Film and Furniture

The Owens house is back, and we’re willing to overlook quite a lot of witchcraft for that greenhouse.

Practical Magic 2 arrives this September, with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman returning as the Owens sisters almost three decades after the original film.

The house is romantic, eccentric and very pretty. Yes, Practical Magic operates at the more sugary end of our usual film diet. But give us a good kitchen, an overgrown greenhouse and several rooms full of intriguing furniture and consider us under the spell.

The sequel, based on Alice Hoffman’s The Book of Magic, brings us back to the family curse, ancestral magic, midnight mischief and the sort of plot that requires at least one candle to blow itself out.

Our attention, naturally, is on the house.

The Owens home was one of the pleasures of the 1998 film: a rambling Victorian concoction of white-painted timber, towers, porches, big windows and vast rooms.

For the original, production designers Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch drew on Victorian architecture, East Coast lighthouses and turn-of-the-century houses. The exterior was constructed for the film on San Juan Island in Washington and dismantled afterwards, while the interiors were built separately on sound stages.

Seeing it recreated for Practical Magic 2 is rather satisfying.

Production designer Tom Burton has retained much of the character: a large cream-painted kitchen lined with glass-fronted cupboards and drawers, a farmhouse sink, long timber table, open shelving and plenty of jars, crockery, plants and assorted domestic paraphernalia.

And then there is the greenhouse, perhaps our favourite of the new spaces seen so far in the trailer. Vines wander across the windows, flowers and herbs crowd the tables, terracotta pots fill the corners and a lovely wicker chair sits amongst the foliage. Frankly, this is our kind of practical magic. If you’ve been wondering how to make rattan look good indoors, surrounding it with a large quantity of plants clearly helps.

Practical Magic 2 () opens internationally from 9 September 2026.

Production design: Tom Burton
Director: Susanne Bier

Wicker is back. Although, judging by the movies, it never really went away.

Rattan and wicker are having another interiors moment, and it’s easy to see why. They bring warmth, texture and a sense of ease to a room, and rattan also has strong sustainability credentials: it is fast-growing, renewable and can be harvested far more quickly than many traditional hardwoods.

Film has been showing us how to use it for decades.

In Call Me By Your Name and Teorema, wicker sits beautifully against old stone, gardens and sun-baked European architecture. Saltburn uses it to soften the formality of a grand country estate. In Aftersun, floral-cushioned rattan creates that very particular holiday-hotel look, while Dear White People turns the peacock chair into a full-on visual statement.

Then there are the smaller details: the woven bedside furniture in The Souvenir, weathered chairs in The Sacrifice, and the way wicker appears again and again as something relaxed, slightly nostalgic and very lived-in.

The screen lesson? Use wicker for texture, mix it with contrasting materials and don’t be afraid of pattern, colour or pieces that show a little age.

Swipe through for some of our favourite wicker and rattan moments on screen.

🔎 Find the furniture, lighting and décor you spot in film and TV at Film and Furniture.
🔗 Link in bio.

Pedro Almodóvar is back, and so are the interiors we love to linger over.

Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), now in UK cinemas, moves between two interconnected stories about filmmaking, grief, friendship and the blurred boundary between lived experience and fiction. Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Raúl, a writer-director struggling to write, while Bárbara Lennie’s Elsa becomes part of the story he is constructing.

Raúl’s Madrid home is filmed in the 1962 house and studio designed by Spanish modernist architect Francisco de Asís Cabrero. Warm timber, red structural details, huge areas of glass and an almost absurdly good collection of furniture, books, lighting and art.

The bright red open shelving seen behind Raúl’s desk is packed with books on cinema, photography, art and culture. Beyond it, glass opens the room to the landscape outside. It makes an unusually convincing filmmaker’s workspace: cultured and carefully composed, but still cluttered enough with drawings, pens, papers and objects to feel occupied.

There’s plenty for design spotters, including Carlo Scarpa’s Cornaro sofa, Gio Ponti’s Superleggera seating, Alvar Aalto’s Angel Wing floor lamp and lighting by Antoni Arola, alongside pieces by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand and Jaime Hayon.

Patricia’s apartment is where Almodóvar turns the colour dial right up. Green, red, orange, pink and mint jostle happily together, including the wonderfully voluptuous green Bubble sofa by Sacha Lakic for Roche Bobois. Elsa and Patricia sit on it listening to Chavela Vargas sing Amarga Navidad, the song from which the film takes its title.

Raúl is surrounded by timber, books and serious modernist design, Patricia in a softer, brighter world of curved upholstery and confectionery colour. Both feel unmistakably Almodóvar, yet very specifically inhabited by their characters.

🔎 Find the furniture, lighting and décor you spot on screen at Film and Furniture. 🔗 Link in bio.

