The legion of fans who adore Emily in Paris have plenty to dig into when it comes to the frothy drama of marketing exec Emily Cooper’s career and romances in the City of Light, but it’s the love affair viewers have with the French capital itself that keeps the Netflix show’s massive audience coming back for more. Much like series creator Darren Star’s culture-shifting Sex and the City, in Emily in Paris the setting earns its nod in the title and is as much a character of the show as Lily Collins’s plucky fish-out-of-water Cooper. We’re all just tourists here to do a little Parisian sightseeing via streaming—and the program’s production team, who know this well, make certain that viewers are in for a visual feast sans trans-Atlantic flight. “To me, the show is about transporting the audience somewhere, and I think this season, we do this in a bigger way than we ever have before,” Star teases of the fourth Emily in Paris season, part one of which premieres today on Netflix.
Collins spends the bulk of her own working hours shooting scenes in her character’s workplace, Agence Grateau (née Savoir), which is just fine by the leading lady of this Emmy-nominated series. She and the cast jest that the dreamy design of the office set would be enough to entice them into overnight stays. “We joked that we would put mattresses in here and actually sleep here,” Collins tells AD in a behind-the-scenes tour, citing the “crown molding, the colors; it’s so calm, the floor…everything about it felt as though they’d just taken a Parisian apartment and put it into an office workspace.”
Architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s influence on the look of Paris’s buildings cannot be overstated, so Star opted for a Haussmannian-style space for Cooper’s office in order to invoke that classic Parisian feel. Production designer Anne Seibel explains that while Agence Grateau’s interior is all a stage set, the fictional firm uses exterior shots of the very real Place de Valois in Paris. The likeness doesn’t stop at the doorstep; the building’s architecture was used to inform the design of the office set. “My aim was to mix and match the exterior [of the real Place de Valois] with the interior [set],” Seibel explains. “So we surveyed all the windows and we adjusted the whole set inside according to the space.”
Art imitates life more closely than one might expect in other elements of the space. Agence Grateau’s kitchenette, Collins says, is “fully functioning,” and the office’s conference room, a sun-bathed baby blue space anchored by a large wood round table “is sometimes the bane of our existence,” she admits—a sentiment that likely strikes a chord with many real corporate warriors out there. The actor explains that the team is “usually in there for a couple of hours” due to the larger number of cast members gathered for meeting scenes and the number of shots necessary.
