If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that a murder mystery mini-series starring Nicole Kidman will feature a gorgeous home. In The Perfect Couple, Kidman’s latest Netflix thriller based on novelist Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 book of the same name, that dwelling is Summerland, a fictitious multi-generational retreat on Nantucket where the Winbury family have converged for a wedding only to have a body wash up on their shoreline the night before the nuptials.
Although the beachfront private estate used for filming is actually on Cape Cod, reportedly in Chatham’s Eastward Point neighborhood along Pleasant Bay, set decorator Claire Kaufman’s decoration of the home is the epitome of Nantucket chic. The gray cedar shingles, crisp white Adirondack chairs, bamboo roll-up window shades, and blue hydrangea bushes all communicate the family’s Nantucket sensibility, but it goes beyond that: Kaufman also selected furniture and objets d’art representative of each character’s persona.
Along with production designer Sarah Knowles, director Susanne Bier, and costume designer Signe Sejlund, Kaufman devised a color palette for each character. “We love that vibrant red for Liev Schreiber’s character, Tag, and that soft rose palette for Kidman’s character, Greer. A lot of this was accomplished through the wallpapers.”
Of the two, Tag is edgier, more assertive, and so the red makes sense, as does Kaufman’s choice to dress his wood-paneled office with a shadowbox of antique guns along with intriguing book titles like Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson, about Virginia Woolf’s female lover. His novelist wife Greer’s femininity and formal nature is shown in her office, with rose-hued walls, a vase of pink flowers and a white desk–along with her book covers framed and hung on the walls.
