Starships
It’s that time for year again - May the 4th be with you! The Star Wars movies have been a cultural staple for 45 years and counting, serving us stunning visual effects and redefining the experience of action cinema. Today, we are celebrating this iconic media franchise by taking a look at the interior design of the movie sets that started the whole thing - A New Hope. This movie used interior design to help tell its story, and we are breaking down the strategy and plays that define this iconic look - so you can choose between the light and the dark sides of the force for your very own home design. If you’ve always wanted to bring a little Star Wars inspired home design into your life, but didn’t want to go full theme park - this is episode for you. The perfect Star Wars home is right at your finger tips - just use the force!
But first, let’s talk about the color of the week. This week, we saw yet another Met Gala, where stars showed up to Fifth ave and 82nd street decked out in over the top fashion. This year’s theme was The Gilded Age, and while many people took unique and confusing takes on this concept, most stars went the ground breaking route of incorporating metallics into their looks. This is a great opportunity to talk about the RAL or R-A-L system. Just as Pantone services as a universal standard for all things pigment, the RAL system is a guide for metal colors. RAL is German acronym that translates to National Commission for Delivery Terms and Quality Assurance. This is a consistent reference point for designers. RAL 1035 Pearl Biege was ever present on the Met stairs this year. This champagne gold is warm and dimensional without giving the true bling of yellow gold, and has been living in the trend compost bin since 2009. If you want to let the 2022 Met Gala inspire your home decor, this metal finish can be applied as an epoxy or electrostatically over any metal, and looks especially great on lighting fixtures and kitchen cabinet hardware. Or in this case, as sequins on an evening gown, but let’s stay focused on interiors.
The original Star Wars movie was released to theaters in 1977. The production had a limited budget, and there were many challenges, set-backs, and pressure intense situations that made the project difficult to deliver. But upon its release, it was a cultural phenomenon, making $775 million dollars in theaters, which was absolutely unheard of at the time. Everyone was obsessed with the movie, it checked off so many boxes. It appealed to families with cute robot and puppet characters, it was fast-paced and action packed, it had ground breaking special effects, and it had familiar elements of classic American film genres, plus a health dose of optimism. The movie did so well that it set into motion a mega series movie brand, and was retitled “A New Hope” in 1981, when director George Lucas re-released it with new updates , edits, and new snazzy budget.
If you haven’t seen the movie, the synopsis is exactly what the title says, people in the future live in space and are fighting a war. There are clearly delineated good guys and bad guys, and the set design actively works to distinguish this depending on who’s territory we the viewers are on in any given scene. The sets were decorated by Roger Christian, who also did the movie Alien starring Sigourney Weaver, another movie mostly set in space ships, not surprising. Christian had a clear vision when he began putting the sets and props together, and part of the clear vision revolved around this idea of contrast.
We have the good guys - humble, scrappy, working class, and oppressed. Much of the details in the vibe of the good guys sets take inspiration from American cowboy western films. There’s lots of dust and grit. The hero’s are farmers, cargo runners, and a niche group of religious rebels. We first see these folks on a desert planet called Tatooine, were Luke Skywalker and his family are moisture farmers. Moisture farmers in a desert, that’s an analogy I need to be using more often. We see Luke’s home, which is very much a Teletubby-style unground dwelling. There is a central, circular outdoor area, off of which all the rooms in the house are located in a radial fashion. It’s important to note that this layout eliminates the need for any kind of corridor or hallway, which I’ll come back to the topic of hallways in a few minutes. All of the interior rooms are comprised of arches that connect the ceilings and the walls. The material appears to be some kind of plaster or concrete mixture, which makes it feel utilitarian and practical in the arid desert climate. There are rows of small round windows just above the ground line to let day light into the rooms, effectively working as a clerestory. This helps protect from the harshness of the desert sun and winds, while still letting in enough sunlight to illuminate the home. Again, super practical, and functional. We’re also seeing this consistent theme of rounded soft forms- from the circular shape of the home’s layout to the eased corners at every door way. This will be repeated through out the movie.
We see Luke eating a meal with his family in their dining room and this is the only real decorative moment in the home - there’s a really beautiful tone-on-tone brown and tan, geometric mural that stretches along the curve of the ceiling. These earthy shapes are contrasted by the dinnerware on their table that is distinctly minimalist, flat, clean, white, with straight profiles. These plates and cups are indicative that we are indeed in the future, but the environment we are in is a working class space.
So fun fact, the desert scenes of Tatooine were film in Tunisia and a few of the sets are still standing today. They were even used in more recently released Star Wars films. Roger Christian mentioned looking at the ancient architecture in Tunisia as inspiration and this is especially notable in the final scene of the film, where our hero’s are being given medals of honor in what looks like a giant stone temple.
Another example of the grungy western-inspired aesthetic is the famous Cantina at Mos Eisley. This scene is pretty iconic, we meet Han Solo for the first time, and there are tons of alien creatures all portrayed by puppets just hanging out and socializing. The interior of the cantina is dark, run down, it’s very much got the same feeling as an old-timey saloon, but with little touches that make it feel futuristic. The bar at the center of the room is rounded with a large bulkhead of the same shape above it to emphasize its presence, and the edges of the bar are dramatically bullnosed, maybe for protection, which implies things can get a little rowdy in the bar. We do see a few fights break out in just a few minutes. The layout of the cantina is actually the same as the layout of Luke’s home - the central round bar is surrounded with arched niches that hold tables, so it’s a very sputnikesque, radial plan. There is not much natural light anywhere in the bar, but we do see some red wall lights around the room. There are very few light fixtures in the entire movie, most of the lighting is in the form of either daylight from a window or a sleek integrated wall panel, which we will talk about later.
