• Features
    • All
    • F&F Features
    • Guest Features
    • Events/Exhibitions
    • Resources
  • Marketplace
    • Furniture & Homeware
    • Films & TV
    • Books & Mags
    • Recommended Retailers
    • The Shining request form
  • Films+TV
  • About
  • News+Members
    • News+Members
    • Sign In
  • PODCAST
  • Contact
Follow
Facebook logoFacebookTwitter logoTwitterInstagram logoInstagramPinterest logoPinterestRSS logoRSS

Nancy Nye

Films / TV

How Do You Know

How Do You Know

Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero

  • Features
    • All
    • F&F Features
    • Guest Features
    • Events/Exhibitions
    • Resources
  • Marketplace
    • Furniture & Homeware
    • Films & TV
    • Books & Mags
    • Recommended Retailers
    • The Shining request form
  • Films+TV
  • About
  • News+Members
    • News+Members
    • Sign In
  • PODCAST
  • Contact
Facebook logoFacebookTwitter logoTwitterInstagram logoInstagramPinterest logoPinterestRSS logoRSS
From Instagram
Pedro Almodóvar is back, and so are the interiors Pedro Almodóvar is back, and so are the interiors we love to linger over.

Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), now in UK cinemas, moves between two interconnected stories about filmmaking, grief, friendship and the blurred boundary between lived experience and fiction. Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Raúl, a writer-director struggling to write, while Bárbara Lennie’s Elsa becomes part of the story he is constructing.

Raúl’s Madrid home is filmed in the 1962 house and studio designed by Spanish modernist architect Francisco de Asís Cabrero. Warm timber, red structural details, huge areas of glass and an almost absurdly good collection of furniture, books, lighting and art.

The bright red open shelving seen behind Raúl’s desk is packed with books on cinema, photography, art and culture. Beyond it, glass opens the room to the landscape outside. It makes an unusually convincing filmmaker’s workspace: cultured and carefully composed, but still cluttered enough with drawings, pens, papers and objects to feel occupied.

There’s plenty for design spotters, including Carlo Scarpa’s Cornaro sofa, Gio Ponti’s Superleggera seating, Alvar Aalto’s Angel Wing floor lamp and lighting by Antoni Arola, alongside pieces by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand and Jaime Hayon.

Patricia’s apartment is where Almodóvar turns the colour dial right up. Green, red, orange, pink and mint jostle happily together, including the wonderfully voluptuous green Bubble sofa by Sacha Lakic for Roche Bobois. Elsa and Patricia sit on it listening to Chavela Vargas sing Amarga Navidad, the song from which the film takes its title.

Raúl is surrounded by timber, books and serious modernist design, Patricia in a softer, brighter world of curved upholstery and confectionery colour. Both feel unmistakably Almodóvar, yet very specifically inhabited by their characters.

🔎 Find the furniture, lighting and décor you spot on screen at Film and Furniture. 🔗 Link in bio.

Images: © El Deseo / Iglesias Más
What will you see for National Cinema Weekend? 🎬🍿 What will you see for National Cinema Weekend? 🎬🍿

On Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 September, more than 500 cinemas across the UK are taking part in National Cinema Weekend, with tickets at £4 at participating cinemas.

Which gives us an excellent excuse to spend rather more time than usual in the dark.

Will it be one of the big new releases?

🕷 Spider-Man: Brand New Day

⚔️ Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

🤠 Toy Story 5

🌙 One Night Only

🏠 The Invite, which gets our vote for some particularly good interiors to inspect while the dinner party steadily unravels.

Or perhaps something a little more off-piste?

🎄 Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas

🎹 Tuner

🏚 Savage House

🔪 Tony

🏕 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

And there are some very tempting returns to the big screen too:

🖖 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

👗 Mannequin

🚕 Taxi Driver

🚽 Trainspotting

🚗 The Fast and the Furious, back for its 25th anniversary

🤖 The Terminator and  Terminator 2: Judgment Day celebrating its 35th anniversary

And, for younger filmgoers, there’s even Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out.

