Something is seriously sinister about Lumon’s severed floor. That’s the entire concept of Apple TV’s smash-hit sci-fi series Severance: One version of a “severed” Lumon employee’s split consciousness, their “outie,” experiences an average off-duty life, while their counterpart—their “innie”’—comes alive only when on-the-clock to do mysteriously important work on the company’s windowless lower level. But beyond Lumon’s nefarious operations, something is visually off in Severance’s uncanny rendering of the average corporate setting. With a limited color palette and very spare design, the show subverts the commonplace elements of an office and invents a haunting visual language all its own that creeps you out while drawing you in.

Many of the major features of Lumon wouldn’t be out of place in any old office building. You’ve got your hallways, cubicles and desk space, kitchenette. Yet, instead of boring, everything is eerie. The hallways, for one, are labyrinthine to the point of almost being a gag. Per set designer Jeremy Hindle, even the cast and crew found themselves disoriented by the endless passages. “[Severance executive producer and director] Ben [Stiller] kept just saying to me, ‘I want more halls, more halls, more halls.’ And the randomness got even better and made more sense, because the place is designed to confuse them,” Hindle tells AD. “John Turturro [who plays Irving Bailiff] talked about how he and Christopher Walken [Burt Goodman] got lost on set. They always do. Everybody does. I’ve been lost on set. Because [the hallways] go on forever.” The lighting in the space is a retina-frying sterile white, and in a few particular areas, motion-sensor activated, which conjures a feeling of constant surveillance.

Our story follows a quartet of macro-data refiners—whatever that means. Not even the characters know. Each day, the four wind down the maze-like hallway to their workspace, where the ceilings are suffocatingly low. Despite all the square footage, the MDR foursome are stranded on a custom-made island cubicle cluster amid a sea of negative space in the form of a sprawling kelly green rug. And being that it’s the only real “green space” a severed employee can ever expect to see, it amplifies the creepiness of the entire setting in its mimicry of the unreachable upstairs real world.

What year is it?!

While we can usually anchor ourselves in a show’s time period by parsing the trends and statement furniture pieces of a space, watching Severance, we find ourselves as adrift as the innies with intentionally anachronistic set pieces. The show’s severed floor makes use of midcentury-leaning furniture and old-school cathode-ray tube computers, and even outside the Lumon offices we see station wagons aplenty yet smartphones abound, making it difficult to ascertain what era we’re really in.

The surreal Severance aesthetic wasn’t built straight into the script. It took time to refine, and it’s hard to define. You just know it when you see it. “There’s a thing I say—and some people don’t like it—but I’m always like, ‘That’s not Severance, that’s not Severance,’” Hindle says of his process while sourcing and crafting pieces for the show. Some references via artwork or furnishings by greats like Dieter Rams wink to the knowledgeable-about-design audience, but most pieces are created in-house. “We really work to make things that you don’t see every day,” says set decorator David Schlesinger. “We fabricate so much of our set dressing and put it in an environment that is somewhat familiar, but just everything’s a little bit off.”

“It was design-wise, the same as The Office, 100%”

If you can believe it, Lumon’s severed floor was going to hew a lot closer to some more familiar TV office design. “When I first met Ben, he sent me the scripts, and it read like an office show. It was design-wise, the same as The Office, 100%. That was its idea, but it was weird and funny,” Hindle says. ‘My job is to be like: Okay, what would it be? Initially I said, ‘Ben, I don’t really know. Give me three days and I’ll put a lookbook together.’” For guidance while crafting the show’s world, he looked to Jacques Tati’s 1967 satire, Playtime; real-life influences like the John Deere building; the work of architect Kevin Roche, a modernist; and that of Eero Saarinen, who took a neo-futuristic approach to design. “I thought, we need it to be just like it was back then: Work was about perfection. It was designed for optimum performance. Before human resources came in the ’80s and you got, ‘Oh, you can bring your family photos and put them on the wall, you can have a plant, you can have a jar, you can have your stupid shit.’”

Per writer Caroline Eubanks, who unpacked office design through the decades for AD in a 2023 deep dive, the offices of the ’20s and ’30s where characterized by a minimalistic look and a focus on “maximum efficiency.” Eubanks pointed to the rise of cubicle culture in the ’80s and ’90s as having given way to an employee-driven effort at personalizing tight allotted plots with framed photos and artwork.

The team at MDR don’t have much in the way of decor, unless you count finger traps and other Chuck E. Cheese–style incentives Lumon hands out for a job well done, but eagle-eyed fans have made a meal out of identifying the few decorative Lumon items that the set designers didn’t make in-house. A ’60s-era Dilly Dally vanity by the industrial Italian designer Luigi Massoni made waves among furniture enthusiasts when it appeared at Lumon in season two, episode seven. By far the most recognizable piece has been a Dieter Rams wall-mounted stereo unit (the Vitsœ 606 shelving system), which also showed up in episode seven alongside other seating by the acclaimed German industrial designer.

