This location in Encino, California, was the one we all agreed upon. Despite the mansion’s beauty and giant balcony, we would have to completely redesign the bedroom to transform it from a European-inspired modern space to a bedroom fit for a Middle Eastern Sultan nearly 1,000 years ago.

Once every department agreed on the location, we got straight to planning. We measured every corner of the bedroom to account for the amount of wallpaper that would be needed. Then, alongside my Art Director, we agreed upon color schemes, the measurements of the Great Hall that we would build from scratch on a soundstage, and the construction of the lattices.

What colors were used? How big and open were the spaces? How many people would exist in these spaces? What did a throne look like back then? These were among the hundreds of questions that went into the planning process.

From the beginning, we knew that a large part of the budget would go to clothing. We did extensive research to figure out how clothes were warn and what colors symbolized what during the time period, and eventually were able to source the clothing through friends and family.

It was time to build! We had simply twelve hours to transform the bedroom. The week leading up to filming, we hand-painted all of the wallpapers depicted.

Building the lattices was no easy feat — it took us 48 hours straight to cut over 1,000 stars.

Finding the pieces we would eventually use took months of research and countless prop runs. Fun fact - Razia’s throne is the same seat used in the Russo Family Lair from Wizards of Waverly Place!

You can only account for so much. Originally, each of the noblemen were to sit on hand-made cushions, but the director decided against it at the last minute. We simply decided to just use gold sheets instead, and it ended up looking significantly better. We also wanted to use haze, but we hated the idea after we tested it. Additionally, after building the tent, we realized that it felt suffocating. To solve this problem, we painted a bunch of flats green and placed them just off the perimeter of the tent to give the sense that this room was a small courtyard in a larger space. Ultimately, every thing that went wrong only made the final result better thanks to quick thinking and a team of people I could trust.