Where Is Severance Filmed? Every Major Location Explained

"Severance" has become Apple TV+'s biggest must-see show, both for the endless intrigue of its science fiction mysteries and for its visually stunning filmmaking. With evocative settings that make up a large portion of the show's identity, the first season won an Excellence in Production Design Award from the Art Directors Guild. Season 2, meanwhile, continued to introduce new locations for both the eerie offices where the "innies" work and the outside world where the "outies" live.

Through behind-the-scenes videos and the show's official podcast, the "Severance" crew has been happy to educate the public on how they create their hit series. The production involves a mix of beautifully constructed sets and real-life places carefully selected to fit the proper aesthetic. If you're curious to know where different scenes were filmed and which filming locations you can visit for yourself, here's an overview of where the crew built or found all of the most significant places in "Severance."

The building used for the headquarters of the secretive Lumon corporation was built between 1959 and 1962 as a research and development hub for telecommunications company Bell Labs. The Holmdel, New Jersey-based campus was sold for redevelopment in 2006 and has since been converted into the mixed-use "metroburb" of Bell Works. Looking at a photo of how it appears in the real world, you can see that the show performed some small effects touch-ups to make the building's two reflecting pools symmetrical.

Director/executive producer Ben Stiller explained on the first episode of "The Severance Podcast" that cinematographer Jessica Lee Gangné (who later directed Season 2, Episode 7, "Chikai Bardo") found the location while performing Google searches for office buildings. "She found this shot, this overhead shot of labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, that had this insane egg-shaped parking lot around the building that was so huge," Stiller said. "Looking at it from above, it's just the scale of it was massive. We went down there and checked it out, and that was, I think, the first location we found, and it dictated so much for us. The biggest thing when we got there that we realized was that nobody had filmed anything there."

The majority of the action in "Severance" takes place within Lumon's maze of offices on the Severed Floor. For the most part, these rooms were constructed on soundstages and with visual effects rather than using real-life locations — all the more effective to convey the surreal unreality of this uncanny underground workplace. Most of the soundstage sets for "Severance" were built at York Studios in the Bronx, New York, the primary shooting location for the series.

In creating the Severed Floor sets, production designer Jeremy Hindle drew inspiration from corporate architecture of the 1950s and '60s, the art of M.C. Escher, and the massive city set Jacques Tati built for the 1967 comedy, "Playtime." "It's a very unnatural design," Hindle told The Hollywood Reporter. "Every background in this room is interesting because it's asymmetric. It's like you're playing with their brains." In an exclusive interview with Looper, Milchick actor Tramell Tillman revealed it's "very easy to get lost" on these sets.

York Studios contains five different stages totaling 81,300 square feet, but not every room on the Severed Floor could fit into those stages. For the Perpetuity Wing, a museum-like area detailing the Eagan family's history that the macrodata refinement workers visit in Season 1, Episode 3, "In Perpetuity," the Kier Eagan Replica House required a scale that made it impossible to build a set from scratch in the studio.

For this sequence, the crew decided to do a location shoot at what Jeremy Hindle described to Thrillist as a "museum in the Bronx... [with] this beautiful brutalist building attached to it, and then a pristine house." Eagle-eyed viewers have identified this location as the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, the house in question being the Glenview Historic Home, a Gilded Age building designed by Charles W. Chilton in 1877 that's also featured, appropriately enough, on HBO's "The Gilded Age."

Goats show up throughout "Severance," both as a quirky motif and as a major part of the central mystery. In the Season 2 finale, it was revealed that Lumon's purpose in raising goats is to find the perfect ritual sacrifice for their experiments in eliminating pain, though many questions remain about how exactly this works. In Season 2, Episode 3, "Who Is Alive?," Mark (Adam Scott) and Helly (Britt Lower) return to the section of the Severed Floor officially named Mammalians Nurturable but colloquially known as "the goat room."

Getting a fuller view of the goat room, previously visited by accident in the first season, required a creative approach to set design. Rather than using a normal studio, 15-foot walls and a protective tent were built on top of the Marine Park golf course in Brooklyn, New York, giving the approximately 50 goats on set plenty of greenery to roam around. CG was used to erase the tent and make the walls appear taller.

In "Severance," the company town of Kier is located in a fictional state abbreviated as "PE." In reality, the locations that form the town on-screen can be visited throughout upstate New York. Irving's (John Turturro) apartment is one of the Strand Apartments in Kingston, New York, and several driving scenes were filmed throughout the city. The Kingston vintage store The Red Owl Collective became the exterior for the Great Doors company in Season 2, Episode 2, "Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig." Zufu, the Chinese restaurant in Season 2, Episode 6, "Attila," was built out of Eng's Restaurant in Kingston, New York. If you'd rather eat at Pip's Bar & Grille, travel into the Catskills for its real-world equivalent, the Phoenicia Diner in Phoenicia.

The many scenes set in Baird Creek Manor, where outie Mark and Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) live, are filmed at the Village Gate Townhouses in Nyack. Other Kier exteriors were shot in Beacon and Utica, New York. Petey's (Yul Vasquez) death scene in Season 1, Episode 3, "In Perpetuity," takes place outside Gulf Gas Station in Nyack, a location used in the first "John Wick" movie; his funeral was at Trinity Lutheran Church in White Plains. Devon and Ricken's house is the Bier House in Usonia. Irving's train departure in Season 2, Episode 9, "The After Hours," was filmed at Union Station in Utica. The entrance to the birthing retreat seen in multiple Season 2 episodes is the Mohonk Testimonial Gateway in New Paltz, previously seen in the 1985 cult horror film "The Stuff." 

Season 2, Episode 4, "Woe's Hollow," marked a notable change of pace for the innie refiners, being the first time they were allowed to go outside as part of an "ORTBO" (Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence) in the Dieter Eagan National Forest. The real forest used for this snowy outdoor excursion was the Minnewaska State Park Preserve in Ulster County, New York. The titular Woe's Hollow waterfall was represented by the park's Awosting Falls, while Irving's dream sequence took place in the Sam's Point area.

Shooting in the park had its challenges. As Jeremy Hindle explained on the "Inside the Episode" video, "You know parks are insanely hard to shoot in, so we went and scouted it with the rangers and stuff to explain to them how we could build this without disturbing anything. We had to build, I think, a quarter-mile bridge over all those trees out of scaffolding to get everything in because we couldn't touch one thing in this forest." Ben Stiller described the process of planning the outdoor shoot as "one of the more fun things we got to do," and all the challenges paid off with one of the show's most stunning episodes.

Season 2, Episode 8, "Sweet Vitriol," takes place entirely in another new location — Cobel's economically struggling hometown of Salt's Neck. Whereas every other location featured in "Severance" thus far has been within driving distance of the New York-based studio, Salt's Neck was filmed all the way up north in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Scenes were shot on Fogo Island, the Bonavista Peninsula, Keels, and Port Union, with a former fish plant in Port Union standing in for the abandoned Lumon ether factory. In the "Inside the Episode" feature, Patricia Arquette described the experience of filming in Newfoundland as "incredible, saying, "The landscape itself was just so cinematic." She explained how the setting reflected her character, saying, "It was so cold, and icebergs are floating by. I felt like it was very much in keeping with Harmony's inner landscape."