Inside the ‘Verity’ House: Designing a “Fever Dream” You Can’t Escape

Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.

When adapting Colleen Hoover‘s 2018 bestselling mystery Verity, director Michael Showalter knew exactly how he wanted the film’s main setting, arguably its most unsettling character, to feel.

“I wanted it to feel like a rabbit hole, like a fever dream,” Showalter tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Drawing on his own recurring dreams, he wanted audiences to feel unsure of where they are, how they got there and how to escape. The house would be a prison of sorts, but it had to be “somewhere beautiful, alluring and seductive.”

“But once you were inside, you didn’t know how to get out,” he said.

Up for the task was the Amazon MGM Studios film’s location manager Elizabeth Krekel and production designer Amy Williams.

The Crawford home, the isolated lakeside house where Dakota Johnson‘s Lowen Ashleigh is hired to finish Anne Hathaway‘s Verity’s manuscripts and stay with Verity‘s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and son Crew (Brady Wagner), plays less like a setting in the film and more like an omnipresent central character in the adaptation. For the film’s creative team, that was the point.

“As soon as we saw the house as an option, it fit perfectly, in a way that I don’t think we even ever imagined,” Williams tells THR.

The house in the film is a real location and one Krekel found by combining through architectural magazines for something that had never been filmed. Williams says the team had also considered traditional homes and big log cabins, but the result was the mid-century modern house in Armonk, New York, known as Beckoning Path.

The home was designed by the chief designer of heritage Scandinavian homeware brand Dansk, Jens Quistgaard, for Dansk founders Martha and Ted Nierenberg.

The location match, however, came with a catch: The property sat outside the production’s filming zone, adding costs to house and transport the crew. Producers signed off anyway. “They really knew how important it was for Michael [Showalter], Jim Frohna the DP and I to have this as our character, the landscape and as the design of the film,” Williams says. “It influenced so many of our choices once we found the house.”

The house offered symbolically fitting elements to the book‘s story and close proximity to the water, while also offering both a menacing and calm aura. “There’s a sense of danger about the house, but there’s also a sense of peace,” she says.

Beckoning Path currently serves as a tai chi retreat, which led Williams and set decorator Kendall Anderson to both utilize and redecorate the interior, as well as build interiors on stage.

“To have this iconic home as an inspiration for interiors that I would get to create was my absolute fantasy. It was a dream,” Williams says.

Despite the film being an adaptation of Hoover’s book, Williams notes that there wasn’t a “huge description” of the home, but it led to an emptier canvas for her to work with in how to elevate bringing the book‘s house to life.

“The house was insane. Talk about an aspect where the film is better than the book. I couldn’t even have envisioned a house that gorgeous and that perfect,” Hoover tells THR.

While visiting the set, Hoover says she was enamored by the location but acknowledged it confused her sense of direction. “I’ve been in the house, and I still couldn’t tell you the floor plan,” she quips.

Below production designer Williams shares details of the Verity home.

A Gothic House That Prioritizes Shapes Over Colors

Though normally colors are the initial priority when setting the tone for characters and environments, Williams said she, along with costume designer Jackie Demeterio prioritized “shapes and forms” first. The obvious shape being a “V” for Verity, but a circle for Lowen and square for Jeremy.

The “V” shapes were notable on the home’s exterior with sharp angles also found throughout the interior. “There’s no flat ceiling in our story. Everything has a sharp pitch to it, or an unusually low angle, like in the hallway,” Williams says.

As for the interior colors of the home, Williams says they wanted to “keep the colors very earthy and natural” with a surplus of greens, browns, and metals.

“There’s something kind of Gothic about the house as well. It’s mid-century, but there’s also a monastic feel to it,” she says. Throughout the interior there is “no two-dimensional artwork” with a surplus of wood, carvings and florals, as well as notable textures including “lush, deep and thick” carpet.