Images: © El Deseo / Iglesias Más

Country piles, Italian palazzi, Riva boats and one very memorable BBQ grill table. The Gentlemen is back.

The Gentlemen Season 2 locations, interiors & BBQ grill table Explore The Gentlemen Season 2 locations, interiors and furniture, from Halstead Manor and Lake Maggiore to the WildTable BBQ grill and WildKitchen

What will you see for National Cinema Weekend? 🎬🍿

On Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 September, more than 500 cinemas across the UK are taking part in National Cinema Weekend, with tickets at £4 at participating cinemas.

Which gives us an excellent excuse to spend rather more time than usual in the dark.

Will it be one of the big new releases?

🕷 Spider-Man: Brand New Day

⚔️ Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

🤠 Toy Story 5

🌙 One Night Only

🏠 The Invite, which gets our vote for some particularly good interiors to inspect while the dinner party steadily unravels.

Or perhaps something a little more off-piste?

🎄 Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas

🎹 Tuner

🏚 Savage House

🔪 Tony

🏕 Teenage S*x and Death at Camp Miasma

And there are some very tempting returns to the big screen too:

🖖 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

👗 Mannequin

🚕 Taxi Driver

🚽 Trainspotting

🚗 The Fast and the Furious, back for its 25th anniversary

🤖 The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day celebrating its 35th anniversary

And, for younger filmgoers, there’s even Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out.

Plus La La Land, which frankly sounds like a very good excuse to see those saturated colours, Los Angeles locations and musical set-pieces on a cinema screen again.

Programmes vary across the country, so check what your local participating cinema is showing.

What are you going to see, and who are you taking?

🎬 National Cinema Weekend
📅 5–6 September 2026
🎟 £4 tickets at participating cinemas

Sunday Sofas: Sofas in Film and TV No.8, The Retro Edition 📺

How do filmmakers furnish the recent past? Very often with patterned upholstery, warm woods, cocktail-hour colours and sofas that look wonderfully lived-in.

For this edition we’re heading into the 1950s, 60s and 70s, or cinema and television’s version of them. From The Apartment to the stylised nostalgia of Asteroid City, the suburban polish of Far from Heaven and the moody Americana of Blue Velvet, these sofas help build entire worlds.

Mad Men, A Complete Unknown and Elvis use seating to evoke taste and era, while My Best Friend’s Wedding, Maid and Elephant remind us that retro can also feel faded, awkward or gloriously ordinary. Father Mother Sister Brother, Stranger Things and even The Incredibles show how persuasive older design languages remain, whether cosy, uncanny or gently comic.

A sofa in film has to work hard.

🔎 Find furniture and décor from film and TV at filmandfurniture.com
🔗 Link in bio.

Stay tuned for more Sunday Sofas...

Stranger Things (2016)
Created by: Matt and Ross Duffer | PD: Chris Trujillo

Mad Men (2007)
Created by: Matthew Weiner | PD: Dan Bishop | SD: Claudette Didul

A Complete Unknown (2024)
D: James Mangold | PD: François Audouy | SD: Regina Graves

My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
D: P. J. Hogan | PD: J. Dennis Washington | SD: Merideth Boswell

Elvis (2022)
D: Baz Luhrmann | PD: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy | SD: Beverley Dunn

Maid (2021)
Created by: Molly Smith Metzler | PD: John Paino

Father Mother Sister Brother
D: Jim Jarmusch

Far from Heaven (2002)
D: Todd Haynes | PD: Mark Friedberg | SD: Denise Pizzini

Elephant (2003)
D: Gus Van Sant | PD: John Pearson

Blue Velvet (1986)
D: David Lynch | PD: Patricia Norris

The Incredibles (2004)
D: Brad Bird | PD: Lou Romano

Asteroid City (2023)
D: Wes Anderson | PD: Adam Stockhausen | SD: Katie Spencer

The Apartment (1960)
D: Billy Wilder | PD: Alexandre Trauner | SD: Edward G. Boyle

Bathrooms in Film No. 4: Readers’ Choice

You had thoughts. Lots of them.

After the first two instalments of Bathrooms in Film, you told us exactly which bathrooms we’d missed. So No. 4 belongs to you.

The pick for first place was clear as bathwater: Scarface. Tony Montana’s vast sunken bathtub sits amid cream carpet, marble columns, gold detailing and a chandelier, facing the television, naturally. Subtlety was never really Tony’s thing.

Also nominated were Performance, Quadrophenia, American Pie, The Women, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible and The Aviator, with thanks to , , , , , .r.cochrane and everyone else who joined in.

And The Aviator gives us a particularly good bit of interiors spotting: its bathroom features Martinique, the famous green banana-leaf wallpaper created in 1942 by Remy and Lucile Chatain with illustrator Albert Stockdale. The pattern was later used by designer Don Loper at the Beverly Hills Hotel and has been turning up on screen ever since.
🛍️ Details on where to buy this for your own home in our Marketplace.

