Mad Men: Visit Don Draper’s Apartment in 3D
This model of Don Draper’s apartment shows a divided lifestyle, perhaps suggesting that it’s impossible to be good at everything — a bachelor and a father, a husband and a lover — to feed off the dreams of others, and remain sober yourself.
The Set
In the fifth season of Mad Men, it’s June 1966, and Don Draper has moved into his Manhattan love nest with his young wife, Megan.
The set, designed by Claudette Didul and the Mad Men team, is a psychogram of a man who is about to fall apart at the seams.
Everything about the space is designed to be perfect for just this moment. It has a white, carpeted conversation pit for a living room and a modernist kitchen with clashing colours. Masculine elements include a leather armchair and a drum-shaped ice bucket.
The interior design
The design is inspired by the 1965 book Decoration USA, by Jose Wilson and Arthur Leaman, and the bestselling books of Betty Pepis, this is pop design, no high modernist masterpiece. It’s about pretending you’re happy, rather than about civilisation.
In a small indicator of depravity, the living room is over twice the size of the dining room. Who cares about table manners when your wife is half your age?
Perhaps the most retro design decision, one that would never be made today, is screening off the kitchen from the living and dining spaces.
Thanks to the popularity of the island, today’s kitchens are about public performance. This kitchen, which neither Don nor Megan spend much time in, was designed for efficiency. The most social thing about it is the bar which Don Draper, in his spiral into alcoholism, utilizes often.
In the back rooms, increasingly small and private, Draper is surrounded by closed doors. The division is what modernist architects call a “binuclear” plan — one section of the house for social and daytime activities, the other for privacy and rest. For the writers and directors of Mad Men episodes, they’re all equally good arenas for emotional confrontation.
Fittingly, considering his (hidden) past, Don Draper tries to store his past, his life before 1966, in the back of the apartment, where direct sunlight never falls. Unfortunately for the children from his broken first marriage, that includes them. His bedroom, behind more closed doors than any other room, is a small, completely windowless space, the heart of the apartment, yet also a kind of cell, just big enough to lie down in. As Bert Cooper said in Season One: “a man is whatever room he is in, and right now Donald Draper is in this room.”
If you have some time, go ahead and refurnish Don Drapers apartment to your own taste!
