The 10 best sets on Outlander

By Lynette Rice
May 12, 2020 at 06:35 PM EDT

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Mark Mainz/Starz

Before production designer Jon Gary Steele bids farewell to the Starz drama (tear!), we asked him to list his favorite sets over the past five seasons. "People love the detail. Why not make it as amazing as you can?" he tells EW. "And that's what we've tried to do, give Outlander a look, so that it doesn't look like every other period piece. I think that we did that. It's been an amazing experience."

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The Great Hall (season 1)

Everett Collection

"It was the most fun set of that season because it was huge. [Executive producer] Ron Moore wanted to do a first test of everything lit… Four giant chandeliers, 12 giant flaming sconces, three huge fireplaces. So there was fire everywhere. That was really fun, to see it all lit up."

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Claire's Apothecary (season 1)

Starz

"It was filled with arches. Everywhere you look, we were shooting through arches. It was all stone. We tried not to make it just a little room with nothing going on. We try to give a director and the director of photography things to play with so there's shade and shadow and depth to the set, not just a box."

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Paris Apartment (season 2)

Ed Miller / Starz

"I raised it off the ground. A lot of sets are as close to the ground as possible, but a [raised set] makes it feel like we're not on a stage. There was a lot of detail on that set, probably more moldings than ever before. We printed tapestries on the walls. We found and paid for images online from museums, and duplicated them to create an almost 250-foot-long tapestry that wove its way through the apartment. So whenever you're in the living room or the dining room, every time you looked through one of these openings, you saw one of these tapestries."

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Star Chamber (season 2)

Ed Miller/Starz

"My favorite set of the whole show! They thought I was crazy for wanting to build a dome for a set that [they used sparingly]."

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Boston Apartment (season 3)

Aimee Spinks/Starz

"Another humongous set. That was fun, to do a whole different look for a different period. To research what color scheme to go with, we went online to find car sample colors. The research department found samples on Etsy and eBay and had them shipped in. We hung them up on the wall and just looked at all sorts of car color samples from that period. That's how we started for the colors of the interior for the Boston apartment."

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Print Shop (season 3)

Aimee Spinks/Starz

"We turned the apothecary for Master Raymond [from season 2] into the print shop."

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Indian Village (season 4)

Aimee Spinks/Starz

"We did tons and tons of research. Ron and [executive producer] Matt Roberts both wanted it to be completely historically correct. We tried to make everything, I mean down to every prop, to make it as period-correct as possible. The plaster department cast different trees to [create] skins. Some were resin. We built structures and wrapped these skins that looked like real bark, which is what the Native Americans did."

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River Run Plantation

Aimee Spinks/Starz

"It was a huge set, which was fun. Tons of moldings. We did a lot of research from Southern plantations to try to make it historically accurate." 

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Claire's Surgery (season 5)

Jason Bell/Starz

"We wanted to separate it from the main house. We did a breezeway, which a lot of Southern homes had back then because they separated kitchens from the main house in case the kitchen caught fire.

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The Fraser House (season 5)

Jason Bell/Starz

"We built the whole big house on location and built the interior on stage. The real exterior was out on this farmland."

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