For season one, Jackson, Wyoming, was built in Canmore. How did you do it this time?

We built it from scratch in a parking lot in Britannia Beach, which is just north of Vancouver. Canmore felt like the game, but we had a lot more we needed to control this time. We leaned into the game to a point, but we didn’t want it to be too old Western feeling so we also leaned into actual Jackson. It became a combo of what’s in the game and Jackson itself.

Did you have to destroy the set when the hoard invades in Episode Two?

We burned things and broke things. Once Mark Mylod, who was the director of that episode, landed there was a lot of retro-fitting. We ended up building a whole network of roofs so there could be action on top of the buildings and people could fall off. But we knew that scene was coming when we laid out and built the town. It was a massive build.

Was the house where Abby kills Joel a real house?

That was someone’s actual home out in Mission, which is east of Vancouver. It was such a match to the game. Typically, on a show like this we would just build that, but we didn’t want to have to blue screen out the windows, which you would have to do on a set. It was amongst some trees so we could use what was outside the windows.

Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) share a moment on their porch, which was built around an existing house.

Warner Bros. Discovery

Was Ellie and Joel’s house also someone’s home?

It was a real house in Langley. We built the porch for the porch scene and built out the interior. We brought snow in for the whole street.

How did you create the version of Seattle we see this season?

It’s a combination of locations and sets. I have to give credit where credit is due to our location manager, Nicole. She got us into places that are traditionally very difficult or where you’re not allowed to shoot. We were going to shoot in Gastown, but it’s super touristy and busy. So we ended up going to a little town called Nanaimo, which is a 20-minute float plane ride from Vancouver. There’s a beautiful strip of old, appropriate buildings and we were able to take over. They allowed us to strip out all the storefronts and break windows and change awnings. We brought in all the [plants].

Before The White Lotus season three, you worked on True Detective: Night Country—quite a shift from tropical vacations. How did working across such different genres prepare you for creating these heightened yet believable vacation wardrobes?

Night Country came right after The White Lotus season two, and yes, it was a dramatic shift from fluid florals to police uniforms and Inupiaq furs! But every project has its unique setting and characters—you dive into the world through research, collecting ideas and images, then plan how to gather everything you need. Real life is the best inspiration; everyone has a style or preferences, even if unconsidered. Every project trains me better in imagining what my characters might wear. For The White Lotus, we always include an element of logic: What did they pack? How did they envision their week evolving—dinners, poolside, adventures?

Camp shirts with retro prints (as seen here on Walton Goggins, next to Aimee Lou Wood) are one style Boivard has observed returning to the mainstream in tandem with heavy The White Lotus air time.

Fabio Lovino/HBO

How has your approach to resort fashion evolved from Hawaii to Sicily to Thailand? What signature elements carry through all three seasons?

Each location has its own distinct flavor. In Hawaii, you can’t escape the Aloha prints, and everyone’s more laid back. For Italy, we incorporated shopping finds into the characters’ looks—most Americans want to do some shopping there—and dinner time becomes more formal. Thailand still leans into its sense of place: linen shirts, treasures from local markets, and clothes that work in the heat. But across all three seasons, there’s this concept of dressing to impress and imagining who we want to be on holiday—more daring and defining than we might be in our regular lives.

Can you walk us through your Thailand sourcing process?

We sourced globally, pulling pieces from the UK, US, and Italy before shipping everything to Bangkok, which is actually a mecca of shopping malls. Once there, we continued acquiring everything from luxury brands to backpacker staples from local markets. We worked with antique dealers, bought Thai silks and upholstery fabrics, and created many pieces in-house. Our traveling warehouse kept growing until we finally headed to Koh Samui for fittings.

When Samantha Brown was hired to host a show on the Travel Channel back in 2000, she was just happy not to be waiting tables anymore. She’s been on the road ever since, though, and 25 years later is hosting her own show for PBS. Samantha Brown’s Places to Love is about to enter its eighth season, and the show is very much sculpted by the lessons Brown has learned over a quarter-century in the game. Namely, she knows now that it’s the people that make the place.

Of the early days of her career, Brown says, “Being on the road 220 days out of the year was just lonely—I was mostly shooting castles, monuments, and cathedrals, which just naturally puts you in the past.” Long walks at the end of long shoot days helped Brown learn how she really likes to travel: instinctively, intuitively, spontaneously, and socially. “The energy of locals doing their everyday thing really filled me up,” she says. “That’s why, for Places to Love, I make sure the focus is on the people, neighborhoods, and places where you can be a part of the community.”

