How Designers Richard Bloom and Linette McCown Showed the Arc of the Iconic Chippendales for ‘Welcome to Chippendales’

When you step into an exciting place like Chippendales, you want to be enveloped in the atmosphere. If it was dingy or lacked taste, you would hesitate to spend much time there. For Hulu’s high-spirted crime drama, Welcome to Chippendales, production designer Richard Bloom and set decorator Linette McCown strived to make every iteration of Chippendales a fantasy destination.

Bloom has been open about how the production truly gave him and McCown carte blanche when it came to designing these spaces. They spent a lot of time researching, but they weren’t solely confined to history. Chippendales spans a large history of time, and the production design is truly ambitious.

“We wanted to celebrate the Chippendales, but it’s also a very dark story,” Bloom says. “It’s also about these two men who have such diametrically opposed ambitions–one is after money and the other is searching for art–and I knew we had limited funds to build the club. We looked at a ton of references, but we wanted to up it. From episode to episode, we would be jumping forward in time, and there would be more color and pizzazz than the club had at the time. Linette would have to, over the weekend, we would change the club over to give it another look, and the dances have their own looks as well. For the calendars, we did these photoshoots, and we wanted to be equally as zany as they were. Those were more literal than we expected. We are telling the story over the course of ten years, and we are also having to change things over really rapidly.”

Some audiences may not realize that Bloom and McCown designed the calendars as well since the photoshoots are produced. One of the shots, for Mr. March, has a life-sized tiger. Where, pray tell, does one find a stuffed tiger, you ask?

“We have some taxidermy houses in town,” McCown says. “Bischoff’s Animals is a big one that everyone uses in LA. There are a few more on the perimeters of the city, and I think the tiger came from Warner Brothers. Everyone got a big kick out of it.”

Bloom offers how working on this show was a complete blast.

“Out offices were above where we would do the club, so when the guys were in there dancing during a changeover,” he says. “We would be in our offices, and it would literally shake from all the women screaming and going nuts. It was one of the most joyous party sets that I’ve been part of. Another challenging thing was that since it was during COVID times, we didn’t have the opportunity to go all over the country. Some of the show takes place in New York and some in India–how do you make Chatsworth, California look like India? It was such a fast-paced show.”

When Murray Bartlett’s Nick De Noia escapes the control of Steve Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani), he opens his own version of Chippendales. It’s more theatrical, over-the-top, and classier than its predecessor, and Bloom knew that De Noia would want to go as far away from Banerjee as possible. After all, New York City is very different than Los Angeles.

“We knew that Nick was going to go more Broadway with more of proscenium stage,” Bloom reveals “When you see the exterior of that club, we were supposed to film in that space, but President Biden came into town and they changed the traffic. We ended up shooting at the same place we were doing the interior which worked out much better since it had the same vibe. We were building to the Hunkenstein dance, and since we shot over two days, we needed a clever way to do the water dance. We also needed to see the stage while Hunkenstein was all set up, so we brought in those curtains and brought the water dance to the center of the section. Knowing that, at that point, they were going on the road after, we would be in a lot of spaces like the Orpheum. We wanted that transition to feel seamless like Nick planned it. He was taking his Broadway version on the road. When you come back to Steve’s sad club and he’s living in this huge mansion, you see where he is putting his money. There’s some more neon at his club, but it’s mostly going towards his Rolexes.”

Even though Banerjee seems to live at his stripping oasis, we do get glimpses of the house he shares with Annaleigh Ashford’s Irene. The bigger Chippendales gets, the bigger his house becomes. Steve and Irene’s home is truly palatial. I couldn’t help but wonder what they would buy first considering they now have an obscene amount of wealth. If I could break into the Banerjee’s home, I would definitely steal that huge portrait of their family.

“Probably their cars?,” McCown asks Bloom.

“Or the portrait,” Bloom offers. “They took that picture out in a parking lot and our graphic designers did some magic, and some painters painted over it.”

“It was going to be bigger, but we scaled it back,” McCown says. “You want it to be comical, but it couldn’t take away from the scenes.”

Chippendales wasn’t always Chippendales. Banerjee tries his hand at multiple clubs before he lands on male exotic dancers. His initial dream is a backgammon club named Destiny II, but he brings in things mud wrestling when he is desperate to draw a crowd. Chippendales continues to build within its walls, and Bloom and McCown had to keep adding to show the club’s progression.

“The original club wasn’t available to us, so we found a real strip club that as over in Culver City that worked well for our needs,” Bloom says. “We already started building before we found the exterior. Since we knew the takeovers were going to go very quickly, we didn’t even have our primary dancers. We have those hunky guys who can’t really dance. It started as a disco, we conceptualized that the quickest thing to do was build the club in it’s second situation. If you re-watch it, you see a lot of wood paneling, and those are wall plugs. We did that paneling everywhere, so on the weekends, Linette’s team could pull those away and add the array of lights and mirror. So it was embedded in there. When episodes three and four happen, we added more neon and added the merchandising station. We had a plan as we started building, but we had to do it in a cost-effective way. We had a COVID situation to shut us down, so even though we were in the third iteration of the club, we had to go all the way back to the beginning with the wood paneling over a weekend.”

“We stripped it down most for the Destiny II version,” McCown says. “The chairs for the ultimate club, the white ones, are similar to what they had in the real club. You always worry there is one item that you worry is going to be red flag, and we had to source about 160 or close to 200 of those molded chairs that we aged. And we mixed in folding chairs. Steve had these events like the games and oyster eating contest before it became Chippendales, so we had to bring in those pizza parlor-like tables. The graphics really helped with the evolution, and it upped the glitz level.”

Welcome to Chippendales is set in a scandalous, sexy world, but the club itself will always be iconic. The show is about offering a fantasy, an escape. Bloom and McCown deliver on making the place itself a success story even when the founders fail on their own promises.

“After Steve goes to New York, he is jealous,” Bloom says about the club’s arc. “That’s when he puts in his own cheesy VIP area, and that was scripted and thought out. Robert Siegel and Jenni Konner are masters of television, so they knew how to make those moments really pop for a viewer. You are watching one after the other, and you want the audience to notice the difference.”

Welcome to Chippendales is streaming now on Hulu.