Another recurring furnishing from the outie world Schlesinger was excited to have sourced for the season was less immediately recognizable to fans, possibly because “it was never really imported to the US so it’s not a familiar thing, but [we incorporated] a line of office furniture that [Italian design house] Olivetti sold, and we use a lot of it,” he says. “You don’t really see it in the show, but you feel it—the furniture in the management office, the back room is all Olivetti, the goat room, ‘mammalians nurturable,’ Gemma’s office, that’s Olivetti. We had these amazing folding chairs from Cappellini that were used everywhere. The idea is that these things get repeated like they would in a corporate environment, like they have a store room and they need folding chairs and they pull them out.”

Blue and Red: A Severed (Color) Story

The monotonous midwinter of Kier (both the Lumon founder’s name and the locale of the story, nodding to the company’s ubiquitous influence) in which the story is set makes the outie world feel nearly as brutal and chilling as the endless 9–5 toil of the innie world. That was a specific choice of Hindle’s to warm audiences to the severed floor: “I was like, ‘It should always be really cold [outside]. It should be uncomfortable always, always, always outside, [such] that the inside strangely is more comfortable.” While the office feels warmer by contrast to the frigid outdoors, a cool color palette runs through the severed floor. In the color story of the show, blue often seems to represent Lumon, while red stands in for the opposite: love, rebellion, the outside world.

The office formerly belonging to severed floor manager Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) gets a new blue paint job when Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) takes over the position in season two. While the company would love to prop him up as firmly in their corner against the increasingly defiant MDR team, a few key pieces signify the Milchick character might be more complex than he seems. “[Tillman] had two notes: He said, ‘I want the rabbit/duck [figurine] if I could, and the iceberg,” Hindle tells AD.