One episode in the eight season of Places to Love sees Brown on the North Carolina coast—here, she sits down for a seafood boil on Oceania Pier.

Samantha Brown Media

The last time Brown sat down with us for a chat, on an episode of the Women Who Travel podcast back in 2021, she was reflecting on the year prior, which she—and most of us—spent cloistered in our homes. Now that she’s decidedly back out in the world and the cameras are rolling once more, she joined us to talk about how her viewpoint has changed, trends she’s totally called, and more.

At our 2024 Points of View Summit, you mentioned your current approach to producing Places to Love, which involves a lot of boots-on-the-ground scouting. How did you land there?

It started when I was more of a “hired host” for The Travel Channel, and those shows were really centered on showing you the greatest hits, no surprises. Just like: What is the place known for? That’s where we’re going to take you. And that was great. But at the end of the day, I just wondered, What else is there? I actually felt a real loneliness and kind of disconnect with the location, and thought, “I guess I’m really not a traveler.”

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Where did you film in New York City?

It gets harder and harder to do a period piece in New York City, so we scouted everywhere from Harlem to the Lower East Side. We ended up in Chinatown on Madison Street, which is just below the Manhattan Bridge, for Tom’s apartment. We used Mechanics Alley, which Tom walks through after he gets off the subway and feels he’s being followed. The antique store was in the West Village. It’s an empty space. The shipyard [where Dickie’s father works] was at the [Brooklyn] Navy Yard in an old warehouse space.

What locations did you use in Atrani?

The piazza [Piazzetta Umberto]. The exterior of Marge’s house. The beautiful beach. One of my favorite locations is the little post office, which was really a garage with strange proportions that just felt so right to me. I love the fact that it’s sitting in a little tunnel that runs through the town square. We also didn’t think we were going to put the bus stop [where Tom gets off] in Atrani. If you know the Amalfi coast at all, there’s one two-lane road that runs through all of it, so being able to control traffic for the few scenes we had was not easy. But you get this fantastic view when Tom’s on the road looking back down into the square.

Positano’s Hotel Miramare was used as a model for Ripley’s hotel in Mongibello, the interior of which was actually a private home. The exterior was an entrance to a convent.

Philippe Antonello/Netflix

Where was your version of the real-life Hotel Miramare?

The exterior was an entrance to a convent in Atrani and the interior was a private home we stripped out and made into the hotel. It had that beautiful room on the corner, where Tom stays, and it looks out to the sea and to Dickie’s house.

Was Dickie’s house an actual villa?

It was actually a villa in Capri, Villa Torricella. We looked at a lot of possible villas and palazzi. We had seen something in Ischia, where [The Talented Mr. Ripley] film was shot. But Steve had been in Capri for the film festival a number of times and noticed this villa and was so taken with it. There are three different factions of a family that live in the house, so the parts of the villa were broken up. We had to negotiate with all the different families to get permission to use the different parts of the house to put together Dickie’s house.

JC: We loved Saga because a lot of the architecture in the show was rooted more in the 1920s and ’30s—you know, the mansions, the estate, the club—so in West Palm Beach we could infuse more of this 1950s mid-century style. In March, 2022 before filming, Tate Taylor and I drove down South Dixie Highway in Palm Beach and earmarked a handful of hotels that felt “of the era” and this Pasadena motel could definitely stand in for them.

There are some scenes that I felt I could step inside, such as Dinah and Maxine’s Martini Bar. Is that a real venue?
JC: It’s a bar called The Prince in Koreatown.

ER: That space looks almost identical to what you see in the show. We changed out the art works—because we had to for clearance purposes—but your readers will actually get that feel when they go there.

JC: We were also very inspired by The Breakers—one party takes place there in the plot—so we shot many interior scenes at The Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which has the same feel. Similarly, we referenced The Colony—our Palm Royale pool looks like theirs, very feminine and pink. Historically, The Colony Hotel held a lot of fashion shows poolside—Slim Aarons photographed them—so we picked up on the dominance of fashion in that space in the show.

How did you differentiate between West Palm and Palm Beach proper?

JC: It’s San Fernando Boulevard in San Fernando, just outside L.A.—it’s a jewel of a street that is mostly period-correct. We did build facades over real shopfronts for the Cuban restaurant and the Va-va Voom nail salon but that’s all. That street has the right foliage and the architectural style to match West Palm Beach in the 1960s.

Equally, the driving scenes. When Maxine is driving in West Palm Beach, we shot in areas of residential L.A. such as Mar Vista; it has the Ain Tract—a couple of blocks where the 1940s houses are all designed by Gregory Ain.

