The real Palm Beach inspiration behind the fantasy world of ‘Palm Royale’

The world of “Palm Royale” may not be filmed in Palm Beach — but the team behind the hit Apple TV+ series that begins its second season Nov. 12 had some real Palm Beach inspiration.

From Addison Mizner to John Volk to Slim Aarons to Jackie O, “Palm Royale” drew from a deep well of pop culture and high society to create a vision of the island where characters portrayed by Kristen Wiig, Carol Burnett, Ricky Martin and Allison Janney create a soapy dream world.

Members of the production team, local historians and preservationists, and Palm Beachers talked with the Palm Beach Daily News about some of the locations and people who helped to inspire and inform the decisions made when building Palm Beach on the Pacific coast.

“Hollywood magic is truly amazing, that they can create something that looks like Palm Beach, and it’s not in Palm Beach,” said Katie Jacob, vice president of the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.

Why didn’t ‘Palm Royale’ film in Palm Beach?

It is famously difficult to get a permit to film in Palm Beach, particularly during season — and that’s something with which the show’s creator, Abe Sylvia, said he can sympathize.

“I’m a filmmaker, but when those signs go up in my apartment building in New York City that there’s going to be shooting, I just roll my eyes. I hate it,” he said, laughing. “And trust me, I get it. I mean, we make a mess wherever we go. And I know that’s not Palm Beach’s style, so I don’t hold it against anybody that they wouldn’t necessarily want filming in their environs.”

Recent permits to film along or near Worth Avenue that were approved by the Town Council limited working hours to first thing in the morning or hours outside of the peak traffic time.

Creating Palm Beach in L.A.

One of the challenges production designer Jon Carlos faced when he was brought onto the “Palm Royale” team was to create the world of Palm Beach, but not in Palm Beach.

That’s a long-standing Hollywood tradition, he said, noting how hit TV series such as “Friends” and “Seinfeld” were set in New York but filmed in Los Angeles. “The big question,” Carlos said, “was, ‘Can we do a good portion of Los Angeles for Palm Beach?’ “

Lucky for Carlos, he was familiar with Palm Beach. His mother grew up in New York but moved to Palm Beach in the late 1960s, he said. Her family lived on Colonial Road, just around the corner from the Kennedy estate, Carlos said. It “could not have been more fortuitous,” he said.

Carlos and executive producer and director Tate Taylor traveled to Palm Beach as they planned the first season and visited some of the Palm Beach landmarks.

“I just felt that we needed to see and kind of understand historically what had been there, and then gradually what has changed so that we can make sure that we were being historically accurate when we were creating our world,” Carlos said.

Turning to local professionals

As the “Palm Royale” team worked to build their Palm Beach world, they turned to the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach for additional historical insight.

“They wanted to be able to make the buildings and the sets that they were doing in California look as similar as possible” to Palm Beach, Jacob said.

They also asked questions about famous Palm Beach architects such as Addison Mizner and Joseph Urban, she said.

It was important to Carlos to be well-versed in the key architects who helped to define Palm Beach style. He and the production team pored over archives and anthology books.

They also got, as the kids these days say, the hot goss.

“What was really fun for Tate (Taylor) was, he wanted to know the gossip as well,” Carlos said. “So what was the color behind the culture in these places?”

That led the “Palm Royale” team to seek insight from the Preservation Foundation into details that helped to bolster the plot — such as where a Palm Beach socialite would go to cavort with a tennis pro. “She would probably go to a motel in West Palm or maybe Lake Worth,” Jacob said.

It made it more fun for the show’s production team to have that insight, Carlos said. “As we were creating our fantasy world, it was ground in some semblance of a reality,” he said.

The “Palm Royale” team asked about how Palm Beach architecture evolved over the years, from the Beaux Arts style of Henry Flagler’s Whitehall estate to Mizner’s Mediterranean revival masterpieces, Jacob said.

Los Angeles has a similar romanticized European architecture in structures, incorporating Spanish, Italian, Mediterranean and Moroccan, among others, Carlos said.

Palm Beach-inspired interiors

When it came to crafting the characters and their living spaces, the production looked to interior designers who were popular in that era, said Ellen Reede, the set decorator for the series.

“We imagined that each one of these ladies would have hired these interior designers,” she said of the show’s cast.

For actress Leslie Bibb’s character Dinah, they chose the late Billy Baldwin, who spent about a year and a half working with fellow interior designer Polly Jessup in Palm Beach after World War II. Baldwin’s work was beloved by former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who spent a great deal of time in Palm Beach, Reede said.