Plus La La Land, which frankly sounds like a very good excuse to see those saturated colours, Los Angeles locations and musical set-pieces on a cinema screen again.

Programmes vary across the country, so check what your local participating cinema is showing.

What are you going to see, and who are you taking?

🎬 National Cinema Weekend
📅 5–6 September 2026
🎟 £4 tickets at participating cinemas

@cinemaweekender #filmandfurniture
Sunday Sofas: Sofas in Film and TV No.8, The Retro Sunday Sofas: Sofas in Film and TV No.8, The Retro Edition 📺

How do filmmakers furnish the recent past? Very often with patterned upholstery, warm woods, cocktail-hour colours and sofas that look wonderfully lived-in.

For this edition we’re heading into the 1950s, 60s and 70s, or cinema and television’s version of them. From The Apartment to the stylised nostalgia of Asteroid City, the suburban polish of Far from Heaven and the moody Americana of Blue Velvet, these sofas help build entire worlds.

Mad Men, A Complete Unknown and Elvis use seating to evoke taste and era, while My Best Friend’s Wedding, Maid and Elephant remind us that retro can also feel faded, awkward or gloriously ordinary. Father Mother Sister Brother, Stranger Things and even The Incredibles show how persuasive older design languages remain, whether cosy, uncanny or gently comic.

A sofa in film has to work hard.

🔎 Find furniture and décor from film and TV at filmandfurniture.com
🔗 Link in bio.

Stay tuned for more Sunday Sofas...

Stranger Things (2016)
Created by: Matt and Ross Duffer | PD: Chris Trujillo

Mad Men (2007)
Created by: Matthew Weiner | PD: Dan Bishop | SD: Claudette Didul

A Complete Unknown (2024)
D: James Mangold | PD: François Audouy @audouy | SD: Regina Graves @reginamgee 

My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
D: P. J. Hogan | PD: J. Dennis Washington | SD: Merideth Boswell

Elvis (2022)
D: Baz Luhrmann | PD: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy | SD: Beverley Dunn 

Maid (2021)
Created by: Molly Smith Metzler | PD: John Paino

Father Mother Sister Brother
D: Jim Jarmusch

Far from Heaven (2002)
D: Todd Haynes | PD: Mark Friedberg | SD: Denise Pizzini

Elephant (2003)
D: Gus Van Sant | PD: John Pearson

Blue Velvet (1986)
D: David Lynch | PD: Patricia Norris

The Incredibles (2004)
D: Brad Bird | PD: Lou Romano

Asteroid City (2023)
D: Wes Anderson | PD: Adam Stockhausen | SD: Katie Spencer @katie_wallis_spencer 

The Apartment (1960)
D: Billy Wilder | PD: Alexandre Trauner | SD: Edward G. Boyle
Bathrooms in Film No. 4: Readers’ Choice You had Bathrooms in Film No. 4: Readers’ Choice

You had thoughts. Lots of them.

After the first two instalments of Bathrooms in Film, you told us exactly which bathrooms we’d missed. So No. 4 belongs to you.

The pick for first place was clear as bathwater: Scarface. Tony Montana’s vast sunken bathtub sits amid cream carpet, marble columns, gold detailing and a chandelier, facing the television, naturally. Subtlety was never really Tony’s thing.

Also nominated were Performance, Quadrophenia, American Pie, The Women, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible and The Aviator, with thanks to @tiffanycsteinke, @stephen_pochin, @smilewrangler, jepney_queen, @randibergman, @m.r.cochrane and everyone else who joined in.

And The Aviator gives us a particularly good bit of interiors spotting: its bathroom features Martinique, the famous green banana-leaf wallpaper created in 1942 by Remy and Lucile Chatain with illustrator Albert Stockdale. The pattern was later used by designer Don Loper at the Beverly Hills Hotel and has been turning up on screen ever since.
🛍️ Details on where to buy this for your own home in our Marketplace.

And yes, The Shining and Saltburn were among your demands too. We heard you. They’ve made it into the series (see previous posts)

What have we STILL missed?