Despite the titular amalgamation, one grand party does take place at The Breakers.

Erica Parise/Palm Royale

What’s your favorite scene?

ER: It’s a toss-up between Norma’s smoking room and—in the final episode—the Beach Ball [the climactic charity ball.] It was a stage and a half!

JC: It was kind of insane. But my favorite scene is Norma’s assisted-living apartment. I grew up in a midcentury ranch and there were a lot of architectural elements from my childhood house that I put into it. In fact, the exterior was genuinely shot in Palm Beach—it’s a condominium tower called The President of Palm Beach. There was a certain nostalgia when I went into that scene that felt right.

With the arrival of the regally wonderful Olivia Colman, this run took us from 1964 to 1977, bringing some groovy fashions, industrial unrest and a new focus on Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) and Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) and their various complicated love lives.

Wales

With the rising profile of Charles, we saw his 1969 investiture as Prince of Wales. This was, remarkably, filmed in the place itself, amid the Edwardian battlements of Caernarfon Castle in the north-west of the country. For the recreation of the Aberfan disaster of 1966, where a landslide covered a south Wales primary school, the production turned to Cwmaman. The unused Glynhafod Junior was turned into Pantglas Junior School, and further filming took place at Blaenavon’s Big Pit National Coal Museum.

London

For Winston Churchill’s funeral in Episode 1, St Paul’s Cathedral was played by Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire, a medieval Gothic giant that’s one of the largest places of worship in Europe but still a great deal less busy than the real thing.

Meanwhile, for Marlborough House, home of Liz’s widowed grandmother Queen Mary, the production enlisted Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, its Jacobean glory still largely intact, from the gold-leaf roof of its Long Gallery to the drawing room lined with paintings over tapestries.

Brocket HallShutterstock

Scotland

Princess Margaret’s travails took her this season to The Glen, the Scottish seat of Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner. Footage for this was filmed at Rhinefield House Hotel in Brockenhurst, Hampshire, mostly around the pool, where she spies Roddy Llewellyn (Harry Treadaway).

Mustique

We also saw Margaret find her paradise on Tennant’s newly purchased Caribbean island of Mustique. This was southern Spain, with scenes shot around Málaga. While there, the production crew took full advantage of the landscape, employing it for scenes of Margaret and her new husband, Lord Snowdon, living it up in California on their US tour.

Washington

When Margaret and Snowdon flew to Washington DC to butter up President Johnson (Clancy Brown) in 1965, the White House they visited was in fact Hylands House, an 18th-century neoclassical stately home in Chelmsford.

France

For the Duke of Windsor (Derek Jacobi) in exile in the Bois de Boulogne outside Paris, we were really in a drawing room of West Wycombe House, the country pile of 18th-century rogue Sir Francis Dashwood, founder of the Hellfire Club. It’s a popular screen location, featured in Downton Abbey, Taboo and Patrick Melrose.

Season 2

Focusing on the years between 1956 and 1964, this season portrayed challenges at home and abroad, including the Suez Crisis and the Profumo Affair, and the Queen (played by her first incarnation, Claire Foy) as a very busy working mother.

South Africa

For this season, South Africa was the show’s go-to foreign location, covering most of the globe on Prince Philip’s world tour: Cape Town covered for Melbourne, the Keurbooms River was the Amazon, Kogel Bay on the Western Cape was Tonga and Hermanus was Bermuda.

What has it been like bringing various parts of Oklahoma to life for the show?

BT: Designing on location is about respectfully observing the details of life in a particular place and reconstructing them in a way that resonates. Oklahoma, where I hadn’t spent much time previously, was just so rich with possibilities. On a very practical level, I’ve never been part of a project that people were so ecstatically excited about. It felt like no matter where you went after the first season, just saying the words “Reservation Dogs” elicited smiles, well wishes, and free beers. Watching this final season has been so moving in that every set makes me think of all the people I was surrounded with for three years while we were making this special show in a very unique place.

TS: My dad is from Okmulgee [where much of the show was shot], so I grew up thinking of it as more or less a dust bowl with no opportunity—which is the assumption most people have about small towns. But then you realize that’s not true at all. It was really important to Sterlin to show how big this community really is. The thing about shooting in Oklahoma was that we didn’t have a lot of resources, like prop houses and fabricators. But everyone was so excited we were there, and every door in the community flung wide open for us, metaphorically and physically. Many of the things you see on set actually belong to community members, which ended up making the show so much richer. We were really trying to bring that authenticity into the show through paintings, beadwork, cradle boards, and even blow darts. In Oklahoma, we had access to an abundance of knowledge from elders who still possess certain skills that are not being taught anymore, similar to language.

