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Forget the car. I want to see the houses.
001 Mix old and new
Dr No’s apartment, 1962
002 Warm up modernism
Goldfinger’s rumpus room, 1964
003 Say more with less
Tiger Tanaka’s house, 1967
004 Let the view decorate
Piz Gloria, 1969
005 Let the architecture work
The Elrod House, 1971
006 Live with what you love
Bond’s own flat, 1973
007 Commit to the curve
Stromberg’s Atlantis, 1977
The idea
A new James Bond is coming. Naturally, everyone wants to know who will wear the dinner jacket. I have another question. Where is he going to live?
Preferably somewhere worth pausing the film for.
The Bond films have always understood the appeal of a good room. Timber against steel. Stone beside glass. One extraordinary chair with enough space around it to appreciate what you’re looking at.
Admittedly, the villains tend to get the better architecture. Their plans for humanity may be questionable. Their choice of fireplace is often excellent.
Much of that visual confidence owes a debt to production designer Ken Adam, whose work helped define the look of Bond. His rooms could be enormous, theatrical and thoroughly improbable, but you always knew where to look. A strong shape. A dramatic change of level. A material used on a scale most of us would never dare.
Alongside the purpose-built sets were real buildings with enough presence to hold their own on screen.
And beneath all that spectacle are ideas that work perfectly well at home. You don’t need a private island. You might need to move a chair.
Here are seven rooms, 001 to 007, and what I’d take home from each.
The details
001
Mix old and new
Dr No’s apartment
Dr No | 1962
For a man with such elaborate plans, Dr No understood something quite simple about a room: everything needn’t match.
Modern furniture sits alongside antiques and art, with rough stone bringing texture to the mix. It feels collected, even if the collection belongs to someone you’d rather not have round for dinner.
The interest comes from the differences. Something old gives a modern piece a sharper outline. A polished surface looks better beside a rough one. Neither has to work quite so hard.
It’s a useful antidote to buying the whole room from one photograph.
At home
Start with what you already own. An inherited table beside a modern chair. An old painting against a clean-lined wall. Look for a connection in colour, scale or shape, without making everything agree.
002
Warm up modernism
Goldfinger’s rumpus room
Goldfinger | 1964
Set aside the room’s less hospitable functions and look at the fireplace.
It’s enormous, shiny and about as subtle as Goldfinger himself. Against all that timber, it is exactly what the room needs.
The wood gives the steel warmth. The steel stops the wood becoming a ski lodge. Each material makes the other more interesting.
This is where rooms can go flat: when every surface is trying to deliver the same mood. Warm wood, warm upholstery, warm lighting, and suddenly the whole thing needs a little bite.
Goldfinger had several faults. Excessive coordination wasn’t one of them.
At home
Look for the material your room is missing. Chrome or steel can sharpen a timber-heavy space. Wood, wool or linen can soften a room dominated by glass and stone. Try a lamp or side table before considering building work.
003
Say more with less
Tiger Tanaka’s house
You Only Live Twice | 1967
Inside the volcano, Blofeld strokes his cat from a G Plan 6250, a black wingback swivel chair launched in 1962 and sold as “The World’s Most Comfortable Chair”. British living-room furniture, moonlighting in world domination. You don’t need a throne to look powerful.
Away from the volcano, there is another version of Bond design. Quieter. Lower to the ground. Rather easier to live with.
The Japanese interiors offer a lesson in timber, screens, low furniture and the space between things. Your eye can follow the room instead of negotiating an obstacle course of objects.
What interests me is the proportion. Lower furniture gives the walls more breathing space. Simple surfaces let the grain of the timber register. A carefully placed object has a presence it would lose on a crowded shelf.
There is no need to rename centuries of Japanese design to see why it works.
At home
Before buying anything, take a few things away. Clear a surface. Open up a sightline. Give your favourite piece enough space to be noticed. Keep the things you love; question the things filling gaps.
004
Let the view decorate
Piz Gloria
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service | 1969
Blofeld’s mountaintop clinic has an unfair advantage: the Swiss Alps.
