The landmark Angels Flight railway is a pivotal set in Perry Mason

For Goldsmith, designing the various key sets—from a Streamline Moderne–influenced courtroom and luxurious Hancock Park interiors to the dark underbelly of the city—became an exercise in class distinctions. “The houses represented a broad range of contrasts,” says the designer, “and we quickly developed housing typologies to show upper, middle, and working classes.” The sets included locations in a 40-mile radius from Thousand Oaks, San Pedro, and Pasadena to Hancock Park and downtown Los Angeles. “We had 136 locations and 24 stage builds, such as the courtroom, Mason’s farmhouse, the morgue, the jail, the Radiant Assembly Church, and various Hollywood apartments and estates that ranged from Spanish Colonial and Tudor to traditional and Art Deco,” says Goldsmith. The film’s color palette and tone are influenced by Los Angeles artists of the period such as Thomas Hart Benton, Emil Kosa Jr., Millard Sheets, and Maynard Dixon.

Of course, no Perry Mason episode would be complete without a courtroom set. Researching various halls of justice across the world, Goldsmith found inspiration with the architecture of Los Angeles City Hall and with Blenheim Palace in London, a 1930s palatial residence. “Tim and I talked about the advancement of modernity and its progression, and how it was expressed in the courtroom. It shouldn’t feel typically traditional and needed to reflect the modernity that was coming,” he details. Emmy Award–winning set decorator Halina Siwolop (Masters of Sex) created the decor for the courtroom, built on a soundstage. Of particular interest is a hand-painted frieze on the ceiling that provides a contrast against the dark wood benches and wall panels. “It was guided by John’s vision and harkens back to the teens and ’20s, and a moment to represent something more in line with WPA design,” Siwolop says.

The landmark Angels Flight railway, an 118-year-old funicular transporting passengers up to the Bunker Hill neighborhood, is another pivotal set. Goldsmith and his team replaced the ads on the cars with period placards and built the nearby drugstore via special effects. (Coincidentally, the railway was used in a 1966 episode of Perry Mason.)

The set decor proves that beauty is in the details, and character clues are abundant. Attorney E.B. Jonathan’s (John Lithgow) Hancock Park Tudor estate tells the backstory of a man whose wife left him, and whose finances were dwindling. “Since the character came from San Francisco with his wife, I wanted something Tudor as it was familiar, and he would have gone that route. He is down on his luck, running on fumes, and the house had to show that. Downstairs, the rooms are all dressed, but upstairs, it is empty, as if he had to sell off his furniture,” says Goldsmith.

Siwolop shopped on Etsy, eBay, Craigslist, and at the antique markets in Whittier and Pomona, California, for the set’s period pieces, and her favorite set was Sister Alice’s bedroom. That room in the McKeegan Mansion set features a charming canopied bed that was chosen for its angelic quality, denoting the bedroom of a little girl who is still looked after by her overbearing mother. The color red and Spanish-style furniture are the main components of the downstairs decor, as it reminded the set decorator of a church interior.

The show’s design is a lesson in history that pays homage to Los Angeles’s past. As Siwolop concludes, “What I love about L.A. are these architectural gems that you have to scratch the surface and dig to find. It gave me an appreciation for the history of the city that most people don’t know about.”