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We hate to break it to you, but Stars Hollow, Connecticut, is not a real place. Yet the endearing small town depicted in Gilmore Girls was so flush with quaint details—falling leaves, quirky gatherings, and sweet little nooks such as Taylor’s Olde Fashioned Soda Shoppe, Stars Hollow Books, and Weston’s Bakery —that it’s easy to imagine Lorelai and Rory Gilmore gabbing over coffee at the retro-style Luke’s Diner at this very moment.
“The show was never about something being slick and glossy and trendy,” Lauren Crasco, the show’s production designer for 42 episodes, tells AD. “We were always very nostalgic and aimed for an existing vintage feel. The few times we had to do something contemporary, it was a little jarring.”
That enveloping sense of coziness is one reason why Gilmore Girls continues to feel like a communal dreamscape, with scores of fans making it as much of an autumn tradition as Halloween costumes and pumpkin spice lattes. Even Crasco was sucked through the screen when binging early episodes in preparation to start her job on the production in 2001: “I thought I lived in Stars Hollow!”
In honor of the ever-popular dramedy’s 25th anniversary, AD caught up with the production designer to go behind the scenes of our favorite small town.
Gilmore Girls operated on a tight budget—with a few exceptions
During their onstage reunion at the recent Emmy awards, stars Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel joked that the show had a small budget compared to its higher-profile neighbors like The Drew Carey Show and ER on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California. “We saved up all year long to have one snow episode,” quipped Bledel.
“It definitely was the smallest art department I’ve ever had,” Crasco says, noting that the shooting schedule—a whopping 10 pages of that rapid-fire dialogue was filmed each day—made the job extra challenging.
Still, when creator and executive producer Amy Sherman-Palladino “really cared” about certain details, the money was stretched. When Crasco submitted a budget request to create the elaborate gates of Harvard University for the season two episode “The Road Trip to Harvard,” the producers saw the need to splurge. “We spent tens of thousands of dollars on that set,” she says.
Lorelai and Sookie had the same house, sort of
Stay with us here: The exterior of Lorelai and Rory’s colonial-style home, complete with its furnished front porch, was filmed on the Warner Bros. backlot. This same structure served as the interior kitchen in the home of chef Sookie (Melissa McCarthy) and her husband, Jackson (Jackson Douglas). “We had these shelves that had to go in and out of the window every time we changed over,” Crasco says. To add to the confusion, the interior of the Gilmore house was constructed on a soundstage on the WB studio lot, also with a full porch attached to it.
“You can be inside Lorelai’s house and take her to the front door. And then you pop outside and two days later, she walks out in the same wardrobe. And now you’re shooting on the back lot. The audience has no idea that there’s been a passage of time,” Crasco says.
Rory’s college was actually USC
Ahead of season four, Crasco did some pre-Pinterest, pre-Instagram studying to plan out Rory’s freshman year at Yale University. “We had a photographer at Yale take pictures for us based on the categories that I sent him,” she says. “We got detailed photographs of the various colleges, dining rooms, classrooms, and hallways.” For the design of Rory’s shabby-chic dorm suite, Crasco reflected on her own overnight stay on the New Haven, Connecticut, campus back in high school. “I remember the sense of community,” she says.
Rory’s university experience also offered the cast and crew the opportunity to venture outside the Warner Bros. lot. “It was a practical decision because we couldn’t just build a big assembly hall or auditorium,” Crasco says. The character’s initial visit to the campus was filmed on location at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Later scenes—including her graduation in the seventh and final season—were filmed at the University of Southern California in LA.
The Dragonfly Inn required an aesthetic shakeup
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The Independence Inn—where Lorelai worked as a maid during the first three seasons—had a formal vibe with a dark color palette and mahogany wood throughout the lobby area (including that fireplace). When she and Sookie decided to go into business together running The Dragonfly Inn, a change was in order. “Amy wanted to make it a more intimate space because this was more personal for Lorelai,” Crasco says, adding that the lobby is much smaller and the kitchen featured whimsical color patterns and decor.
Crasco pulled from literary references and coffee-table books like Classic Country Inns that she found at a vintage bookstore in Santa Monica. Special attention was paid to the dining room, where Crasco opted for painted floral wallpaper similar to an inn in Maine, and the production team filled it with specially created artwork and shadowboxes as well as a collection of antique spoons. The production designer also used her own old family photos to ensure there wouldn’t be any snags in copyright clearance and licensing.
Stars Hollow appears in more shows than just Gilmore Girls
Your favorite comfortable Connecticut town has a deep Hollywood history, with films ranging from The Music Man to The Lost Boys all relying on those same winding streets and grassy knolls. The Stars Hollow set also doubled for Rosewood, Pennsylvania, in Pretty Little Liars. If you ever rewatch that YA thriller, keep your eyes peeled for the same gazebo and church from Gilmore Girls, and even Miss Patty’s dance studio and Luke’s Diner, which became the Apple Rose Grille in PLL.
Even within the world of Gilmore, Stars Hollow evolved over the years. “We turned [the town square] into a much more formal New England gathering space,” Crasco says. Drawing on her own experience growing up in Boston, she inserted various monuments, columns, and bronze plaques to make the town appear more historically and geographically authentic. She even tried to add a custom sculpture of an American Revolution Minuteman—“I did a lot of drawings.” Alas, the budget didn’t allow for it.
