The two-man Philly shop responsible for some of the iconic ‘Severance’ furniture
Outside the elevator doors of Lumon Industries’ severed floor, Severance‘s Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) awaits the arrival of Mark Scout (Adam Scott) and the company’s other “microdata refiners.”
The young deputy manager sits on a green bench, which has made its way to the AppleTV+ series from Columbus, Ind., by way of a Philadelphia shop.
While audiences kept an eye out for stunning revelations, furniture dealers and Rarify founders David Rosenwasser and Jeremy Bilotti squinted their eyes for a sharper look at one of their finds.
Miss Huang’s seat was a modified version of the John Behringer 1961 Link Bench the duo scored in Columbus, which they called the “mecca for modern architecture.”
“That was the first piece we saw sequentially that we were like, ‘Oh shoot, there it is!‘,” Rosenwasser said. “We knew it was a cool piece, but we didn’t know what it was going to be.” Reupholstered in green for the screen, the bench is one of several Rarify finds seen throughout the second season of the superhit TV show.
After years restoring and selling one-off vintage furniture pieces, the MIT and Harvard grads merged their interests in architecture, manufacturing research, and vintage furniture four years ago. The result was Rarify, the designer-led furniture and lighting dealership that sources hard-to-find furniture, refurbishes, and then sells them.
Last year, Rosenwasser and Bilotti opened their Bella Vista showroom at 735 Bainbridge St., while their larger collection is stored in a 80,000-square-foot warehouse in Lebanon, Pa.
“It was always something that was built from the ground up,” Bilotti said. “It started off as restoring just one single huge chair, which is wild to think about.”
The self-proclaimed “vintage furniture nerds” hand-picked the 1960s midcentury conference tables, desktops, prism lounges, and finely-crafted credenzas that fit the dark and ambiguous world of Severance creator Dan Erikson.
“They look almost futuristic, but they are also sort of vintage and retro in the same way,” Bilotti said. “There was intentionality behind what the decorators were doing, and the furniture and design of the spaces, the architecture, contributes to that in a very intentional way, which we really love.”
The furniture helps define the unsettling labyrinth below the surface of the Lumon Industries building, where Mark Scout, his coworkers, and partial love interest, Helly (Britt Lower), transform from their everyday selves (outies) into their Lumon identities (or innies).
Along with Miss Huang’s bench, other Rarify collectibles that made it to the show include a $15,500 Washington Prism lounge, ottoman, and table set by David Adjaye that finds pride of place in the muted and haunting home of Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry).
A Gerald Luss credenza ($19,950) stands in Burt Goodman (Christopher Walken) and husband Fields’ (John Noble) home, in a scene that was shot in the actual Gerald Luss House in Ossining, NY. There was also a full suite of Jens Risom and Florence Knoll pieces at the fictional Ganz College, where Mark and his wife, Gemma Scout (Dichen Lachman), first met and worked.
But the biggest shock came seeing one of their finds at the center of the explosive season finale.
The baby crib at the center of “Cold Harbor,” where Gemma Scout is forced to confront one of her last (and most traumatizing) memories, also came from Rosenwasser and Bilotti. And yes — spoiler alert — they spotted the oak-colored crib in an earlier episode in Mark and Gemma’s house before it moved inside in “Cold Harbor.”
“I didn’t really process the crib,” Rosenwasser said. “It didn’t really hit me because you couldn’t see it that well [earlier in the season]. And then on the last episode, it’s like, ‘there it is!’”
The Severance team, they said, even designed a custom box for the crib with “COL d’ARBOR” written across.
Bilotti and Rosenwasser found the crib by designer craftsman Charles Webb in Cambridge, Mass., after a lengthy search. When the Severance team wanted two of them, the duo scrambled to find one just in time for production “somewhere in the Midwest.”
The level of detail interwoven into the show’s story lines also went into its set design and decoration, Bilotti said. Both of them, he said, were thrilled to play a part in the three-year project.
“It’s wonderful for us as people in the furniture and design world to see such public interest in these pieces … We hope that we’ve made a tiny impact, and maybe educated some people, too,” Bilotti said.
Bilotti and Rosenwasser caught the attention of Jeanelle Marie, Severance‘s assistant set decorator, thanks to word-of-mouth and a series of viral videos of showcasing their restoration process and growing vintage collection.
After the pair collaborated with Marie on the Kaley Cuoco-led series The Flight Attendant, they met the then newly-assigned Severance set decorator, David Schlesinger, who had previously crafted sets for Knives Out, Hustle, The Equalizer 2, and Leave the World Behind. In February 2023, Rosenwasser and Bilotti showed Schlesinger their 15,000-plus collection in their Central Pennsylvania warehouse.
Once Schlesinger left, the duo started receiving “urgent” phone calls and emails from the show’s set decoration team, requesting hard-to-find items that weren’t in high circulation. The inquiries set the partners off on deep dives looking for pieces that could furnish the vague world of Severance, which blurs the line between the past, future, and present.
“They were looking for the best of the best that hadn’t been widely covered in culture and media,” Rosenwasser said. “If you could buy it from a furniture store today, it was a lot less appealing.” The ones that made it onto set, he said, were often in short supply.
Billoti and Rosenwasser sourced the pieces and shipped them to the shooting locations in central New Jersey or New York’s Hudson Valley.
“There were super-specialty things that were really unique, and they would need 10 of them. It was quite a challenge,“ Rosenwasser said. ”But we scoured the interweb, and by luck, there were other ones out there.”
For every item that made it into the show, Bilotti said, there were at least two more that didn’t. That list includes a John Nyquist desk chair, Lehigh Leopold end table, Lewis Butler coffee table, and an assortment of other fittings.
For Bilotti, Severance has become a version of AMC’s Mad Men. “The set of Mad Men was so integral to the identity, that made it a hit TV show. The same goes for the Bell Works headquarters, Gerald Luss House, and the other architectural works that Severance is filmed in. The furniture is a part of the lore of the story."
Is a third season collaboration in the works for Bilotti and Rosenwasser?
“We’re crossing our fingers,” Bilotti said.