For Burnett’s socially powerful Norma, they chose Tony Duquette, with some Elsie de Wolfe, because the two interior designers influenced each other, Reede said. The sway of Duquette’s love of dark, striking colors can be seen in many of the scenes set inside Norma’s Dellacorte mansion.

“There was that research and historical accuracy for each of the characters in each of the mansions,” Reede said.

3 Palm Beach locations that served as inspiration

The Colony

“The Pink Paradise” was a source of inspiration for some of the color palettes and for the pool at the fictional Palm Royale Club, according to the production team.

The Colony Hotel at 155 Hammon Ave. has also played host to tapings of special editions of “Entertainment Tonight!” featuring “Palm Royale” stars, and housed cast members when visiting Palm Beach.

“Palm Royale” triggered renewed interest in Palm Beach culture on a level that makes the series the first of its kind as it streams to millions of viewers, said Sarah J. Wetenhall, owner and chief executive of The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach and its sister lodging, The Hedges East Hampton.

“Since the series debuted, we’ve welcomed guests who shared that ‘Palm Royale’ inspired their visit — they wanted to experience the charm and glamor for themselves,” she said.

“The show captures the spirit of Palm Beach: polished yet playful, sophisticated yet irreverent. As with so many cultural moments that shape Palm Beach’s influence in fashion, design, and lifestyle, ‘Palm Royale’ adds another meaningful layer to that conversation, but this time it’s one that has brought the area to life for a global audience, and we’re delighted to see that reflected here at The Colony.”

The President of Palm Beach

When Carlos and Taylor visited Palm Beach before season one, they wanted to find buildings that had iconic style but were lesser-known than something on the scale of either the Everglades Club or Mar-a-Lago.

For the assisted-living facility where Burnett’s character, Norma, spends several episodes of the first season, Carlos said he wanted to find a structure that truly felt like Palm Beach.

“We were looking at the southern part of the island, and we stumbled across The President of Palm Beach condominium towers, which are incredible,” he said. “That whole area down there by the golf course is just one incredible mid-century tower after another.”

Architectural elements of The President were recreated in Los Angeles, Carlos said. “You actually feel the connectivity between the Los Angeles stage work and the exterior work in Palm Beach,” he said.

Worth Avenue stores

When building the set for Ceil Chapman, the luxe store where the ladies of “Palm Royale” meet to shop for the latest fashions while gossiping and plotting, the “Palm Royale” production team looked to some of the iconic storefronts along Worth Avenue.

The inside of the store was inspired by the interior design work of the late Dorothy Draper, whose work included many commercial projects, Reede said.

When characters are in Ceil Chapman’s dressing room, there is a window that looks out into a courtyard. That view was inspired by the way so many Palm Beach stores have windows and doors that open into or look out onto the lush gardens and fountains of the vias that line Worth Avenue, Carlos said.

“We really wanted to make sure that it felt like it was an iconic staple of the community, of Palm Beach,” he said.

Palm Beachers note the differences

For TV viewers, the Palm Beach of “Palm Royale” is as good as the real thing on Florida’s Gold Coast.

Eagle-eyed Palm Beachers have spotted where the truth separates from fiction.

“Probably one of the funniest comments that I’ve heard about the show is, ‘We all know that’s not Palm Beach because the palm trees are too skinny,’ ” Jacob said, laughing.

Alexander Ives was “weirdly impressed” with the series. The multigenerational Palm Beacher once led the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach, was a longtime member of the Architectural Commission and this year was reappointed to another term on the town’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

“It’s both a mess and somehow perfection,” he said of the way the production team drew inspiration from multiple sources — a club here, a pool there, the scallops on that, the gables on this.

“It’s kind of what (Addison) Mizner and Joseph urban were doing anyway when they looked to Europe,” Ives said. Those iconic architects brought together pieces of architectural history to create something new in Palm Beach, he said.

“Now something is taking what they created, and making a pastiched version of it into a slightly new thing,” he added.

“Palm Royale” captures the escapism architecture that Mizner loved, Jacob said. “It’s a world of fantasy,” she said. “I do think the show encompasses and really takes on that world of fantasy, of Palm Beach.”

Kristina Webb is a reporter for Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at [email protected]. Subscribe today to support our journalism.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Real Palm Beach inspiration behind the fantasy world of ‘Palm Royale’