A color restricted in their palette was red given that would be a dominant color for Verity’s costumes including her sweater and the dress she wears when first meeting Jeremy. Red would be used “sparingly and intentionally for things like the canoe to signify that Hitchcockian color punch,” she explains. “Beyond that, we used complementary tones for our actors and their skin tones.”

Williams, who has worked with Hathaway on several projects, credits the actress for being a collaborative partner and one who helped test wall, paint and fabric colors.

“Anne’s palette generally leans a little cooler, so we picked inky navies and blues, and greens. And Dakota’s eyes are this beautiful greenish blue, so that informed some of our choices.”

Built to Disorient: “A Maze of a Home”

Beyond the exterior and the main kitchen and living room, nearly everything else was built on stage. With a story where nothing and no one is as they seem, those spaces leaned into the film’s psychology.

“We played a lot to give the audience a feeling that they’re trapped and in a bit of a maze of a home. We wanted Lowen to feel disoriented in that way,“ she says.

The extra-long hallway to Lowen’s bedroom was designed to feel like a maze, with a “sense of secrecy and what could be around the corner.” As Jeremy leads Lowen to her room, he notably stands at the taller end of the sloping ceiling and Lowen at the lower.

“There’s a sense that things are off, and it’s like a hall of mirrors,” Williams says. “I also think architecturally it helps the viewer when you’re in a very tight space and it leads you into a more open space. It just packs more punch. It’s almost like her bedroom has prison bars. There’s all these verticals.”

Lowen’s bedroom put the bed on an altar-like platform and use mirrors and two-way glass. “It’s very voyeuristic,” Williams says.

As for the bathroom, rough stone “intrudes into the bedroom” and forms the sinks and bathtub, work by “incredible sculptors and scenic painters.”

“It’s always been my fantasy to build a house into a boulder or a cliff and have that coming into the room,” she says, citing architectural magazines and the real location’s cliffs and boulders. “I would love to take some of those sets and rearrange them into a house.”

Verity’s Office: A Shrine With Hidden Secrets

“Michael [Showalter] really wanted the office to be womb-like, so I started pulling palettes of pale, peachy pinks and really soft, feminine colors,” Williams says of designing the room for the author protagonist. “He described it as almost as if Verity’s writing her book in front of a Hollywood glam makeup mirror: a total fantasy of what a feminine office would be.

To offer that vision, the designers skipped bookshelves and built an octagonal conversation pit with a circular skylight above the desk, echoing a skylight over the real house’s unseen indoor pool. “It really is a shrine to Verity and her writing,” Williams says.

Mirrors turn to reveal Verity’s hidden files and boxes. “There were a lot of hidden spaces. … You have to search for the secrets, and a lot of things are buried under the surface. At first glance you don’t notice them, but as you get into the space more, there are cracks and corners and mysteries throughout.”

Verity’s Room: Dangerous and Intrusive

“We needed a big, impressive room for Verity to convalesce in,” Williams says. “She’s in a wheelchair and can’t go down the stairs to what would normally be her bedroom, which is another weird thing. Lowen is taking over the bedroom Verity shares with Jeremy.”

The activity room, with a couch and television, is on the main floor for easy access, and the team decided it “sits directly on top of Lowen’s bedroom.”

“You can almost get the sense that maybe Verity could hear what was going on in the bedroom, or vice versa. To have them stacked on each other felt a little bit dangerous, and intrusive in a fun way,” she says.

Home Not-So-Sweet Home

The Crawford home is striking, but Williams admits it’s “not necessarily a place to raise kids.” Each piece was chosen very specifically. “It’s very pleasing to the eye, it’s beautiful, but maybe it’s not the most comfortable sofa,” she says.

That was Showalter’s directive, she says. “Make this very glammy and glossy and beautiful to the eye.”

Whether Verity, Jeremy or Lowen were prisoners of the home amid their eventual deadly circumstances is up for debate, but the beauty of it all makes up for it, Hoover jokes.

“If it feels like a prison, I’ll murder someone if I have to in order to spend the rest of my life there!”