8 Secrets of ‘Gilmore Girls’ Sets You Need to Know Ahead Of Your Annual Rewatch

The palatial home of Emily and Richard Gilmore (played by Kelly Bishop and Edward Herrmann) was supposed to convey blue-blood wealth. “The decorative items in the parents’ house were more subdued because we wanted to skew it very New England,” Crasco says. “We would only change things surreptitiously over a few seasons.”

The set itself required a few adjustments, as the interiors proved to be too cramped for the six-foot-five Herrmann. “He’s such a tall man, and the [old] set was always so small,” creator and executive producer Amy Sherman-Palladino has said. “He would walk through an archway and it would look like a dollhouse.” However, the production team gradually enlarged it as the budget allowed. “Every [season] we kept making the set a little bigger and the ceilings a little higher,” she added.

The scale issue was finally resolved for the 2016 sequel series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, when the interiors received a bona fide upgrade. Alas, Herrmann, who died in 2014, wasn’t around to appreciate it. “It was [finally] big enough for Ed,” Sherman-Palladino said. “And he’s [not here].”

Luke’s Diner wasn’t exactly weatherproof

The warm heart of Stars Hollow was actually anything but. Because Luke’s Diner was essentially a wooden frame without insulation—and the cast and crew constantly shuffled in and out the door—the December and January shoots on the backlot could be brutal. Yes, even in Southern California. “I do remember it would get really cold,” Crasco says. “We had to find these little pockets between the sets and behind the building façade to at least be out of the wind for a few minutes.”

She even has a chilling anecdote to prove it. One day inside the diner set, she and the crew bundled up beside a propane heater with cups of coffee in hand. Suddenly, she took a whiff and became alarmed: “I looked at one of the set dressers and I said, ‘Do you smell anything burning?’ He literally looked over and said, ‘Yep, your coat’s on fire’ and took another sip of his coffee. I ripped off my jacket as fast I could!”

One guy painted all the signs in town

One thing that gave Stars Hollow that authentic feel? All the storefronts had a personalized touch. The credit goes to graphic designer Casey Kasemeier, who painted awnings and signs for both the Stars Hollow stalwarts and new businesses. (Welcome to the neighborhood, Bessie’s Butcher!) “If we needed anything, whether the music shop or tailor’s or soda shop or whatever,” Crasco notes, “we just gave it to Casey to do it in-house. We never sent it out to a sign shop.”

Kasemeier even created signage for the planned (but ultimately unrealized) Gilmore Girls 2003 spinoff, Windward Circle. When that production went to Venice, California, to transform the iconic boardwalk eatery Hot Dog on a Stick into a fictional spot called Dante’s Inferno, Crasco notes that he and the painters came up with “this grinning devil hot dog!” The series, by the way, was intended to center on Milo Ventimiglia’s Jess character.

Gilmore Girls operated on a tight budget—with a few exceptions

During their onstage reunion at the 2025 Emmy awards (to mark the show’s 25th anniversary), stars Graham and Bledel joked that the show had a small budget compared to its higher-profile neighbors like The Drew Carey Show and ER on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California. “We saved up all year long to have one snow episode,” quipped Bledel.

“It definitely was the smallest art department I’ve ever had,” Crasco says, noting that the shooting schedule—a whopping 10 pages of that rapid-fire dialogue was filmed each day—made the job extra challenging.

Still, Sherman-Palladino “really cared” about certain details, and the money was stretched. When Crasco submitted a budget request to create the elaborate gates of Harvard University for the season two episode “The Road Trip to Harvard,” the producers saw the need to splurge. “We spent tens of thousands of dollars on that set,” she says.

Lorelai and Sookie had the same house, sort of

Stay with us here: The exterior of Lorelai and Rory’s Colonial-style home, complete with its furnished front porch, was filmed on the Warner Bros. back lot. This same structure served as the interior kitchen in the home of chef Sookie (Melissa McCarthy) and her husband, Jackson (Jackson Douglas). “We had these shelves that had to go in and out of the window every time we changed over,” Crasco says. To add to the confusion, the interior of the Gilmore house was constructed on a soundstage on the WB studio lot, also with a full porch attached to it.

“You can be inside Lorelai’s house and take her to the front door. And then you pop outside and two days later, she walks out in the same wardrobe. And now you’re shooting on the back lot. The audience has no idea that there’s been a passage of time,” Crasco says.

Rory’s college was actually USC

Ahead of season four, Crasco did some pre-Pinterest, pre-Instagram studying to plan out Rory’s freshman year at Yale University. “We had a photographer at Yale take pictures for us based on the categories that I sent him,” she says. “We got detailed photographs of the various colleges, dining rooms, classrooms, and hallways.” For the design of Rory’s shabby-chic dorm suite, Crasco reflected on her own overnight stay on the New Haven, Connecticut, campus back in high school. “I remember the sense of community,” she says.

Rory’s university experience also offered the cast and crew the opportunity to venture outside the Warner Bros. lot. “It was a practical decision because we couldn’t just build a big assembly hall or auditorium,” Crasco says. The character’s initial visit to the campus was filmed on location at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Later scenes—including her graduation in the seventh and final season—were filmed at the University of Southern California in LA.

The Dragonfly Inn required an aesthetic shake-up

The Independence Inn—where Lorelai worked as a maid during the first three seasons—had a formal vibe with a dark color palette and mahogany wood throughout the lobby area (including that fireplace). When she and Sookie decided to go into business together running The Dragonfly Inn, a change was in order. “Amy wanted to make it a more intimate space because this was more personal for Lorelai,” Crasco says, adding that the lobby is much smaller and the kitchen featured whimsical color patterns and decor.

Crasco pulled from literary references and coffee-table books like Classic Country Inns that she found at a vintage bookstore in Santa Monica. Special attention was paid to the dining room, where Crasco opted for painted floral wallpaper similar to an inn in Maine, and the production team filled it with specially created artwork and shadow boxes as well as a collection of antique spoons. The production designer also used her own old family photos to ensure there wouldn’t be any snags in copyright clearance and licensing.

Stars Hollow appears in more shows than just Gilmore Girls

Your favorite comfortable Connecticut town has a deep Hollywood history, with films ranging from The Music Man to The Lost Boys all relying on those same winding streets and grassy knolls. The Stars Hollow set also doubled for Rosewood, Pennsylvania, in Pretty Little Liars. If you ever rewatch that YA thriller, keep your eyes peeled for the same gazebo and church from Gilmore Girls, and even Miss Patty’s dance studio and Luke’s Diner, which became the Apple Rose Grille in PLL.

Even within the world of Gilmore, Stars Hollow evolved over the years. “We turned [the town square] into a much more formal New England gathering space,” Crasco says. Drawing on her own experience growing up in Boston, she inserted various monuments, columns, and bronze plaques to make the town appear more historically and geographically authentic. She even tried to add a custom sculpture of an American Revolution Minuteman—“I did a lot of drawings.” Alas, the budget didn’t allow for it.