Lana Del Rey's set designer talks Southern Gothic homes and curating an antique-driven space

When the curtain dropped at Lana Del Rey's recent UK/IE stadium tour, a large, Southern-style wood house that could have easily been located in rural Louisiana and/or a Tennessee Williams play came into sharp view. It's an evolution of the one that made its debut at her Stagecoach performance in California a few months ago, wherein she debuted country-inspired music.

Creative director and designer Ric Lipson from STUFISH, who worked in collaboration with TAP Management, explains that this connection between the music and Lana's affinity towards country aesthetics was an important thread for him in the creation of the space.

'It came from her and I just exchanging pictures of houses from the South and getting the right tone of the house so that it didn't feel too colonial,' Ric explains. 'It didn't feel too posh, but didn't feel too run down.'

Ric explains that he and Lana looked at homes across America and took stock of their similarities and differences; namely, the specific, Gothic yet ornate architecture of these rustic spaces. The result is a weathered, idyllic property with willow trees and porch swings flanking the property. It feels lived in but loved.

'There were a lot of little subtleties,' he explains. 'The shutters, the style of the front door, the way the handrails are, the way the roof shapes are. So we learned, by looking at a lot of different houses all over America, and especially around the south, just to find the right tone. A lot of those houses are often all white walls, white frames, but some of them have these other colors, [like] green. The blue that the shutters were came out as sort of a way of softening that architecture and making it not so Little House on the Prairie kind of vibe.'

Shop the Lana Del Rey-inspired, Southern edit

When it came to accessorizing the set, there were some key vintage and antique pieces that the team sourced to achieve the vision of an idyllic, southern-style yard.

'Lana has been spending a lot of time in that area, and so she knew that the porch should have a rocking chair,' Rich tells us. 'We went and found vintage stuff; Facebook Marketplace was our friend. There was a beautiful reference that she had of this old kitchen with blue painted china, so we had to smash these plates -- we had to find plastic versions of them. There were lots of little things like that, like the right kind of lantern and the rake.'

There were also some ties to her lyrics, 'Red wine on the table, dripping candle wax' from "Quiet in the South" manifested as simple table decor, while candles specifically made their mark in iron stick holders and candelabras.

They also leaned into the magic and mystery of antique decor, teaching us that secondhand objects are often the most personal.

'In the kitchen, we have an old piano that we went and bought. When we took the cladding off, we found a picture of this old lady who obviously had owned the piano 50 years ago,' they say.

'We kept her picture in the kitchen, so there's this really nice tie-in to the spirits of the past. This wasn't just a set, this was an embodiment of Lana and what she's doing with the show, but also where all this furniture had come from, it had its previous life somewhere else, and that was kind of magical.'