Set Designers' Days - Free-wheeling

As a designer you like to think that you have a set worked out in every detail before it is even built, but, in fact, you can still tweak (and more than tweak) right up to the last second.

It's part of the design process that, as you learn more, you revise what you previously decided upon.

I was recently on another set designer's stage where a lucky dumpster find of handsomely upholstered curtain pelmets threw every other decision into question.  (Pelmets are hard to describe: kinda like curtain "hats"? Box-like-things-at-the-top-of-the-window?  That's an awkward phrase.)  This found curtain thing was so cool it just demanded to be used!

Public domain image, messed with

I too have been known to rework a design to use an unexpected fun-thing.  Or - on the dark side - to change all a set's colors to suit a wrong-sofa.  Just as I once did to for a great sofa on this same stage.  (Sofas!)

Today's Lesson: "More of any design is improv than the audience knoweth."