How Designer Stephen Carter Builds Worlds for Shows Like ‘Succession’

Stephen Carter has made a name for himself in Hollywood by defining the look of wealth in 21st-century America with his production designs for such iconic fare as Succession. Yet away from work, he lives in the same Brooklyn home he bought in 1992—a space that feels downright homey compared to the glass penthouses, hushed duplexes, and sprawling ski retreats he serves up as entertainment. “It’s not a world I came from at all,” he admits, “but I like it more than I thought I would. It can be addictive.”

That mix of humble beginnings and a near-clinical understanding of how affluence operates helps explain why Carter has become one of Hollywood’s foremost interpreters of what’s now known as stealth wealth. A four-time Emmy nominee (three for Succession, one as art director for Sex and the City), the production designer has shaped a new visual language for luxury—cooler, quieter, and stripped of obvious showiness. Instead of the oil-baron excess of Dallas or the leather-and-chrome bravado of contemporary money dramas like Billions, Carter favors seductively austere minimalism and high-ticket abstract art.

Raised in Georgia, where his mother was a painter and his father a political-science professor, Carter moved to New York to study acting and directing at N.Y.U.’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School. His trajectory shifted sophomore year after he helped friends with set design for their black-box productions and fell in love with the craft.

Postgraduation, Carter cycled through what he calls “all the stations of the cross” in an art department—model-making, drafting, assistant art directing—before landing full design gigs. Amid the drafting tables and miniature models, Carter not only honed his technical skills but also absorbed how seasoned designers build worlds from scratch.

“Watching these talented people is how I became infatuated with the idea of working as a designer,” he recalls. He assumed theater would be his path, but in the early 2000s he pivoted to film, drawn to its broader scope and quicker pace. “I’ve got a notoriously short attention span,” he admits. “So, [projects] where you have to build a fancy Upper East Side apartment in six or eight weeks, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s about the right tempo for me.’ ”

He eventually worked as art director on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, the 2015 Academy Award winner for best picture, before stepping into the role of lead production designer for Spotlight, the Oscar-winning newsroom drama. Next came Succession, the critically acclaimed HBO juggernaut that would cement his career and reputation as a creator of luxury worlds. The key to his success, in the view of production designer Kevin Thompson, for whom Carter worked on several projects earlier in his career, is not that he has a signature style but rather that “intellectually and conceptually, he designs with the art direction being supportive of the narrative and not driving the narrative. It’s in the background, but it supports.”

Carter’s process begins with detailed scene-by-scene rundowns cataloging locations, times of day, characters, props, graphics, and special effects. That granular attention helps him understand how each set functions across the story arc—and equips him to collaborate with writers, directors, and producers. But there’s also instinct. He always asks, “Would I be excited to act on this set?” If yes, he knows it’s working.

Unlike a feature film—where the script is locked in and the tone defined before design—Succession’s narrative development remained a mystery. Thompson, who designed the pilot, crafted the apartment of mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox) entirely on location, stitching together several real-life spaces around Manhattan. When the series was ordered, Thompson, who normally focuses on films, stepped aside and Carter took over, re-creating his predecessor’s design on a soundstage but elaborating on it with additional rooms that felt refined yet emotionally detached. As the series progressed, Carter went on to construct a highly believable world of Roy, with a sequence of meticulously outfitted penthouses, lofts, vacation homes, and castles, as well as private jets, yachts, a corporate boardroom, and a TV newsroom. Carter’s research for a billionaire aesthetic included combing through design magazines and coffee-table books, noting blanched color palettes and editorial spreads that both reflect and shape real-world luxury. Rather than fixating on opulent ballrooms and such, he captured how the ultra-wealthy actually live behind the scenes, in ways that feel authentic rather than performative.

