‘Only Murders in the Building’ Production Designer Patrick Howe Is Winging It

In some ways, Patrick Howe plays the titular role on Hulu’s Emmy-winning comedy series Only Murders in the Building. As the series’ production designer, Howe is directly responsible for designing and bringing to life the stunningly specific, intricately decorated apartments found in “the Building” a.k.a the Arconia—the New York residence where Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), and Oliver Putnam (2023 lead-actor Emmy nominee Martin Short) have been solving murders for the past three seasons. “My role as production designer is to interpret the scripted material to place the action into settings,” Howe tells VF over Zoom. “Then that gives me ideas to decide what is the most ideal kind of setting to best tell the story.”

Sometimes, Howe has very little story to go on. “The scripts are really quite general,” Howe says of Only Murders in the Building. “Most writers don’t describe much and they leave that to me.” He’ll have a brief chat with showrunner John Hoffman about what he has in mind, and mine the script for small details that give a window into what the world should look like. “It’s usually just a small description, and you really have to fill in the blanks and extract more from the action that’s written,” Howe says. “Like, ‘open on a serene park setting’ or ‘open on dark, creepy alley.’ Your mind goes to a certain place, but still there’s a lot to fill in.”

One apartment Howe literally had to fill in season three was Mabel’s. Gomez’s aspiring artist spent the first two seasons of OMITB living in her aunt’s mid-renovation construction zone of an apartment, complete with exposed beams, holes in the floor, and many, many safety hazards. “It was this gutted apartment,” Howe says. “And I think it was emblematic of Mabel herself being lost and needing to figure out what she was going to do in her life.” By season three, however, the renovation is complete and Mabel’s apartment is nearly unrecognizable, with the mural she painted in season two a distant memory.

“I loved the transition,” says Howe. “I really like before-and-after situations—how to still recognize that the space is the same space, but it has a whole new fresh look.”

To accomplish this, Howe decided to focus on making Mabel’s new apartment feel modern and attractive to potential buyers, yet bear little resemblance to the quirky, artistic Mabel we’ve come to know over the last two seasons. “I feel like it was sexy and yet not so extreme, because some people are put off by strong colors or extreme styles of furniture,” Howe says.

It’s not just Mabel’s apartment that gets a major makeover in season three. The Arconia’s penthouse apartment, which belonged to Sting in season one and Amy Schumer in season two, is (briefly) occupied by one Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd), a famous Hollywood actor who stars in Oliver’s Broadway play, only to wind up dead in the elevator shaft on opening night. In Glenroy’s hands, the apartment becomes a veritable shrine to himself, covered head to toe in memorabilia from his starring role in the fictional action film franchise CoBro, where he plays a superhero zoologist that can turn into a giant cobra (a nod to Ant-Man? Perhaps). The script described the penthouse as having “a Hard Rock Cafe–worth of memorabilia to Ben Glenroy,” Howe recalls. “That told you right there how far to go.”

To create a Ben Glenroy–inspired Hard Rock Cafe, Howe enlisted the help of his decorator, Rich Murray, to fill every available space with some sort of CoBro tribute. “Rich came up with all these different styles of artists as if they’d all done portraits of him, and creating all these famous situations,” Howe says. “He really ran with it.” Snake imagery was also crucial to the aesthetic of the apartment, which included a giant cobra sculpture standing in the entryway of Glenroy’s penthouse. “You’re slammed with this enormous sculpture of a snake, and that would set the tone for the rest of the other two rooms,” says Howe.