Crime Scenes, Casinos, and the Corleone House: Mapping Out The Ever-Expanding Universe Of 'Only Murders in the Building'

“Only Murders in the Building,” Hulu and Disney+’s long-running murder mystery-comedy series, always finds a way to keep the intrigue. In season four, that looked like a sojourn to Los Angeles, where the motley crew of reluctant detectives—Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez)—found themselves being fictionalized in a movie based on their podcast. As paparazzi photos have revealed, the forthcoming sixth season will see the crime-solving trio take a trip across the pond to England, and in the fourth season, they traveled across a body of water—New York’s tidal basin—to Staten Island to investigate a murder not in the iconic Upper West Side Arconia building where they reside, but in the stately home best known for “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II.” Only Murders in the Building? Try only murders in The Godfather house!

Chatting to The Set Set from his temporary studio in London, where the show’s new season is in the final stages of production, production designer Patrick Howe—nominated for a Creative Arts Emmy Award for the fourth time for his work on the series—says he relished getting to step inside Hollywood history for the episode. Where “OMITB” has a leg up on “The Godfather” is in being able to actually film inside of the property that is actually a private home. Its airy and bright interior, favored by the real-life owners, betrays the dwelling’s dark cinematic legacy, so Howe and his team painted, redressed, and redecorated the home to create “a darker, moodier atmosphere inside” for the Caccimelio mafia family helmed by Bobby Cannavale and Téa Leoni. “We were able to make some heavy brocaded draped and dark, patterned wallpaper to take what is, in real life, a light, bright, cheery space and make it ominous,” Howe says. “The idea was to be able to create a plausible threat to the trio that was approaching the house and not knowing what they were getting into. They needed to be scared and uncomfortable with what they were going to encounter.”

“The Godfather” house was just a decoy, however, in order to misdirect Charles, Oliver and Mabel (as well as the audience) from the real scene of the crime and the season’s pièce de résistance: the Arconia’s underground casino. “It was something that the characters were unaware of, and the audience had never seen before,” Howe says, divulging that he always has a little chuckle to himself when presented with new layers of the Arconia each season by co-creator and showrunner John Hoffman. “In episode one, there’s a really great reveal of the space. Those are my favourite moments to create—if you can get a little gasp out of the audience.”

A former stables converted to a casino room, Howe drew inspiration from other classic New York buildings of the era, such as Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library, which employ the same vaulted masonry. “I went about designing the largest vaulted space that could fit in those [sound] stages to support a lot of storyline and a lot of material,” he explains. “It was going to have lots of gambling and lots of flashbacks to different eras,” he says, so he wanted to make it festive and visually interesting to look at in addition to being structurally sound and period-correct.

Has Howe ever backed himself into a corner in his Arconia designs when a formerly unknown aspect or amenity of the building is unveiled, such as the casino or the west wing in season four? “So far it’s worked out!” he laughs. “Maybe in the 20th season it might be a problem, but all the way through the five seasons, it’s just kind of worked out when there’s another new space. There’s no end to the size of the basement. Who’s to say that there’s not more than one level underground?” 

We’ll be watching out to see how Howe extends the footprint of the Arconia in season six—that is, if the gang spends much time there. It appears that the majority of the upcoming season is set in London, which began production in the city in mid-May and, as of mid-August, was still ongoing. Asked whether this indicates a prolonged British storyline, Howe is predictably tight-lipped, but was able to tell The Set Set that we pick up with the podcasters renting a flat in an old manor house converted into apartments. Their misfit group of neighbors, played by the likes of David Tennant, Nicola Coughlan, Jodie Whittaker, Geri Halliwell-Horner, and the recently announced Olivia Colman, aren’t unlike those in the Arconia in eccentricity. 

The new season will include a courtroom scene, which Howe built from scratch as, he tells us, in the UK it’s extremely hard to get permission to film in the Crown courts. It was a fine balance of “travel postcard moments” and sets that served the storyline. “There’s a lot of glamorous locations, so we did as much as we could with the time we had to be able to flaunt some classic landmark locations in the city and pay tribute to those,” he says. 

Ultimately, Howe says that Mabel, Charles and Oliver will wind up back at the Arconia, the unofficial fourth main character, at the conclusion of the case, ready for a likely seventh season. It’s no mean feat “to sustain an interest in a show over multiple seasons,” Howe says, and he’s “doing my best to keep it visually interesting and creating new content.” It’s certainly paid off for the four-time nominee, who says he thinks of himself as a humble person, but he does “love being recognized and I don’t take it for granted. I keep trying to keep doing my best and keep that going as long as possible. “There’s always room for more at the Arconia.”