🚿 Explore the furniture, décor and design we spot on screen, including the Martinique wallpaper, at filmandfurniture.com.
🍺 The square Mexican beer glass that sent Film and 🍺 The square Mexican beer glass that sent Film and Furniture on another mission.

A Film and Furniture reader asked us to identify the extraordinary thick, square glasses they’d spotted in Rick Stein’s Road to Mexico.

So we went looking.

We discovered they’re called Copa Chabela Cuadrada, traditional Mexican glasses used for beer and, rather brilliantly, designed to be drunk from the corner.

Their ultra-thick glass helps keep your drink colder for longer, and you can even put them in the freezer first to chill the glass before pouring.

Finding out what they were proved easier than finding somewhere we could actually buy them.

Eventually we tracked down a small supplier in Mexico willing to send them to the UK, and started importing them ourselves.

Each holds a generous 600ml and they work beautifully for beer, but also for ceviche, seafood cocktails, starters and desserts.

They’re available individually, in pairs or sets of four from Film and Furniture.

🔗 Head to the link in bio to buy.
Sunday Sofas: Sofas in Film and TV No.7 - The Futu Sunday Sofas: Sofas in Film and TV No.7 - The Future Edition 🚀

How do filmmakers furnish the future? Quite often, with a fantastic sofa.

Science fiction has long used furniture to tell us what tomorrow might look and feel like. Sleek or strange, optimistic or dystopian, a sofa can reveal plenty about the world we’ve entered, and about the era in which that future was imagined.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, Stanley Kubrick filled Space Station 5 with Olivier Mourgue’s sculptural Djinn chairs and 2-seat sofas, designed just three years earlier. Their low, fluid forms and vivid colour became inseparable from Kubrick’s vision of the 21st century.

In The Hunger Games, the Capitol’s huge serpentine de Sede DS-600, first launched in the 1970s, becomes part of a future built on decadence and excess.

Then there’s the joyless seating of Blade Runner 2049; the polished space-liner luxury of Passengers; the immaculate white-and-blue minimalism of Oblivion; and the retro-futurism of Incredibles 2, with its conversation pits and built-in seating.

More recently, The Fantastic Four: First Steps plays with the same idea, creating a 1960s-inspired future filled with curves, colour and sweeping sofas.

And if Kubrick’s future is the one for you, Film and Furniture sells professionally restored Djinn chairs and 2-seat sofas, increasingly collectible pieces of screen design.

🔎 Find the Djinn collection and more furniture from film and TV at filmandfurniture.com
🔗 Link in bio.

Stay tuned for more Sunday Sofas...

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
D: Stanley Kubrick | PD/AD: Tony Masters, Harry Lange, Ernest Archer

The Hunger Games (2012)
D: Gary Ross | PD: Philip Messina | SD: Larry Dias

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
D: Denis Villeneuve | PD: Dennis Gassner | SD: Alessandra Querzola

Passengers (2016)
D: Morten Tyldum | PD: Guy Hendrix Dyas | SD: Gene Serdena

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
D: Matt Shakman | PD: Kasra Farahani | SD: Jille Azis

Incredibles 2 (2018)
D: Brad Bird | PD: Ralph Eggleston

Oblivion (2013)
D: Joseph Kosinski | PD: Darren Gilford
Join In

Disclosure: We may receive a small % commission if you click a link and purchase a product or service via this website.
We tell you this in the spirit of openness and please rest assured that all our recommendations are vetted and genuine.

ALL WRITTEN CONTENT © FILM AND FURNITURE.
All rights reserved. Content cannot be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed or published without consent.
All original images: copyrighted to the original image maker and/or film company and are published under Fair Dealing.

Film and Furniture logos © Film and Furniture

Terms & Conditions Returns & Refunds Privacy Policy & Cookies Sign In
ADVERTISING & PARTNERSHIPS GUEST POSTS
Site design: Form®
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. Learn more. View our privacy policy. Got it