Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/834282
Grace and Frankie, created by Marta Kauffman, centers around Grace (played by Jane Fonda), an emotionally repressed WASP, and Frankie (Lily Tomlin), an eccentric Jewish artist with boundary issues. The two women are thrown together when their husbands, Robert and Sol (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston), announce that they've been having an affair with each other for the past twenty years and are planning to get married. It's an Odd Couple scenario on steroids, ripe with comic design opportunities. At the top of Season Three, Robert and Sol have just gotten married and are moving from a house that showcased the dishonesty at the heart of their old marriages into a home that is a sanctuary, a place where they're finally free to be themselves. To frame these two very different men joining their lives, two styles of architecture were merged in their new house. Robert has a traditional sensibility, where Sol is earthy and eccentric, so it was decided that the house would have the bones of a traditional Spanish colonial that has been remodeled with organic textures and patterns. The idea is for the two distinct styles to blend harmoniously, as Robert and Sol do. Because Robert and Sol have been leading false lives for so many years, it was crucial that everything about the new house feel absolutely real. Real materials were used throughout the house: Spanish tile, hand-carved wood doors and beams, live trees and plants in the courtyard, etc. The doors, windows and cabinetry were built with slightly unusual proportions (extra-thin mullions, long narrow window panes, Above: Elevations of Robert and Sol's courtyard fireplace and pizza oven, hand drawn by Greg Papalia. Below: The courtyard was designed to bring the outside world in. Lead greensman Richard Bell sculpted the set with plants and trees native to Southern California. Using a blue screen in the background allowed weather and time of day to be changed at will.