And yes, The Shining and Saltburn were among your demands too. We heard you. They’ve made it into the series (see previous posts)

What have we STILL missed?

🚿 Explore the furniture, décor and design we spot on screen, including the Martinique wallpaper, at filmandfurniture.com.

🍺 The square Mexican b**r glass that sent Film and Furniture on another mission.

A Film and Furniture reader asked us to identify the extraordinary thick, square glasses they’d spotted in Rick Stein’s Road to Mexico.

So we went looking.

We discovered they’re called Copa Chabela Cuadrada, traditional Mexican glasses used for b**r and, rather brilliantly, designed to be drunk from the corner.

Their ultra-thick glass helps keep your drink colder for longer, and you can even put them in the freezer first to chill the glass before pouring.

Finding out what they were proved easier than finding somewhere we could actually buy them.

Eventually we tracked down a small supplier in Mexico willing to send them to the UK, and started importing them ourselves.

Each holds a generous 600ml and they work beautifully for b**r, but also for ceviche, seafood cocktails, starters and desserts.

They’re available individually, in pairs or sets of four from Film and Furniture.

🔗 Head to the link in bio to buy.

Sunday Sofas: Sofas in Film and TV No.7 - The Future Edition 🚀

How do filmmakers furnish the future? Quite often, with a fantastic sofa.

Science fiction has long used furniture to tell us what tomorrow might look and feel like. Sleek or strange, optimistic or dystopian, a sofa can reveal plenty about the world we’ve entered, and about the era in which that future was imagined.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, Stanley Kubrick filled Space Station 5 with Olivier Mourgue’s sculptural Djinn chairs and 2-seat sofas, designed just three years earlier. Their low, fluid forms and vivid colour became inseparable from Kubrick’s vision of the 21st century.

In The Hunger Games, the Capitol’s huge serpentine de Sede DS-600, first launched in the 1970s, becomes part of a future built on decadence and excess.

Then there’s the joyless seating of Blade Runner 2049; the polished space-liner luxury of Passengers; the immaculate white-and-blue minimalism of Oblivion; and the retro-futurism of Incredibles 2, with its conversation pits and built-in seating.

More recently, The Fantastic Four: First Steps plays with the same idea, creating a 1960s-inspired future filled with curves, colour and sweeping sofas.

And if Kubrick’s future is the one for you, Film and Furniture sells professionally restored Djinn chairs and 2-seat sofas, increasingly collectible pieces of screen design.

🔎 Find the Djinn collection and more furniture from film and TV at filmandfurniture.com
🔗 Link in bio.

Stay tuned for more Sunday Sofas...

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
D: Stanley Kubrick | PD/AD: Tony Masters, Harry Lange, Ernest Archer

The Hunger Games (2012)
D: Gary Ross | PD: Philip Messina | SD: Larry Dias

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
D: Denis Villeneuve | PD: Dennis Gassner | SD: Alessandra Querzola

Passengers (2016)
D: Morten Tyldum | PD: Guy Hendrix Dyas | SD: Gene Serdena

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
D: Matt Shakman | PD: Kasra Farahani | SD: Jille Azis

Incredibles 2 (2018)
D: Brad Bird | PD: Ralph Eggleston

Oblivion (2013)
D: Joseph Kosinski | PD: Darren Gilford

🎬 La La Land at 10: beyond the dancing, the interiors are doing plenty of storytelling too.

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land returns to cinemas from 16 August, ten years after its debut, and we’ve been looking again at the film through its furniture, lighting and interiors.

💗 Mia’s apartment is exuberant and theatrical. Floral wallpaper, mismatched patterned bedding, a huge Ingrid Bergman portrait, vintage lamps, an old dresser and bursts of red, pink and turquoise create the home of someone already living partly inside her own Hollywood fantasy.

As Mia works on her one-woman show, the living room becomes a creative sprawl: pages across the floor, a faded orange sofa, upright piano, small wooden tables and domestic lamps.

🎹 Sebastian’s apartment is far more stripped back. Pale walls, hard daylight through Venetian blinds, a simple bed and little decoration leave the piano, records and record player to dominate.

Production designer David Wasco and set decorator Sandy Reynolds-Wasco give Mia and Sebastian very different visual worlds.Ten years later, there is still a lot to look at.

And then there’s the Griffith Observatory, where its monumental stone interior, Art Deco lighting and great circular Foucault pendulum become part of the choreography.

Production designer David Wasco and set decorator Sandy Reynolds-Wasco give Mia and Sebastian very different visual worlds. Ten years later, there is still a lot to look at.

Which La La Land interior would you move into? 🎹💃

🔎 More film interiors, furniture and design at Film and Furniture.