed by the father with whom he shared most of his name.
I obtained a quote from Lynch for a story about Lloyd’s work last year. “I personally like Lloyd Wright more than Frank Lloyd Wright because Lloyd Wright is more minimal, more pure. But just as beautiful.”
Lynch kept hiring from the family, employing Lloyd’s son, Eric Lloyd Wright, to design a pool house for the property. He used another adjoining house he owns as Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s home in Lost Highway, actually modifying its facade for the film. What do you see in that house? Bertoia’s Diamond Chair and the Eames’ Elliptical table, as well as furniture of his own design.
Drapes were the design tool that Lynch used to greatest effect
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House was the set for Twin Peaks’ internal soap opera Invitation to Love. Lynch directed an Yves St Laurent commercial set in Chareau’s Maison de Verre in Paris, and he made use of all sorts of notable properties otherwise.
“Assessed as a whole, Lynch’s career constitutes an idiosyncratic history of architecture and design,” Richard Martin wrote in his book The Architecture of David Lynch. “Perhaps, then, we might consider his films as forming an imaginative and unconventional architectural project in their own right.”
Drapes – that rather overlooked soft lining of glassy modernism, employed repeatedly by Mies, Loos and Neutra – were the design tool that Lynch used to greatest effect. They are there in Pullman and Arquette’s bedroom in Lost Highway, and they define his most iconic space: the Red Room in Twin Peaks.
The associations with theatre are inescapable, and red curtains appear again on a stage in Mulholland Drive’s Club Silencio, a space that (sort of) became real in Lynch’s Silencio nightclub in Paris, which features chairs of his design. These sorts of directorial forays have become more common; Wes Anderson designed a bar in Milan, and Luca Guadagnino a hotel in Rome, but Lynch was there first.
He is the rare director who can actually build his own furniture, having started in art school, and he adored the stuff. In an interview with LA Weekly, he once said: “Every word has, you know, its spread of power. You could care a little bit or you could care a lot. But if you put this word caring at the maximum-level intensity, it wouldn’t begin to be enough to say how much I love furniture.”
Lynch was largely building for himself, designing his own bed and much else, but did step slightly into the market. He had an exhibit of his work at Salone del Mobile in 1997. Now-defunct Swiss furniture company Casanostra produced a limited run of several of his designs subsequently.
The minimalism he favoured at home would be deliberately eschewed to evocative purpose
Some of these pieces border on absurdism, but a number were designed for an almost-hilarious specificity of use: there is an espresso table and a whiskey and cigar table. The most obvious inspiration seems to be Chareau’s discordant-but-perfect meldings of the hand-hewn natural and industrial materials.
He was also a prolific lamp designer, veering between driftwood dadaism and Bauhaus rectilinearity. There’s a short film of him working on his lamps, proof that he wasn’t just handing off sketches to someone else.
What are we to make of this all? Among all the glorious traits that might define the Lynchian style is its hallucinogenic attention to the atmosphere of given locations. It’s cinematic lingering that flows naturally from someone who was acutely attuned to the vibe of spaces he’s in all of the time. As he wrote in his semi-autobiography, tellingly titled Room to Dream, “the more pure the room, the more the people and the furniture can come forth.”
The average person might bump into a table if it’s too large but likely wouldn’t say it was deranging their thoughts. Lynch did. In that Form interview, he said: “To my mind, most tables are too big and they’re too high. They shrink the size of the room and eat into space and cause unpleasant mental activity.”
And he made viscerally clear to his audience just what this sort of sensitivity constitutes. The minimalism he favoured at home would be deliberately eschewed to evocative purpose in his work.
His was not an uniform cinematic aesthetic in the manner of directors whose film sets look rather the same, but conveyed concentrated attention to the essence of a variety of spaces, whether art deco theatres or Googie diners or various Hollywood fantasyland locations.
He knew precisely how to use design and spaces to make us feel a certain way
In other words, Lynch was a superb director of architecture. He knew precisely how to use design and spaces to make us feel a certain way, and keep on feeling it long after Twin Peaks, or Mulholland Drive, or Lost Highway are over. These are media that explore the power of space a good deal better than most films ostensibly about architecture.
Lynch’s last foray into design was at the 2024 edition of Salone del Mobile, where he designed A Thinking Room. What was in it? Deep blue walls, a golden ceiling, and a throne with seven “chimneys” connected to the ceiling, for ideas to vent in or out. In some ways, he needn’t have bothered; every space he created had us thinking.
Anthony Paletta is an architecture journalist based in New York City. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bloomberg CityLab, The Architect’s Newspaper and Metropolis, among others.
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