Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation of Wuthering Heights moves decisively away from traditional windswept naturalism and treats design as emotional voltage, using architecture and surface to heighten every feeling.

Starring Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, with Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper as their younger counterparts, and Martin Clunes, Shazad Latif and Hong Chau as Mr Earnshaw, Edgar Linton and Nelly Dean, the film understands this is a story of extremity and the interiors follow suit.

Wuthering Heights vs Thrushcross Grange

Wuthering Heights, the Earnshaw house on the Yorkshire moors, feels oppressive, weighty and raw. It is elemental, carved out of weather. Low ceilings compress the space. Glossy black tiles on the exterior reflect the elements, amplifying the sense of exposure and severity. Its darkness mirrors the ferocity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s bond. The architecture feels as untamed as their love.

The arched courtyard lined in glossy white tiles acts as a hinge between worlds. It gleams and reflects, signalling a shift to the possibilities beyond. Its tunnel-like curvature carries an unmistakable sensual charge. It turns a physical passage into an emotional one.

Once Catherine marries Edgar Linton, Thrushcross Grange offers the polished opposite. Refined and heightened, yet strangely caged.

The more Catherine inhabits it, the more the interior decoration seems to dominate. Sparkling blue walls feel exaggerated, almost garish. Surfaces gleam as though emotion has been lacquered over in favour of presentation.

That contrast is not subtle, and that’s precisely the point. With production design by Suzie Davies and set decoration by Charlotte Dirickx, the design team also behind Saltburn, this interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel is not interested in restraint. Everything is dialled up.

The silver dining room at Thrushcross Grange shimmers with brittle sophistication. Silver walls. Silver chairs. Silver sheen. A space polished to the point of fragility.

Here sits one of the film’s most delicious details, the doll’s house. A meticulous replica of the main house. Open it and inside rests another doll’s house. A world within a world. A story folded in on itself. It is playful, but faintly claustrophobic.

Catherine’s pink bedroom, padded and faintly freckled and veined, echoes her own skin. Design becomes anatomy. The walls feel intimate yet exposed. In the red-floored library, whose colourways faintly recall Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the surreal white fireplace composed of hundreds of plaster-cast hands feels grasping and desperate.

Throughout, dramatic foreshortening and exaggerated scale distort perspective, heightening the emotional stakes. Rooms feel slightly unreal — as though we are inside Catherine’s psyche rather than a Yorkshire estate.