Outlander Season 2 Sets

"The apothecary was really fun" to put together, Steele tells TVLine, though creating corner pieces "that had a little curve in every corner of every panel" was a time-consuming endeavor. "They said, 'Well can't this be a straight pane;? We don't really need these little corner things'," he recalls, laughing. "And I go, 'No, those little curved things look amazing.'"

"All the research showed alligators in these places back in the 18th century, because they were considered really exotic," Steele says. The store's myriad ceramic vessels were handmade and painted, and set decorator Gina Cromwell stuffed the secret room in the back with a variety of curiosities. "I think she had, like, 500 to 700 different skulls of all sizes," Steele says. "Ron [Moore] wanted that room to be really, really mysterious and dark. Even the fireplace in the back room had signs of alchemy carved into the stone of the mantel."

The rich color adorning the walls of Prince Charles' favorite brothel "started as an emerald color, and the scenic artist said, 'Let's make it really rich and deep,'" Steele recalls. "By the time we do get to a certain color, it's usually 20-something different layers and different samples, because it evolves." But try explaining that to fans who contact Steele on Twitter, asking for the names of paint colors used in the show. Steele chuckles as he explains the long process the drama went through to create the complex hues. "I go, 'It's never the exact color that you get from Benjamin Moore or whatever,'" he adds.  

The brothel's hallways were "covered in velvet, pure velvet," Steele says. "And we didn't use red, because I feel like all houses of ill repute, whore houses, they always have this red wallpaper, and I'm not doing that."

The eight buxom, carved ladies holding up the brothel's parlor ceiling are known as caryatids. "You see them in classical architecture. They're used to hold up a beam or whatever above," Steele explains, adding that the show was planning to create them all — but then Cromwell found a few originals, so the production-design team replicated those.

"When you're in the parlor or the dining room, or the bedroom" of the Frasers' Parisian abode, "you look through the French doors and you really see a courtyard below. The balconies are real. We had cobbles. We poured concrete and then they stamped them to make cobbles and they aged them," Steele says. "And I pitched it to Ron because I wanted to have a carriage come onto stage and see Claire and Jamie get out of, and the camera could outside or inside... and it could crane on up and then get continuous shots from courtyard into the rooms."

Little-known Outlander fact: To cut production costs, Jamie and Claire actually slept in the dining room. Well, kinda. The same set that housed the long table — and the Frasers' eventful dinner party — was the same one used for the couple's bedroom. "The panels all come out," Steele says, as do the chandeliers and furniture, for the switch. "We needed a day-and-a-half to do all that, but that happened a lot," he adds. "We bring in armoires and different pieces, and the giant bed comes in, and then all the panels are popped out and changed for a whole different look... No one would know unless I told them."

Jamie and Claire's temporary residence also doubled for the room where the king and Madame Fraser negotiated Jamie's release from the Bastille. "We took the parlor living room of the Paris apartment —it has like pilasters on every wall all the way around, which are like columns. So we made it where we could case each one with a different looking pilaster, and then we made them look like pilasters that are in Versailles."

"So we covered up a lot of the stuff that was Jamie and Claire's — you would never see it — with that giant bed and had a secret door added," Steele continues. A new fireplace and some murals on loan from the Louvre later, the set was transformed into a royal residence.