Another recurring furnishing from the outie world Schlesinger was excited to have sourced for the season was less immediately recognizable to fans, possibly because “it was never really imported to the US so it’s not a familiar thing, but [we incorporated] a line of office furniture that [Italian design house] Olivetti sold, and we use a lot of it,” he says. “You don’t really see it in the show, but you feel it—the furniture in the management office, the back room is all Olivetti, the goat room, ‘mammalians nurturable,’ Gemma’s office, that’s Olivetti. We had these amazing folding chairs from Cappellini that were used everywhere. The idea is that these things get repeated like they would in a corporate environment, like they have a store room and they need folding chairs and they pull them out.”

Blue and Red: A Severed (Color) Story

The monotonous midwinter of Kier (both the Lumon founder’s name and the locale of the story, nodding to the company’s ubiquitous influence) in which the story is set makes the outie world feel nearly as brutal and chilling as the endless 9–5 toil of the innie world. That was a specific choice of Hindle’s to warm audiences to the severed floor: “I was like, ‘It should always be really cold [outside]. It should be uncomfortable always, always, always outside, [such] that the inside strangely is more comfortable.” While the office feels warmer by contrast to the frigid outdoors, a cool color palette runs through the severed floor. In the color story of the show, blue often seems to represent Lumon, while red stands in for the opposite: love, rebellion, the outside world.

The office formerly belonging to severed floor manager Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) gets a new blue paint job when Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) takes over the position in season two. While the company would love to prop him up as firmly in their corner against the increasingly defiant MDR team, a few key pieces signify the Milchick character might be more complex than he seems. “[Tillman] had two notes: He said, ‘I want the rabbit/duck [figurine] if I could, and the iceberg,” Hindle tells AD.

“They’re doing TikToks. They’re asking security, ‘Where’s Lumon?’”

Outside the show, the actual building used for exterior and some interior shots of Lumon has taken on a life of its own as Severance’s viewership grows. The 1959-built Holmdel, New Jersey, complex, formerly Bell Labs, is now known as Bell Works. (It’s the brainchild of Saarinen, whose work inspired Hindle’s concept for the show.) “Eero Saarinen designed it to liberate people from the long, boring office hallway,” says Bell Works managing partner Ralph Zucker of the space. He revels in the building’s starring role but describes it as “the opposite of what the show portrays,” where departments are purposefully kept apart.

The building is a series of skywalks wrapped in a reflective glass box (in the daytime, you can see out from inside, but you can’t see in from outside), originally meant to encourage spontaneous discussion between researchers of different departments and offices traversing the passageways. There are retail spaces as well as office spaces, and Zucker envisions it as the bridging of—to put it in Severance terms—innie and outie life, where you can clock out of work, go shopping, and catch a performance all in one space. He also notes that it’s livelier than ever, adding that the building is 98% leased on the office side and virtually full-up save for one or two spots on the retail side. Busy as it is anyway, a continued fan presence has taken hold of the space since the show started back up. How does Zucker know they’re Severance tourists and not just shoppers and employees? “They’re doing TikToks. They’re asking security or the concierge, ‘Where’s Lumon?’”

A whole new level

While visitors to Bell Works will come up empty in their search for the severed floor (given that most the interiors of Lumon were built on a soundstage), the employees in the world of the show are plumbing the depths of their underground workspace in recent episodes to uncover the company’s hidden operations.

Severance audiences this season discovered that hell has a basement: the testing floor. Full-time innies, who don’t ever get to go home, live in creepy but stylish cells beneath the severed floor where they undergo a range of unpleasant episodes in different rooms as the Lumon team studies their manufactured experiences, from painful dentist visits to high-turbulence flights. In the space assigned to main character Mark Scout’s wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), shades of hospital green nod to that test subject atmosphere. She’s a specimen under Lumon’s constant surveillance and that feeling pervades aesthetically: There are no cozy niches or spots to curl into, nowhere to hide.

“With Gemma’s suite [on the testing floor], there’s not really a right angle there,” Hindle says. “It’s always like, ‘Where am I?’ It’s uncomfortable. Their performances are uncomfortable; they’re kidnapped and locked in. We try to make it beautiful and cool in a weird way, but it’s a prison—especially the testing floor, it’s a prison.”

Of course, the office is not Severance’s only set with deliciously layered design to pick apart; much of the series unfurls in the winding hallways of Lumon, but audiences were also given glimpses into the glassy Eagan mansion—the “hardest set” of the series, per Schlesinger, as it was such a departure from the norm (“The obvious choice would be a big Victorian mansion, but we didn't want to do that”); Burt Goodman’s warm abode (illuminated by stunning Ben & Aja Blanc lighting… AD would love an Open Door); and Mark and Gemma’s book-lined shared dwelling, among the many new backdrops of the show’s second season. Try to enjoy each one equally.