The other major set we see on our hero’s turf is the interior of the Millennium Falcon, which is Han Solo’s spaceship. Christian wanted this to look like the inside of a submarine and used engine parts to decorate the walls. We also see a round chess board with hologram projections on it as a focal point. This space and all the other good guy spaces are very intentionally meant to look rough, raw, and ragged. Christian and Lucas wanted to make a clear departure from the plastic fantastic, bright and shiny sci-fi era, and create scenes that felt realistic - and it in the stagnant economy of 1970’s America - that meant a little run down.
The bad guy spaces, on the other hand are about as iconically shiny and space-age as it gets. The opening scene of the movie is on an enemy space ship - more specifically in its corridors. The vast majority of the shots we see on enemy territory are tight views in the hallways of stations. I’ve talked about the idea of prospect and refuge on other episodes, and this is a great example. A narrow, unending hallway gives us neither prospect nor refuge, with nowhere to hide and no ability to really understand what lies ahead of us. We only see an endless stretch of corridor. This is used to build tension in horror movies all the time, say for example Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and it's a situation interior designers are constantly working to avoid. Long corridors are often an easy solution for tricky space planning like hotels and hospitals, but the spaces they create can feel dizzying and claustrophobic. The movie takes advantage of this, and intentionally makes us feel uncomfortable in this type of space by showing our hero’s chased by storm troopers.
The space ship in the opening scene has bright, slick, glossy white walls and a spotless gray floor - plus, the world’s most exaggerated curved integral wall base. I am obsessed with wall bases, they protect a wall from wear and tear, help hide the tiny imperfections where the wall meets the floor, and they add a visual framing to a room. I always tell my students to show wall bases in their projects to make their spaces look more realistic, and if this corridor was an assignment I would give it an A. Integral bases are a special variety where either the floor or wall material is smoothly bent to the adjacent surface to create the base- it always reminds me a miniature skate park quarter pipe. These are very common in hospitals because they are super easy to clean. You can run a wet mop over them without it getting snagged on a corner of molding, and there are no crevices for dust or dirt to hide. What’s interesting is the implication of sanitation. A curved base like this, especially paired with white walls, makes the space feel almost sterile in its level of cleanliness.
The color and material palette on our enemy ships are very specific. Mostly - we are talking black and white. One ship has the pristine white walls, but the Death Star’s interior is mostly black. Notably, in Darth Vader’s conference room of evil, there is a huge, jet black, glossy conference table that is like looking into the abyss. The table is almost comically wide, keeping all the meeting attendees at a far distance from each other and including their dark reflections in every shot. This room has the same layout as Luke’s house and the Cantina- a central circular focal point (in this case, the conference table) surrounded by smaller down-lit niches. The entire Death Star itself Is, of course, a sphere, and this is apparent when we are looking down its corridors, as they gently curve to obstruct our view ahead, making in impossible to see storm troopers before its too late.
In general though, the shapes we see on the Death Star are more angular and rectilinear. Rather than arched doorways, we see octagonal door frames and hexagonal corridors, with honeycomb shaped blinking lights on the walls. The ceilings have high contract dark baffles and long, linear backlit panels.
I noticed two design elements that connected almost every single set we see in the movie. The first being the shape and style of the doors. All of the doors on the space ships serve as air locks, meaning the frame of the door wraps down from the sides and along the floor, creating a giant saddle that everyone has to step over. Clearly, there is no ADA in space. From what I understand, this is a safety measure taken from submarine designs, in the event of a hull breach, the leak could be isolated to a small area simply by closing the doors around it. That minimizes how many storm troopers get sucked into space! But this style of door is mimicked at the main entrances of Luke Skywalker’s house, even though most of the entrances to the surrounding rooms don’t even have doors. In this case, I would imagine this is to prevent sand storms from pummeling the spaces, but it’s interesting that doors are the same rounded rectangle shape and all of them are automatic sliding doors, as opposed to a traditional hinged swing door. I blame this movie for so many people’s obsession with sliding doors, there’s something about seeing them in the movie that feels so futuristic, and who hasn’t walked into a Stop-n-Shop or a Safeway’s automatic sliding entrance and pretended to be Darth Vader for at least a second.
The other common design element that we see in every spaceship from the Death Star to the Millennium Falcon is blinking geometric lights - all over the walls of every space. This aesthetic is pretty straightforward spacey - looking as though every panel is an indicator light to some mechanical function. But the movie uses these to create a dynamic, active texture to quietly dance behind the characters as the story unfolds.
So, if the hero vibe is what you’re after - a little dirt and a handful of imperfections will help make your home feel relatable. Make sure to chose furniture with round edges, and keep everything in earth tones. If you want to embody your inner Darth Vader in your home decor, go for things that are black, white, and glossy all over - with sharper angles and some hexagons. Either way, your home will be feeling more like a galaxy far, far away before you know it. Until next time, stay moisturized - even in the desert - bye!
