Custom Closets and Pup Portraits: Rebel Wilson’s ‘Isn’t It Romantic’ Apartment Spoofs Your Typical Rom Com

There’s a moment in the upcoming Warner Bros. romantic comedy, “Isn’t It Romantic,” when Rebel Wilson walks into a fancy New York apartment she doesn’t believe belongs to her. “Someone’s broken into my apartment and they’ve taken everything and replaced it with much nicer stuff,” Wilson explains to a 911 operator as she discovers pints of Talenti gelato in the freezer and rows of heels in the walk-in closet.

To which the dispatcher responds: “So your emergency is that your apartment is too big and you have every shoe you could ever want? Byeee.”

The rom-com spoof, in theaters February 13, focuses on Wilson’s Natalie, a New York-based architect cynical about love, who wakes up from a subway mugging incident—only to discover she’s living in a nightmare: A rom-com world filled with flowers, extravagance, and well, lots of romance.

Natalie’s newfound dreamy environment, including her expensive home, is brought to life on the big screen with production designer Sharon Seymour’s vision and expertise.

“I had done a number of my own romantic comedies in my career and that’s often a classic topic of humor within the art department: When you actually design a romantic-comedy apartment, you’re not necessarily evoking reality,” Seymour, whose previous rom-com credits include “Because I Said So” (2007) and “Love Happens” (2009), tells Apartment Therapy. “I thought this was a tremendous opportunity to have a lot of fun with the cliches of a fabulous apartment.”

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Seymour and her team started their research by viewing multi-million dollar apartments online. “I looked at an apartment Madonna had owned. I went on websites like Zillow and Corcoran, and looked at the top of the top beautiful apartments in New York,” she explains. “I took a lot of that information and distilled it down into [Natalie’s] new apartment.” Seymour adds that director Todd Strauss-Schulson wanted the interior to include certain components, such as arched windows, billowy drapes and a pastel color palette—design details often incorporated in popular rom-coms.

Before Seymour designed the new space, she referred to Natalie’s dingy old studio—the one she called home in her everyday reality. “If you look at the floor plan for Natalie’s old apartment, the windows, kitchen and bed sort of fall into the exact same place in the new apartment. They’re just super sized by over 50 percent,” says Seymour.

The high-end apartment, built on a stage at Grumman Studios in Bethpage, New York, is a visual treat: The living room is decorated with gold-accented velvet furniture that complement the Tiffany Blue walls and the kitchen is equipped with a built-in wine cooler and stainless steel appliances, which set decorator Alyssa Winter sourced from luxury kitchen recycler Renovation Angel in Fairfield, New Jersey. Over by the windows, which offer a skyline view of the city, Natalie’s home office is set up with a modern glass drafting table—an upgrade from her personal messy work space in real life.

A telling detail of Natalie’s love life (or lack thereof) is a hard-to-miss painting of her pup, a Bichon Frise named Baxter, located above the fireplace. “She still rejected romance, so the idea that she has this compelling relationship with her dog to that point, we all thought was really funny,” says Seymour, who adds that the dog went in for a photo session before a painting was created to exaggerate and heighten the canine’s beauty.

As with many romantic comedies, the leading lady often gets an upgraded wardrobe and Natalie is no different in the film. She finds herself going into a walk-in closet filled with a rainbow of shoes, purses and clothes (some are from Wilson’s clothing line, Rebel Wilson x Angels)—all of which are perfectly arranged and color-coded, of course.

创建一个定制的梦想衣橱,西摩症d with an interior designer at California Closets. “We went to them with a ground plan of what we wanted, just as if we were a private client. We also were working in a much tighter timeframe than most residential interior [design],” explains Seymour. “We had our own construction department and we did some customization with glass and mirrors that wouldn’t have been possible to do within the timeframe.”

The bedroom also gets a charming update. “We wanted that to feel very feminine,” Seymour says of the room with lavender walls and a royal purple upholstered headboard, which was “this huge impulse to make this beautiful, sensual nest.” The soft curtains, etched glass doors, fireplace, and spa-like bathroom are among the finishing touches to create what “was supposed to be a seductive elegance.” No love-making scene with co-star Liam Hemsworth made the cut, though. It’s a PG-13 rom-com, after all.