Guillermo del Toro has never met a piece of architecture he didn’t want to turn into a character.
In his new Netflix take on Frankenstein, the director leans all the way into historic estates, spiraling labs, and grand old houses that feel equal parts aristocratic fantasy and gothic fever dream.
Production designer Tamara Deverell built the film’s world across real European mansions and massive Toronto soundstages — and the result is a movie where the sets hit just as hard as the story.
The centerpiece? A colossal laboratory built inside a former industrial tower and a sprawling Frankenstein family estate stitched together from four of the most cinematic homes in the UK. Here’s a closer look at the two places viewers won’t be able to stop talking about.
Frankenstein’s lab: a multi-story tower of marble, metal, and madness
Del Toro didn’t want a lab — he wanted a cathedral of science. So Deverell moved into an abandoned water tower and spent five months shaping it into the most dramatic workspace ever built for a monster.
The lab climbs several stories upward, anchored by marble floors and wrapped in custom metalwork. A massive spiral staircase — designed, fabricated, and installed just for the film — winds up the tower like a helix.
And dominating one wall is an enormous circular window that instantly becomes one of the film’s defining visuals.
The circular motif isn’t just aesthetic flair.
Del Toro uses circles across his filmography — The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak, and now Frankenstein — as symbols of eternal loops, cycles, and rebirth. In this lab, the round window matches the circular grate in the floor and the open top of the tower, turning the entire space into a literal “circle of life” chamber.
The lab’s eerie green patina makes the whole space feel ancient
While the set was brand-new, Deverell designed it to look like it had lived for centuries.
Copper pipes run through the walls, oxidized to a mottled green. Stone and tile surfaces are layered in green-on-green palettes, making the entire space feel corroded, damp, and beautifully haunted — like Frankenstein built his experiments in the belly of an old alchemist’s tower.
It’s one of the most distinctive environments in a movie filled with bold, unusual settings, and it stands out as a top-tier del Toro “world unto itself” creation.
The House of Frankenstein: four grand estates fused into one gothic super-mansion
Unlike the lab, Frankenstein’s ancestral home wasn’t built — it was assembled. The film uses four different historic estates to create one fictional residence:
- Gosford House in East Lothian
- Burghley House in Lincolnshire
- Dunecht House in Aberdeenshire
- Wilton House in Wiltshire
Each location contributes a different layer of aristocratic grandeur. Massive halls, marble corridors, ornate plaster ceilings, gold details — the family’s staggering wealth is written into every surface.
The stately English manor familiar to Netflix fans
And yes, Netflix fans will immediately recognize Wilton House.
The same stately architecture that served as the Duke of Hastings’ home on Bridgerton was one of the homes featured on Frankenstein.
The film-ready estate has also hosted Emma, Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, The Crown, Outlander, and even the 2017 Tomb Raider reboot. If a production needs “historic and breathtaking,” Wilton House is basically on speed dial.
Wilton House’s staircase is a major focal point — and a Kubrick connection
Among all the grand interiors used in the film, one architectural element stands above the rest: the elaborate staircase at Wilton House.
Del Toro specifically loved shooting there because Stanley Kubrick filmed Barry Lyndon in the same space.
‘I think part of the charm of it for Guillermo as a cinephile is that he was shooting in the Barry Lyndon house,’ Deverell says. ‘That film has a very different vibe than ours, but we looked at it a lot as reference since it’s set during a similar period, and there’s candlelight, mood lighting, that kind of thing.’
The two films couldn’t be more different in tone, but both lean into candlelit period interiors, heavy atmosphere, and sweeping, painterly compositions.
Del Toro and Deverell studied Kubrick’s work as reference — a very cinephile move — and it shows in the way the camera glides through the estate with a kind of stately elegance.
Why these locations work so well together on screen
By blending four estates and a massive, purpose-built tower set, the film gives viewers a Frankenstein home that looks vast, ancient, and impossibly wealthy.
Every space in the movie has its own color signature (marble and gold for the house, green patina for the lab, icy white for the Arctic exploration scenes) creating a world that feels handcrafted, storied, and larger than life.
It’s exactly the kind of worldbuilding del Toro is known for, and easily one of the most visually rich environments he’s ever put on screen.
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