Nice. Welcoming. Lovely. Wonderful. Accommodating. If you watched just one episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood back in the day, then you know these are some of the virtues Fred Rogers imparted to his young viewers. They’re also the words that production designer Jade Healy uses to describe her experience working on A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. The new drama (opening Friday, November 22) depicts the real-life friendship between the kind-hearted, soft-spoken children's show host (Tom Hanks) and the cynical magazine journalist (Matthew Rhys) assigned to profile him in 1998. “You really had to be there,” Healy tells Architectural Digest. “Everyone was smiling every day. When Tom sang the theme song for the first time, it was like a dream.”

It helped that he was singing in the very same space where Rogers made the magic happen. To authentically capture Rogers’s spirit, Healy and her team built the entire Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood set—including his living room, the miniature town and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe—at the now-empty Fred Rogers Studio at WQED-TV in Pittsburgh. “We didn’t think we could do it because the stage is really small and we had to pack in his set, his TV crew, and the extra layer of our own film crew,” she explains. “We looked into other places, but at the end of the day, nothing else actually felt right.”

The set of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Photo: Lacey Terrell

Re-creating Rogers’s world over the course of three months required a little detective work and a lot of assistance from his loved ones, including his widow, Joanne. Healy (who also oversaw the new divorce drama Marriage Story) and her team paid several visits to the local Fred Rogers Center and Archive to examine, photograph, and measure several original pieces of furniture. “We wanted to make sure everything was constructed the same way,” she says. She took paint samples as well, because “the colors that you see when you watch a show are different than what they look like when they’re shot through the Ikegami camera.”