The number 13 carries a spooky, unlucky connotation. It’s only fitting, then, that American Horror Story: 13 attempt its creepiest season to date, with help from an all-star lineup of returning cast members and some new evil faces as well. This installment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series (airing Thursday nights at 9pm on FX and streaming on Hulu) functions as a convergence of previous seasons, with most of the action unfolding in a terrifyingly eerie New York City penthouse that doubles as the devil’s lair.
Unfortunately, 13 will not revisit all the alluringly creepy places of AHS past—there’s no Tudor Revival murder house or Art Deco hotel—but one fan-favorite location has thankfully been resurrected: Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, the heart of AHS: Coven (season three). The home of the witches led by Supreme Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson) contrasts the devil’s penthouse with its reappearance, according to production designer Anu Schwartz, its opalescent interiors embodying the bright magic of the matriarchal coven. “Placing these two worlds side by side gives installment 13 an instant visual language for the battle between good and evil,” he says.
Jessica Lange reprises her role as Constance Langdon in AHS 13—and many other fan-favorite characters are back as well.
“The guiding design principle was to imagine Satan’s home after nearly a century living among us in human form: refined, wealthy and curated with the finest things the world can offer,” Schwartz tells AD of designing the penthouse in AHS: 13. “Every object and design choice was intended to evoke temptation and seduction, manifesting the devil’s intent.
When the all-girls boarding school for young witches first appeared on the show, the historic Buckner Mansion in New Orleans was used for exterior shots, underscoring Coven’s spooky Southern Gothic aesthetic. Several scenes were shot on location at the home in New Orleans’ Garden District, and ultimately, the show’s fanfare helped the 1856-built Greek Revival estate go from historic walking tour mainstay to viral tourist attraction. Today, AHS loyalists still visit the location to peek at the sprawling manse, which was a private residence when Coven was filmed and remains one today. (Visitors are directed to view the home from the sidewalk.)
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Buckner Mansion in New Orleans, Louisiana served as the exterior of Miss Robichaux’s Academy in Coven, and became a fan favorite location.
The AHS: 13 production team undertook a colossal design challenge to rebuild the revered Miss Robichaux’s. “It got me excited about creating the sets for this world, especially when I found out [we were] gonna reach back into the other storylines and converge them, but at the same time, make our own set,” Schwartz says. “I really wanted to honor it.”
All of Miss Robichaux’s interiors from Coven were shot on a stage set in New Orleans. But in the 13 years since Coven aired, much had been lost to time. The paint swatches. The plans. The profiles and proportions. The sets themselves had been long torn down.
The team unearthed a piano “very, very similar” to the one in Coven—complete with legs that had the same profile—but the antique instrument presented other obstacles. “The morning that we had a scene in there, Emma Roberts started to play it and it didn’t work. We had to quickly figure it out. We brought a specialist to come and fix it, and then, for the rest of the season, it worked properly.”
“Nothing was saved from the original set,” Schwartz says. “We were able to track down the original vendor who made the fireplaces and ceiling medallions, but everything was recreated for installment 13.”
Schwartz reached out to Mark Worthington, the production designer on Coven, who shared what he could piece together. “He sent me a packet of photos, and I poured over everything,” Schwartz recalls. “I froze my screen, I zoomed in, and I looked. I really tried to get all the details.”
Schwartz eventually secured a copy of the original Coven plans from a Disney production archive. The discovery helped his team successfully identify the company that produced the fireplaces and the ceiling medallions for the chandeliers so they could be exactly recreated.
Secondhand platforms helped the team pinpoint suitable dupes for décor and furniture. The piano, for instance, is not the same one that Stevie Nicks played in Coven. It was a Facebook marketplace find, sourced locally in New York City. According to Schwartz, the seller was helping a 91-year-old man part with a piano he’d cherished for decades, and he was “thrilled to know it would have a new life in the show.”
Schwartz sought the exact shade used for the academy’s whitewashed walls in Coven, but after 13 years, the paint chip was long gone. He embarked on a camera test, a color analysis, and plenty of investigating. A warm white and a slightly cooler, gray-tone white were selected for the walls and trim, respectively. “I discovered the trim was different than the walls and worked with the DP and decorator to get the correct lighting. I think we got the right color.”
“We didn’t find the exact things, but we treated everything the same as far as getting it as close as possible,” he says. “Scale, profile, silhouette, and shape were sort of more important than some other aspects.”
From start to finish, they had approximately six weeks to rebuild Miss Robichaux’s at Broadway Stages in Brooklyn. “Which is a bonkers timeline,” he says. The rapid production schedule paid off when the cast members saw the familiar-yet-foreign set for the first time in more than a decade. He remembers how they soaked in the space, awestruck, because they “just couldn’t believe it.”
A closer look at the set’s instantly recognizable staircase would reveal that the 13th spindle is turned upside down: “That was our little homage to season 13,” says Schwartz.
