Entertainment Weekly talade med True's Blood production designer Suzuki Ingerslev.

Entertainment Weekly spoke with True Bloodproduction designer Suzuki Ingerslev about some of the new sets we’ve been treated to in the first three episodes of Season 3. She also answered fans’ questions about some of the older sets.

For the King of Mississippi’s Mansion, Ingerslev and her crew took a trip to Natchez, Mississippi. Longwood, a National Historic Landmark and the largest remaining octagonal home in the U.S., which she was told had never been filmed before for TV or features. “The interior was never completed. After the Civil War, they walked away from it,” she says. “But we just needed it for the exterior, because there’s nothing like it in the whole world. So we convinced our producers, begged and begged, and they let us go down there and shoot it.” As for the interiors, they were created from scratch after studying the furniture, chandeliers, and wallpapers in plantation homes. “The wallpaper in the King’s dining room is completely Mississippi wallpaper,” she says. “It’s got the river, it’s got Spanish moss and alligators. It’s really amazing that we found that in a wallpaper book.”

When it came time to acquire Bill’s much-storied bed, Ingerslev admits she felt some pressure to find one that would live up to those expectations. ”That kind of a bed is probably $20-, $30-, $40-, $50,000. Our producers wouldn’t have liked that,” she says. They settled on a rental from Warner Bros., which was probably used in a lot of old studio films. Another decision that required some thought: How to decorate the table. “At first, we were like, ‘Let’s get all this great silver,’ and then we realized we couldn’t use silverware in there because vampires can’t touch silver. So we ended up going with a gold flatware. We used a lot of glass displays and crystal. Waterford was kind enough to loan us some pieces because apparently, they’re fans of the show.”

Lou Pine’s: The wolf-related signage in the bar — e.g. Howl and Red Wolf beer — is an obvious homage to what lies beneath in its werewolf patrons, but for a more subtle clue, check out the table lights. When they couldn’t find any they liked, the prop master got an idea: “They look like normal lights, but they’re actually silver doggie bowls and cheap plastic domes,” Ingerslev says.

Lafayette’s home: “Basically, we started with a leopard carpet and some foiled wallpapers that we found in an in-stock book here in the office. It’s not often that you get to combine those two anymore,” she says. “Also, there was a book called Bachelor Pads that we used as a resource.” They wanted to incorporate religion into Lafayette’s life. “He’s not just a one deity man, he goes to different deities, so we represented all of them,” he says. His home is a location right now, but eventually, if they get to build that set, we may finally get to see his bedroom in all its glory. ”You only see little glimpses of it. We have a feather boa in there, and some kind of crazy art, more foiled wallpaper. We would love to go to town on that. His littleboudoir. That would be a fun one.”

Fangtasia: Definitely another fun one. “We found that poster, I think it was from The Colbert Report, with Bush biting into the Statue of Liberty, so we put that in there,” she says. “We found a guy somewhere in the Midwest who usually paints serial killers, and we convinced him to paint some of these velvet paintings of our crew members for us and send them over.” In addition to a lot of anti-religious artifacts — “We have a Last Supper that lights up,” she notes, with a laugh — they figured Eric would make it look like Disneyland. “He’s stereotyping what vampires are just to draw people in and make money, and so we did a souvenir stand, too,” she says. “We created these little postcards, and apparently, every time we have extras in there, half of them disappear because everyone takes them as souvenirs.”

Eric’s office they keep pretty plain because he keeps his personal life hidden from everybody. “We tried to make it look functional. Like bar owners will lock up their alcohol in there. There’s Tru Blood boxes. We had Hot Sauce on his desk in the first season, and that was a joke from my decorator since vampires don’t eat.” What did he use it for? “I don’t even want to know with him,” she says. We’re guessing maybe for what he used the basement for earlier this season. “Yeah, we worked with the props on that one,” she says of Eric’s memorable sex scene with Yvetta, “and we’re all trying to figure out: Is it ropes, is it metal, a chain, what is it that they’re using [as constraints]? It’s so funny having these discussions trying to figure out how to torture people, or hang them, or have sex with them. That was a crazy set to build anyway. We started with brand new metal, brand new concrete, and then we aged it all down. And then we do a wet-down [before shooting] so that it seems even more dank and disgusting. When you’re in that set, you feel like you need to shower afterwards.”

Eric and Pam do have homes away from Fangtasia, but we won’t be seeing them this season, Ingerslev says. “Eric’s would be a tough one,” she imagines. Really, we just want to see Pam’s closet. “I know, right?” she concurs. “That’s probably the entire space. And she has a little casket she sleeps in.”

Bill’s house: She based the built interiors on traditional layouts of plantation homes, but “I wanted it to be older and peeling, and not in the sense that it was a haunted mansion, but just that it had been years and years since anybody had loved or cared about this house. I feel like it feels romantic, and it doesn’t just feel spooky,” Ingerslev says. More than one reader wanted to know why gentleman Bill chose to sleep under the house. Will we ever see him upgrade his daytime quarters? “No,” she says. “In the books, Charlaine Harris talks about how they create a cubby hole for him at Sookie’s house in between the floorboards of the first and second floors, but in our show, we haven’t addressed that. I guess it goes back to their instincts, and they do like to bury down into the ground, so even if he’s a gentleman, he has that animal instinct to go down and hide. We felt comfortable doing the light-tight rooms in the vampire hotel because there’s security there, and it’s not easy to break into a room. But in his house, he’d be pretty vulnerable.” For the reader who asked why there was a bowl and sponge outside Bill’s home in the recent flashback, “Apparently when people used to pass away in those days, as a warning, they would put the bowl and the sponge outside the front door, and it would let people know sickness was in their house.”