The sets also had to be emblematic of the interior worlds of the characters—people so secure in their positions that their statuses didn’t rely on logos or overt luxury cues. Yet the homes weren’t exactly personal. As Carter explains, “We were saying something about these characters: None of them are such interesting people that they have a strong point of view about the art in their house. It’s all staged by people who are afraid they’re going to lose their jobs at any given moment. High-end, expensive, but also lacking a real connection emotionally to the family.”

Carter may not move in the circles he depicts, but he is a stickler for nuance—even if unnoticed by most viewers. On Succession, that obsession with correctness extended to the smallest details, down to the fonts in fictional news articles and TV graphics. “We’d bring in people like [executive producer and journalist] Frank Rich to look at chyrons or mock printouts and ask, ‘Does this feel accurate for the Times versus the Journal?’ ” he says. That mindset carried through even in grotesquely funny moments—like the infamous ortolan dinner in season one. Because the bird is illegal to hunt and serve in the U.S., Carter sculpted replicas using food-grade dyes, coffee stirrers, and marzipan. And occasionally, authenticity came from the actors themselves: Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy, requested his personal espresso machine be used.

Still, realism was never the end goal. “More importantly, it has to feel right for the story, for the characters, and for the show,” Carter explains. He brought that same blend of credibility and metaphor to his subsequent collaboration with Succession creator Jesse Armstrong: Mountainhead, an Emmy-nominated satirical thriller starring Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith about tech moguls facing an A.I. crisis at a remote Utah compound. For the project, code-named Espresso, Armstrong’s guiding principle was clear: fast, dark, and bitter. With no finished script, Carter began not with detail, but with mood.

He started scouting homes in Telluride. Then a rental company pointed him to a seven-story chalet built into the side of a mountain in Deer Valley, with five of the floors underground. A Robb Report article about the $65 million listing confirmed its desirability.

When he toured the house in person, it immediately felt like promising territory. The intrusion of this modern structure into untouched wilderness created the “sense of violation” Armstrong wanted while capturing the “tech bro-y and a little douchey” vibe Carter was aiming for—“in the right way.” The house was so distinctive that Armstrong adapted his script to fit it, weaving in elements like its bowling alley to shape both the narrative and the characters’ world.

Inside the Deer Valley dwelling, Carter staged subtle status symbols, like a faux version of Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Bleeding Wound Over the Materialism of Money Painting in the entryway. His team started with high-resolution digital files of the original, then printed and hand-painted the surface to replicate the texture and light play. They even made a fake credit card and stuck it on the canvas à la Hirst.

Striking the right balance between authentic detail and deliberate illusion defines Carter’s work. In A24’s Babygirl, he applied the same concepts to a sleek Manhattan penthouse at 200 Amsterdam Avenue—a space that might look familiar to eagle-eyed Succession fans as one of the apartments inhabited by Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin). Carter valued the unit’s “crystalline sharpness,” which mirrored the high-powered C.E.O. played by Nicole Kidman.

But locations are only the beginning—and rarely arrive camera-ready. The Montecito, Calif., estate that would serve as media matriarch Nan Pierce’s home in Succession was mid-renovation when Carter inspected it. Paul Eskenazi, the location manager, worried about the construction chaos but recalls Carter’s surveying the unfinished rooms and immediately recognizing their potential. “Steve was able to see through the mess,” Eskenazi says. “I didn’t see how it could work, but he did, and he was right.” 

Though his meticulous style might seem tailor-made for prestige dramas centered on the exceedingly affluent, storytelling remains his true focus. “I don’t feel in any way pigeonholed,” Carter explains, noting that he has an upcoming 1980s period project that will be a complete departure. “One of the nice things about what I do is that every project is a new world to get into. If I can learn the world of luxury, I can learn science fiction or 17th-century Italy.”

And though he may know more about copper turbotières than many real-life owners at this point, Carter insists, “I’m just as likely to be out at a punk-rock show as I am chatting at an auction house.” He smiles, then adds with a laugh, “Probably more likely to be at a punk-rock show.”