· Behind the scenes
How to build a room that feels colder
The ward is the same 11 °C as every other vault. Visitors swear it’s colder. Our set builder on doors, wallpaper and the art of the slightly wrong.
Every vault under Saltgate sits at eleven degrees, summer and winter. Ask anyone coming out of Ward Nine and they’ll tell you the ward was colder. It isn’t. It just looks it.
Light that comes from the wrong side
Cold rooms in films are lit from below and from behind. We do the same with the ward’s one working lamp: it hangs low at the far end, so every bed throws its shadow towards you.
Doors older than the building
Every door down here was rescued from a demolition somewhere else. We take them apart, swap the hinges to the other side and hang them a centimetre too low. Nobody can say why the door feels wrong. They just walk through faster.
Nothing is new
The sheets on the beds are washed fifty times before they go down. The wallpaper in The Lodger is printed, pasted, then peeled back by hand over a week. A room that looks finished is a room nobody is afraid of.