The fourth and final season of HBO’s hit series Succession premieres this coming Sunday, and fans of interior design are certainly not rejoicing its end, although actor Brian Cox (Logan Roy) may be. The show follows the internal power struggles of the fictional Waystar Royco media mogul Logan Roy and his family, and this season will see Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), Shiv (Sarah Snook), or perhaps even Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) or cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) finally come out on top in the line for the company throne. Succession’s jargon-heavy dialogue and fast-paced drama makes it hard to tear away from the cast of characters, but we always got our eye on the scene sets. To play like the 1%, you’ve got to live like them too. These are the best Succession interiors, ranked, from the prior seasons.
When season three premiered and I watched Kendall create a secession war room out of his ex-wife Rava’s (Natalie Gold) New York apartment, I was shocked. Two years prior, when it went up for sale, I toured Pavilion A, a 6,711-square-foot, five-bedroom, four-bath, and two-half bath apartment built on the 29th floor setback of the 1913 Cass Gilbert–designed Woolworth Tower, and apparently it still hadn’t sold yet by the time the Succession camera crew came in. Interiors legend Thierry Despont created this mansion in the sky, and its spiral staircase, copper-clad terraces, and stunning skyline views are instantly recognizable to any architecture aficionado.
The 17th-century Villa Cetinale (originally the home of Cardinal Fabio Chigi, nephew to Pope Alexander VII) in Tuscany sets the stage for the second marriage of the Roy children’s mother, Lady Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walter), in season three. During the event, each potential company heir plans for domination of their father’s company. Although redesigned with a light touch a decade ago by Camilla Guinness, period furnishings, Renaissance artworks, and luxurious fabrics abound. A fight for control in a villa once owned by the family who lent money to the Medici? Count us in—pun intended.
A wedding where your distant British mother tells you that playing second fiddle to her ex-husband’s new wife is going to “take the pressure off” your own ceremony? Now, that scene has got to be set in an iconic venue. Built in the early 1800s to look like it was built more than 1,000 years prior, Eastnor Castle in the English Cotswolds was the perfect fit. In its grand state rooms, decorated with sumptuous damasks, patterned wallpapers, tufted furnishings, and suits of armor, Shiv and Tom have perhaps the most awkward nuptials ever filmed—a passive aggressive dance surrounded by acres of countryside.
Built in 1919 as a country home for financier Otto Hermann Kahn and his family on the North Shore of Long Island, the National Register of Historic Places listed Oheka Castle the second largest private house in the US. However, in Succession season two, it serves as the venue for Waystar Royco’s company hunting retreat, said to be in Hungary, where Logan forces employees to “play” his boar on the floor game. The American castle’s European charm is certainly visible in its French chateau revivalist architecture by Delano & Aldrich and formal parterre gardens by the Olmsted Brothers. Now a hotel and frequent celebrity wedding venue, the mansion was an inspiration in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and it certainly stirred up drama for the Roys in wood-paneled rooms swathed in damasks.
After Logan’s stroke in season one, his company’s annual charity gala is a tense and contentious affair for his children, who nearly take him and the gala down in one night. The grand hall of the 1921 Italian Renaissance–style Cunard Building in New York’s Financial District is where it all plays out. Designed mostly by architect Benjamin Wistar Morris, its fresco-covered vaulted structure looks more like a Roman bathhouse than the train station it once was—and today, it’s a Cipriani event space for wealthy New Yorkers (like the Roys) and their corporations.