Two new spring series, “Palm Royale” on Apple TV+ and “Apples Never Fall” on Peacock, take viewers to Palm Beach, Fla., but showcase two very different aesthetic worlds.
“Palm Royale”: Opulence vs. Vibrancy
“Palm Royale,” the Kristen Wiig-led series on Apple TV+, dives into Palm Beach circa 1969, showcasing its stark social divide.
“The show really portrayed this upper echelon of women in Palm Beach. But at the same time, we were also portraying the other side of the bridge,” says show production designer Jon Carlos. The team traced the town dynamic to the opening of the Breakers in 1894, at the time the world’s largest resort. The working class — builders and hotel support staff — congregated in West Palm Beach, while the upper society were rooted in Palm Beach proper.
In the show, they addressed that geographic division through the color palette. The Palm Beach environments, including the home of grande dame Norma Dellacorte (portrayed by Carol Burnett), are rich and luxurious, with deep colors that don’t overpower. “[The interiors] needed to be bold in their depth, but not bold in their vibrancy. The women always had to be the strongest color in their environments in that regard in Palm Beach,” Carlos says.
The West Palm Beach decor in the show, in contrast, is “a bit more poppy, a bit more saturated, a bit more loud,” a reflection of the area’s cultural vibrancy and less superficial nature.
“And so when the women of Palm Beach would come to those environments, their bright costuming kind of diminishes,” adds Carlos. “They’re no longer the focal point; they lose their power the second they step foot out of their superficial domains.”
Vice versa, the characters of West Palm Beach bring their brighter colors — teals and saturated shades of orange — with them to Palm Beach. “So we kind of play this dynamic of cross-pollination of color based on region,” Carlos says.
The production team also used color to assert dominance in different spaces. In the case of the Dellacorte smoking room, typically a man’s domain, they incorporated shades of pink to switch the narrative. Subverting the masculine, chairs were upholstered with a pink houndstooth and suiting fabric that resembled a Chanel suit.
Many of the interiors incorporated recreations of period materials that are no longer available, or have been contemporized. “We got our hands on a piece and basically recreated it in the right color palette and then had it all manufactured,” Carlos says.
While the ’60s calls to mind mid-century modern, that minimalist aesthetic was more common in West Palm Beach. “The Palm Beach set was a very international set,” says set decorator Ellen Reede. “These people had been traveling all over to Europe and all of Asia, and they saw things that they wanted to bring back.”
Interiors were built out with a mix of rented and purchased pieces from Los Angeles-based Melissa Levinson Antiques and other local antique shops, and online marketplaces for high-end decor like 1stDibs and Chairish.
“And all the ephemera, all the small little items — motel bills and things like that that we didn’t actually create — we purchased from people on eBay and Etsy, that people had held on to,” Reede says. “And people like us absolutely adore that because we get to use the authentic articles.”
“Apples Never Fall”: A Family Drama, Grounded in Tennis and Family History
Personal ephemera, particularly trophies and tennis trinkets, also played a role in decorating the primary family home at the heart of “Apples Never Fall,” a mystery-drama series on Peacock. Although author Liane Moriarty set her novel in Australia, the story was recast in West Palm Beach for its screen adaptation.
“West Palm Beach versus Palm Beach Florida: there’s a big distinction, which is that one side of the waterway is a very elite, wealthy community. We tried to show the difference of that to where our characters live in West Palm Beach,” says production designer Tony Fanning. “We tried to get them to be more real, a little bit more upper working class.”
The drama-mystery is centered around the disappearance of a family matriarch, portrayed by Annette Benning, shortly after she and her husband sell the longtime family business, a tennis coaching center. With their mother gone, suspicion runs rampant among her four adult children.
“It’s primarily about a family that is centered around tennis and competitive sports, and what that does to a family dynamic,” Fanning says. “Within the primary house, the family home, we really wanted to give a sense of that history of their lives together as a sports family,” he adds. “That drew us to questions like, ‘How do these characters live, and what would they be drawn to in terms of material, color, texture and way of living?’ We wanted the home to feel very earthy, and that they were people of the earth.”
To reflect a down-to-earth vibe, the team leaned into natural fabrics and materials like wood, and restricted their color palette to “tennis colors”: green, white, yellow and variations on blues.
“Trying to choose things that really felt Florida,” he says. “And that was in fabric patterns, the texture of the fabrics. We used a lot of caning, we used a lot of palm patterns in the bathroom — things that would immediately read ‘Florida,’ that you don’t necessarily see in other communities.”