Finally, what has it meant to you to be part of a history-making series showcasing authentic Native American experiences?

BT: I feel completely honored to have been a part of the show. Reading the first scripts, I knew it was going to be special, but being in Oklahoma, it really started to sink in. On the first day of shooting season one, Sterlin gathered the entire crew and gave a very stirring speech about how we’re making a comedy but that we shouldn’t forget how many years of suffering have led up to us being able to joke about these things. He also explained that each Native American person in the production is here because one of their ancestors survived. Finally, he noted that Native Americans have always been props or villains in films, and this is the first show to let them tell their own story.

TS: My dad, who passed away a year before I got the job, was an artist and coincidentally created a cartoon called “Rez Dogs” for me when I was a kid. It was about a bunch of basketball-playing dogs on the rez, and it was just funny and insightful, teaching me about our culture. He made that because there was nothing else showing me anything about my people. My grandpa was an actor who would travel the country and meet all these Indian kids, and he said they were all really proud to be Indian but weren’t sure why. There was this disconnect. He said he thought it was because other kids have all these people to look up to, whether it’s in television or sports, but that all our Native heroes are dead. Rez Dogs is something my grandpa and dad wanted for us—and now we have it.

Symonds Yat remains a setting in season 4 of the series.

Alamy

Before we say goodbye, here’s our round-up of what to look out for in Season 4, including new locations you won’t have seen before.

While many of the locations for Season 4 remain familiar—Otis and Jean’s house is still the gorgeous The Chalet, for example—there’s one very significant change this time around. The announcement of the closure of Moordale High at the end of Season 3 came as the Caerleon campus, where it was filmed, became unavailable after it was sold to developers. That means the Moordale pupils (or most of them, at any rate) have moved to a new establishment, Cavendish College, with all the nerves and opportunities that entails.

Cardiff

Cavendish is represented by a proper icon of Welsh life: the modern reception building of St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff, one of the country’s most popular visitor attractions. Opened in 2018, the block we see is a new addition to an otherwise old-world complex, centred on the Elizabethan manor of St Fagans Castle. In its grounds are several recreations of work and culture chronicling life in Wales throughout history, from clogmaking and ironwork to pottery and cornmilling.

Cwmcarn

For the approach to the new school, meanwhile, filming took place on the beautiful Cwmcarn Forest Drive, north-west of Newport. Running for seven miles through woods, hills and valleys, it’s at the heart of another popular visitor attraction, favored by hikers and mountain-bikers.

Emma Mackey as Maeve Wiley in Sex Education.

Thomas Wood/Netflix

Tetbury

While her classmates are getting used to another school, Maeve is settling into new surroundings of her own: Wallace University in the US. For this, the production used two locations, both of them rather closer to the Sex Education base of operations than you’d think. The first, used for the classical Ivy League exterior, is Westonbirt School in Tetbury, Gloucestershire. A private boarding school since 1928, this was previously a stately home, owned by the Holford family since the 17th Century. The current incarnation is its third, built in 1870 by Robert Stayner Holford in lavish Elizabethan style and said to have been one of the most expensive houses of its time, involving the diversion of a main road and the relocation of a village.

Bristol

For interior scenes at Wallace, meanwhile, Maeve and Thomas Malloy (Dan Levy) are seen in the Wills Memorial Building of Bristol University. The unofficial centre of a non-campus university which otherwise sprawls across the city, this was built in 1925 as one of the last Gothic-style buildings in England, financed by heirs to the Wills tobacco company. We see the dark wood bookshelves and vaulted ceiling of the Law Library, one of many rooms that make up the Wills Memorial complex that centres on a Great Hall used for degree ceremonies.

Abergavenny

Another leaver from Moordale is Adam (Connor Swindells), who is now in rather more down-to-earth surroundings than Maeve: we find him working the fields at Werngochlyn Farm near Abergavenny, about 20 miles north of Newport. Dating back to the 12th century, sitting under the Skirrid Mountain in Llantilio Pertholey, this now combines a working farm with four holiday cottages, which can be booked through werngochlynfarm.org.

Monmouth

More changes to spot include a new bridge: rather than the Wireworks Bridge in Tintern seen in previous seasons, we now see the Duke of Beaufort Iron Bridge in Monmouth. Built in 1874 as part of the great Victorian rail expansion, it was closed to locomotives in 1964 but has remained as a footpath and landmark.