Nestled among the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s affluent city blocks is 281 Park Avenue South, a six-story building just as bold, stylish and iconic as the person who once sought to lease it, famous New York swindler Anna Delvey.
Netflix’s Inventing Anna, based on journalist Jessica Pressler’s 2018 New York magazine article, highlights the best of Delvey’s glamorous hotspots. But none are as breathtaking as the building where Delvey sought to house her Anna Delvey Foundation. Delvey devised a grand scheme to transform the former church building into a hangout for New York’s hottest and wealthiest VIPs.
Built in 1892, the Church Missions House is a hulking 19-century gothic beauty of ornate limestone, stained glass and overarching medieval columns. It’s easy to see why Delvey, a woman armed with impeccable taste and burdened by an attraction to overtly expensive objects, would want to lease the historic landmark. It’s gorgeous, the perfect place to craft her dream project.
In the fourth episode of Inventing Anna, Delvey (Julia Garner) tries to hoodwink investors, architects, and restaurateurs into securing a $22 million loan for the building. She suggests an eclectic mix of amenities and luxuries on each of the building floors, ranging from hotel rooms with butlers, three uniquely themed restaurants, a bakery and art galleries. But the investors – veterans of the NYC real estate scene - are skeptical.
“It’s a very memorable building,” Inventing Anna production designer Henry Dunn tells Tudum. At the time of filming, the building was being transformed into what is now a branch of the high-end Swedish photography museum Fotografiska. “We thought we’d have to get something that looks similar. Ultimately, [when] the scaffolding [came] down, we got lucky with some of the timing and we were able to shoot that exterior.”
The production team wasn’t so lucky with capturing the interiors. Because 281 Park’s interiors were now being occupied by the Fotografiska museum, the location scouts and design team cleverly turned their attention to the sprawling and lavish mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast to complete Delvey’s vision.
“We had the trick to find someplace that we could shoot the interior,” Dunn explains. “We went and looked all over Manhattan [at] buildings being redone, buildings that were being remodeled, we would cheat it like this. We talked about it in a million different variations before [we thought,] ‘Why don’t we go out to one of the sort of fake gothic mansions that were built with pre-Wall Street crash money between the 1880s and the 1920s.’”
Thanks to the ingenuity of director David Frankel and cinematographer Maryse Alberti, the production team was able to make the Anna Delvey foundation come to life and capture the building’s essence with viewers being none the wiser. “By judiciously adding little elements and hiding other ones, I thought we did a very good job of tying the two things together,” Dunn says. “David and Maryse really captured the potential of the space with the lighting, and there’s just enough construction that [Anna’s] idea was gonna come through. It helped that our props department was able to find the actual original deck of what was going to be the Anna Delvey Foundation, so we could see what she wanted to do. That scene when she’s walking the people through her hopes and dreams for the place; that was a trick. Multiple locations, good editing and shooting.”
The result? A space fit for a queen... or at least a faux German heiress. Turns out there is such a thing as a good honest swindle in the name of beauty!