The real location, Piz Gloria on the Schilthorn, puts the landscape all around you. Its revolving restaurant takes the business of finding the best view quite seriously.
Inside, the clinic hangs Verner Panton’s Fun shell lamps: a towering one in Blofeld’s office, a smaller one in Bond’s room. When Bond checks for bugs, the lamp is the first place he looks. Fair enough. It is the most interesting thing in there.
With that much happening beyond the glass, the window becomes the room’s main event.
Most of us have a garden, a tree or an interesting bit of street rather than a mountain range. Still worth looking at. Yet we often arrange every seat around the television and leave the view to the back of the sofa.
At home
Put one comfortable chair where you can actually see out. Keep enough of the window clear to enjoy it. Choose curtains for how they frame the view as well as how they look closed.
005
Let the architecture work
The Elrod House
Diamonds Are Forever | 1971
John Lautner’s Elrod House in Palm Springs was built for interior designer Arthur Elrod in 1968. Bond arrived a few years later. The architecture required very little assistance.
A vast concrete canopy, curved glass and boulders incorporated into the building give the house its character. The furniture responds to those forms. The living space opens towards the pool and the desert beyond.
Bambi waits for Bond in Gaetano Pesce’s red UP chair, with Pierre Paulin’s Ribbon chair in the same room. Neither was vintage then. The UP was designed in 1969 and originally arrived vacuum-packed into a flat disc, swelling to its full shape in about fifteen minutes once unwrapped. Furniture with enough nerve to sit beside a boulder.
The landscape is part of the room.
What I like is the refusal to smooth away the things that make the building unusual. The rocks stay. The curves lead. Everything else finds its place around them.
Back in town, the same film frames Blofeld’s penthouse desk with a pair of Arco lamps, the Castiglioni brothers’ 1962 design. Overhead light from a marble base so heavy it has a hole for a pole to carry it. Light doing a job beyond lighting.
Most homes have something we’re tempted to work around or cover up. An awkward alcove. An off-centre fireplace. An oddly placed window. Sometimes that is precisely where the room should begin.
At home
Before choosing colours or furniture, identify the feature worth making more of. Let it influence the layout. An awkward room often becomes easier once you stop trying to make it symmetrical.
006
Live with what you love
Bond’s own flat
Live and Let Die | 1973
After all those spectacular lairs, Bond’s own flat brings things back to a more recognisable scale.
M arrives early, Moneypenny in tow, and Bond makes coffee with an espresso machine that attracts almost as much attention as the briefing.
A useful reminder that even a secret agent has a morning routine.
This is the domestic detail I want more of. What does he use? What has he kept? Where does he sit when nobody is trying to kill him?
By Spectre (2015), we have an answer. The production team chose an Amsterdam chair from Leather Chairs of Bath for its size and shape, worked through several rounds of colour samples, and Oscar-winner Anna Pinnock visited the showroom to approve it. Beside it sits a black Anglepoise 1227. It looks effortless. It wasn’t.
The things we reach for every day say more about a home than objects bought because a shelf looked empty.
At home
Give space and budget to what you enjoy using. The coffee machine, the reading chair, the record player. A room becomes personal through the life you lead in it.
007
Commit to the curve
Stromberg’s Atlantis
The Spy Who Loved Me | 1977
Stromberg takes the appeal of a waterfront property considerably further than most.
His Atlantis headquarters gives Ken Adam scope for rounded, organic forms, with an exterior that looks like something hauled up from the seabed.
There is nothing tentative about it. The shape is part of the whole idea, rather than a finishing touch.
Even the seating follows suit: Verner Panton’s Pantonova, curving wire furniture he designed in 1971 for the Varna restaurant in Aarhus. Sociable furniture, decidedly unsociable owner.
That is the useful bit. A curve can do more than soften a corner. Repeated thoughtfully, it can connect the furniture to the room and make separate pieces feel as though they belong together.
You can stop well short of a submersible dining room.
At home
Let a shape recur where it makes sense. A round table might pick up the curve of a chair or lamp. Vary the size and material so the connection feels considered rather than bought as a set.
