The Uncomfortable Calm of Lumon

When production designer Jeremy Hindle first read the script for “Severance,” the key set description was almost absurdly minimal: Four desks, large room. That bare, Beckett-like stage direction became the starting point for one of television’s most precisely crafted spaces. His mandate for the world of Lumon Industries was to create an atmosphere that is simultaneously “stunning and lonely,” built on the idea that viewers feel a space viscerally before they ever rationalize it. “Most of the responses you feel when you’re watching something are kinetic, not cerebral,” he says.

An Emmy-winning designer who cut his teeth building “hundreds of offices” for commercials, Hindle found in Severance a chance to apply that experience to a single, defining environment. Unpacking his visual references reveals how a mix of postwar architecture, German industrial design, and a few cinematic touchstones combined to make Lumon feel so uncannily familiar yet deeply wrong.

Architecture of Isolation

For the fundamental character of the Lumon headquarters, Hindle looked to the monumental corporate work of Kevin Roche and Eero Saarinen. The John Deere Headquarters (1964)—with its imposing steel structure and cool, rationalist grid—provided the blueprint for Lumon’s overall look and feel. It also serve as a direct line to the show’s central artifact: the iconic desks seen in the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department.

He also drew heavily from Jacques Tati’s 1967 architectural satire “Playtime,” a film that presents a futuristic Paris made entirely of cold glass and steel. That cinematic universe offers a natural reference point for the director’s desire to design emotion, allowing him to replicate the way those structures influence every character that passes through them.

Furniture as Social Cue

Hindl's design world is a mix of carefully fabricated pieces and a handful of deliberate classics. Among the latter sits the Dieter Rams-designed Braun TS 45 and TG 60 wall console, a pair of audio components that function as a quiet object of desire within the sterile office. While most furniture was built for the show, these pieces stand out precisely because of their utilitarian finality.

Negative Space on Screen

Specific cinematic moments had an outsized impact on Severance’s framing. A single still from the Coen Brothers’ “Fargo” (1996) gave Hindle his first concept of how vast and empty the Severance world needed to be. It was, in fact, the very first image he shared with director Ben Stiller to align their vision for the scale of the piece. The framing does another kind of work, too: it reads as "kinetic" rather than still.

Hindle’s own feature film debut, “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), also left its footprint on his working method. That project tested his ability to commit to building large-scale physical worlds—full-scale models that were necessary to make the environment comprehensible to an entire production crew, a discipline he carries into television.

Similarly, Spike Jonze’s “Her” (2013) remains a point of study for how a film’s design and wardrobe sections can operate in precise harmony; it informs how Hindle treats costume as an extension of the physical environment.

Enduring Universes

The decision to bring that level of rigor to the small screen was guided by the model of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” (1990–2017). Though Hindle never had much interest in television before “Severance,” the project felt different—offering a chance to build a world with the same surreal permanence and cultural endurance as Lynch’s, where a strict visual code underpins the mystery.