The 'Verity' house has a midcentury modern pedigree that's to die for

There are plenty of reasons why theatregoers will be seduced by Verity, the erotic psychological thriller hitting cinemas 2 October: its twisty plot, courtesy of director Michael Showalter; an all-star cast starring Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett; not to mention a host of steamy scenes with – shall we say – bite. But architecture and design buffs will be lured in by a different type of eye candy: the striking midcentury modern lake house where the majority of the drama unfolds.

The film, adapted from the best-selling 2019 book by Colleen Hoover, centres around novelist Verity Crawford (Hathaway), who has been left incapacitated after a car accident. Her husband, Jeremy (Hartnett), enlists struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson) to finish one of Verity’s final projects. While at the Crawfords’ secluded forest retreat, Lowen discovers a manuscript that reveals a horrifying secret about Verity’s past.

While the storyline may leave you questioning reality (no spoilers here though), the house where Verity is set is actually a real building in Armonk, New York, a hamlet in Westchester County just north of New York. The home was built in the early 1960s by Danish designer Jens Quistgaard for Martha and Ted Nierenberg, the founders of the beloved American homeware brand Dansk. Today, the house functions as a wellness retreat centre called Beckoning Path.

Quistgaard designed some 4,000 products over his prolific career (he's particularly noted for his charming timber pepper mills). He rarely designed homes, but the one he designed for his employers was just as imaginative. Quistgaard's boldest design move for the residence was its saw-tooth roof, which makes the structure stand out against its rocky lakeside site like a jagged gash. ‘The idea behind the house was that it was a shipwrecked boat, crashing into a landscape,’ says Emmy Award-winning production designer Amy Williams, who oversaw all of Verity’s sets. ‘That also really worked for our story.’

For Williams, a frequent Showalter collaborator and a self-professed design obsessive, the opportunity to create Verity’s sets was a dream assignment. ‘As soon as I saw [the house], I was like, oh my God, I can't wait to design this,’ she says.

For one thing, the home’s unusual silhouette provided the perfect sinister setting; with dim winter light and slow camera pans, the roof can be interpreted as bared teeth or fangs. Conveniently, the zig-zags could also be read as inverted v’s for ‘Verity.’ ‘It's scary and it's stylistically interesting,’ Williams adds.

Working with set decorator Kendall Anderson, Williams got to work dreaming up Verity’s interior world. ‘There's not a great description of the house in the book. It's really up to interpretation,’ she explains. ‘Michael shares mostly cinematic references and I come back with visual references and renderings that you can walk through to see how the space works.’

Midcentury modernism, of course, was a primary touchpoint for the sets. ‘We love mid century. We love brutalism, and we got to bring a lot of that to the house,’ Williams says. ‘Kendall and I were all up on Pinterest and 1stDibs.’ If they couldn’t find the perfect piece, the design team fabricated it themselves as with a custom sectional in the living room, inspired by a midcentury design by Harvey Progger. There are Easter eggs referencing Quistgaard and the home’s original clients, too: look closely and you’ll notice the kitchen is stocked with Dansk dishware and decorative objects.

One of the most conspicuous pieces of furniture in the film is the bed in the primary bedroom – Jeremy and Verity’s erstwhile marital bed and, later, the one Lowen, on her quest to finish Verity’s book, sleeps in. In a creepy moment of foreshadowing, Lowen spots a bite mark on the headboard.

‘The bed was one thing that at first Michael and I weren't on the same page about. I wanted to use a Noguchi piece. I thought it would be very elegant in the space,’ Williams says. But that idea was nixed in favour of a custom build, using a soft wood to accommodate teeth marks created in a moment of on-screen ecstasy. ‘You can't bite into mahogany. So we had to use a very soft balsam wood. We did a lot of testing with it,’ Williams says – testing that involved false sets of teeth, test-chomps from the crew (including Showalter) and food dye. ‘We joked the bed was edible,’ Williams says.

Some sets, including the bedroom, bathroom, and Verity’s office were designed on a soundstage in order to accommodate the actors and crew. In these sets, Williams made sure to be true to Quistgaard’s vision, with timber built-ins and even rock outcroppings. A particular memorable set is Verity’s study, complete with a hexagonal skylight, shag carpet and a sunken living room. The aim was to create a space that was feminine and womblike. ‘It makes no sense to have a conversation pit in someone's office, but it was a really fun one to design,’ Williams says. ‘I got to fantasize that I was Frank Lloyd Wright for a minute.’

A monumental mirrored desk – ’where all the secrets are kept,’ per Williams – was sourced on 1stDibs (the production designer loved it so much that she bought a version for herself). Hathaway, meanwhile, picked out the Italian chandelier.

The result is an opulent and foreboding domestic world that will inevitably send chills down viewers’ spines – or, at the very least, inspire their next home decor project. As Lowen, Dakota Johnson’s character puts it in the film, ‘This house is insane.’