As befits any horror series, the setting of Locke & Key is a vital source of the scares. The ancestral home of the Locke family, Keyhouse is welcoming and imposing at the same time, with secrets and surprises behind every door.

Locke & Key comic artist Gabriel Rodriguez, along with writer Joe Hill, and executive producers Carlton Cuse and Meredith Averill, spoke with CBR and other media outlets at Netflix headquarters in Los Angeles ahead of the release of streaming service's adaptation. Rodriguez explained how he conceived Keyhouse for the comics, and how difficult it was to get Hill to settle on one consistent idea for its design.

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Keyhouse is one of the most distinct parts of the Locke & Key universe. It contains many secrets that the Locke children are tasked with uncovering, especially after they start finding the extremely powerful and magical keys around the building. The house is incredibly unique, which was always part of the goal for Rodriguez. "I'm an architect by training," Rodriguez revealed. "When I got the chance to work on this story and [Joe Hill] pitched this idea, we knew from the start that Keyhouse was going to be a fully rendered character in the story. I faced it as an architectural challenge."

While trying to come up with a design that would be livable and sustainable for the series, Rodriguez wanted to make sure that the house had a certain level of uniqueness to it. "I had this very unpractical idea of making the house as uneven and unsymmetrical as possible, from every point of view. From there, I did the actual blueprints as an actual architectural project. So we could have these highly detailed battlegrounds for all the action that was going to happen later, and to figure out how many places we have to explore for the story."

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But even when the designs for the building were weird, Rodriguez strove to make sure the building felt "as if it was a real place. I think one of the things that makes Locke and Key such a compelling story is that there are grounded elements of the story that are rooted in reality. So when you add the fantasy element, it gets sort of a huge contrast on that. I did entire research for the kind of architecture we were going to use and the kind of house we were going to try to make. With all of that as a reference, I was able to make a detailed design of the blueprints and all the elements."

However, Hill ended up making things difficult, explaining that while Rodriguez had "lovingly crafted this blueprint where everything was... I never actually bothered to look. So I'd say 'they go into the bathroom off the kitchen' and Gabriel would be like 'there is no bathroom off of the -- fine, I'll sketch it out'. He was going crazy because I kept putting stuff where it didn't belong. I was shocked, about 20 issues in, that Tyler and Kinsey's rooms were actually on the third floor of the building. I didn't know there was anything up there. Eventually, [Rodriguez] and our editor Chris Ryall connived to put the blueprints in a comic, so the blueprints were published -- thus locking me into the geography of the house. That's how they trapped me into actually paying attention."

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For Cuse, the Lockes' house was a definitive part of the world of the story. But the version they made for the television series had to be workable as a television set. "When we adapted it for production, we had to make it really functional and practical. So the layout of the rooms, it was important to create these traffic patterns, these circularities so you could actually follow the characters. It was certainly something practical I learned on the Psycho house in Bates Motel, just kind of thinking how you move actors from space to space.

"We sort of replicated that idea. We built the exterior of the house in Toronto. And then we built the interior and we wanted to make sure the way the rooms were laid out on stage allowed for the characters to move easily [within] the various spaces. The essence of it all came from Gabriel's design. The emotional goal was to make it feel inviting... there are a lot of incredible details in Keyhouse that will pay off down the stream."

Locke & Key stars Darby Stanchfield (Scandal) as Nina Locke, Jackson Robert Scott (IT) as Bode Locke, Connor Jessup (American Crime) as Tyler Locke, Emilia Jones (Horrible Histories) as Kinsey Locke, Bill Heck (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) as Rendell Locke, Laysla De Oliveira as Dodge, Thomas Mitchell Barnet as Sam Lesser, Griffin Gluck (American Vandal) as Gabe, and Coby Bird as Rufus Whedon. The series is now streaming on Netflix.

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