Why it works
There is a hierarchy. Something leads, and the other elements support it.
These rooms have very different personalities, but each gives you something clear to notice.
At Goldfinger’s, it’s the tension between timber and steel. At Piz Gloria, the view. At the Elrod House, the building itself.
That is useful in an ordinary sitting room, where the rug, curtains, fireplace, artwork and sofa can all end up competing for attention. Decide what deserves the first look. Then consider what the room needs around it.
I wouldn’t call Bond’s interiors restrained. A revolving mountaintop restaurant rather rules that out.
But they are decisive. You can see the idea.
Even M knows it. Her apartment in Casino Royale has a Barcelona chair, Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 design. No drama required.
And what about the next Bond?
With Denis Villeneuve directing and Steven Knight writing, there is plenty to be curious about before we even get to the casting.
Arrival. Blade Runner 2049. Dune. Villeneuve’s films give architecture, light and scale a powerful role in the storytelling. A room can make someone look formidable, isolated or completely out of their depth before they say a word.
Which makes the prospect of his Bond interiors particularly interesting.
My guess? Stone, concrete and timber. Deep shadows. A spectacular piece of glass. One excellent chair.
My hope? Somewhere with signs of a life beyond the job. Books he has actually opened. Something brought home. A coffee machine that gets used.
No Time to Die made a start. Set decorator Véronique Melery wanted Bond’s Jamaican house to feel authentic and as normal as Bond allows: a bed of local wood, a vintage Murano glass mushroom lamp, a recreation of Lina Bo Bardi’s Tripé armchair, a Butterfly chair and a replica of Ian Fleming’s own desk from Goldeneye. A secret agent, very nearly settling in.
I’d like to know what the new Bond keeps, as much as where he lives.
The verdict
The best thing to take from Bond is the confidence to follow an idea through.
Mix the periods. Give the materials something to play against. Work with the building. Leave space for the view and the things you enjoy.
A good room should have a point of view. These have several, usually across private land.
As for the next Bond’s address? I couldn’t possibly say.
Concrete, surely.
File 007 · Declassified
The full Bond file
Seven design lessons from 007 in one nine-page dossier. Stolen art, disappearing chairs and a killer garden. No password required.
DOWNLOAD THE FILE (PDF) →Get the look
Want the look without the secret underground lair? Stone, timber, linen, sculptural lighting and a few very good shapes, inspired by the rooms that got it right.
SHOP THE SECRET AGENT EDIT →WHAT TO LEAVE OUT
No tiny furniture dotted around filling gaps. No desperate styling of every surface. No purposefully matching range. No waxworks of yourself (Brad Whitaker, The Living Daylights). Nothing that melts when the heating comes on (Gustav Graves, Die Another Day). And definitely no ejector seat.
LIKE THIS?
Interiors, gardens, useful ideas and things I’d genuinely want at home. The Edit lands every other Thursday.
Questions
When will the new James Bond be announced?
Not yet confirmed. Producer Amy Pascal has said the end of 2026 is a good bet. Filming is expected to begin in 2027, with the film targeting a 2028 release.
Who is directing the next Bond film?
Denis Villeneuve, the director of Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune. Steven Knight, who created Peaky Blinders, is writing the script.
Who designed the classic Bond sets?
Ken Adam designed the sets for seven Bond films, from Dr No (1962) to Moonraker (1979). His work defined the look of the series.
What chair does Blofeld sit in?
In You Only Live Twice (1967), Blofeld sits in a G Plan 6250, a black wingback swivel chair launched in 1962 and marketed as “The World’s Most Comfortable Chair”.
Can you visit Piz Gloria?
Yes. It sits on the summit of the Schilthorn above Mürren in the Swiss Alps, reached by cable car, and the revolving restaurant is still open.
Which house was used in Diamonds Are Forever?
The Elrod House in Palm Springs, designed by John Lautner for the interior designer Arthur Elrod. In the film, it plays the home of the billionaire Willard Whyte, and Bond ends a fight in its pool.
