Severance: 12 Hauntingly Stark Locations That Brought Lumon to Life

The unnerving world of Severance is one where corporate control, psychological manipulation, and unsettling isolation come to life through its meticulously chosen filming locations. The eerie, retro-futuristic design of Lumon Industries isn’t just a set—it’s a carefully curated aesthetic that reinforces the show's unsettling atmosphere. From stark office buildings and brutalist architecture to eerily empty outdoor spaces, these locations play a pivotal role in immersing viewers in the psychological horror of severed consciousness. Below, we explore 12 real-world locations that helped shape Lumon’s haunting presence, each adding to the eerie, claustrophobic, and dystopian aesthetic of Severance.

1. Bell Labs Holmdel Complex – Holmdel, New Jersey (Exterior & Interior Hallways of Lumon Industries)

The most iconic location in Severance is the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, a massive mid-century modern research facility in Holmdel, New Jersey. Designed in 1962 by renowned architect Eero Saarinen, this striking building was once a hub for innovation in telecommunications, but in Severance, it becomes the cold, clinical headquarters of Lumon Industries. Its mirror-like glass façade reflects the surrounding landscape, creating a sterile, utopian atmosphere that mirrors Lumon’s carefully controlled world. Inside, vast, empty hallways stretch endlessly, disorienting both employees and viewers alike. The blinding white walls, featureless doors, and fluorescent lighting evoke a sense of sterility and corporate anonymity, reinforcing the loss of individuality experienced by Lumon’s workers. The labyrinthine corridors, shot inside this vast structure, serve as a metaphor for the psychological maze employees must navigate under Lumon’s rigid control. The absence of windows and outside references further enhances the claustrophobic and surreal tone of the show. Bell Labs’ mid-century aesthetic, designed to inspire technological progress, is repurposed here to symbolize corporate oppression and isolation, making it the perfect real-world embodiment of Lumon’s dystopian environment.

2. Beacon, New York – Kier, the Lumon Company Town

The quaint, eerie town of Beacon, New York, serves as the stand-in for Kier, the fictional company town where Lumon Industries maintains an unsettling grip on daily life. This historic Hudson Valley town, with its Victorian architecture, tree-lined streets, and old-world charm, provides a subtly dystopian backdrop for the story, reinforcing themes of corporate control bleeding into employees’ personal lives. Many of Beacon’s older buildings and storefronts were carefully chosen for filming, subtly suggesting that Lumon’s influence extends far beyond the office. There’s a feeling that everything is just a little too perfect, that the town itself may be part of a larger corporate ecosystem, designed to maintain the illusion of normalcy for Lumon workers outside their severed office lives. Beacon’s small-town aesthetic contrasts sharply with the cold, brutalist interiors of Lumon, but rather than serving as an escape, it instead feels equally curated and artificial. This setting underscores the unsettling idea that true freedom might not exist for those under Lumon’s watchful eye, creating an atmosphere that is both picturesque and deeply ominous.

3. The Waterfront at Sunset Park – Brooklyn, New York (Helly’s Escape Attempt)

When Helly R. desperately attempts to flee Lumon, she finds herself outside in an expansive yet eerily lifeless industrial landscape—a place that should symbolize freedom but instead feels just as barren and oppressive as the world inside Lumon. This chilling scene was filmed at The Waterfront at Sunset Park in Brooklyn, New York, an area known for its harsh industrial aesthetic, sprawling warehouse structures, loading docks, and desolate piers. The lack of people, the monolithic, gray surroundings, and the distant skyline barely visible through the haze reinforce the inescapability of Helly’s predicament. The open space paradoxically feels just as suffocating as Lumon’s claustrophobic hallways, emphasizing the psychological manipulation at play—even in the outside world, Lumon’s presence looms large. The cold, sterile color palette and harsh lighting make the setting feel almost otherworldly, as though Helly has stepped from one prison into another, equally unwelcoming one. This location perfectly enhances the series’ theme that severance doesn’t just divide work and home—it makes reality itself feel unreal.

4. Mohonk Mountain House – New Paltz, New York (The Wellness Retreat)

The Mohonk Mountain House, a grand, 19th-century lakeside resort in New Paltz, New York, serves as the filming location for Lumon’s mysterious and cult-like wellness retreat. This sprawling, castle-like hotel, surrounded by dense forests and perched beside a serene lake, embodies the eerily serene atmosphere that Severance thrives on. The retreat, meant to provide rest and enlightenment, instead carries an unsettling, cult-like presence. The Mohonk Mountain House’s grandiose yet isolated setting enhances this idea—it feels exclusive, detached, and removed from the outside world, much like Lumon itself. With its Victorian architecture, labyrinthine hallways, and dark-wood-paneled interiors, the location suggests a place where tradition and corporate philosophy merge in a deeply unsettling way. Employees are encouraged to embrace Lumon’s ideology, but the tranquil beauty of the surroundings only masks the deeper psychological control at play. The mountaintop isolation mirrors the psychological isolation of severed employees, making this location a hauntingly fitting choice for Lumon’s indoctrination practices.

5. The Starrett-Lehigh Building – New York City (Exterior of Lumon’s Downtown Offices)

In several key scenes, we see Lumon Industries’ downtown office building, a looming, emotionless presence in the city. These exterior shots were filmed at the Starrett-Lehigh Building, a massive Art Deco industrial complex on Manhattan’s west side. With its monolithic, windowless sections and stark, geometric design, the Starrett-Lehigh Building evokes a sense of inescapability and power, mirroring Lumon’s psychological grip on its employees. The building’s rigid symmetry and endless rows of windows create a sense of corporate anonymity, as though no individual matters within the massive entity of Lumon. The choice of this historical industrial building, originally used for warehousing and shipping, emphasizes the dehumanization of Lumon’s workforce—workers are treated less as individuals and more as interchangeable parts in a grander corporate machine. The cold, unfeeling exterior of the Starrett-Lehigh Building perfectly reflects Lumon’s inhumanity, reinforcing the corporate dystopia at the heart of Severance.

6. Westfield Garden State Plaza – Paramus, New Jersey (The Lumen Employee Mall Scene)

The Westfield Garden State Plaza, one of New Jersey’s largest shopping malls, was used for a key shopping scene where Lumon employees interact in their outie lives. On the surface, a shopping mall might seem like a place of freedom and consumer choice, but in Severance, it takes on a far more unsettling quality. The strange detachment, overly bright lighting, and clinical atmosphere of the mall make it feel alien and unwelcoming, rather than lively. The characters move through the space as though still trapped within the Lumon system, reinforcing the blurring of personal and corporate life. The choice of a modern, sterile shopping mall perfectly aligns with Severance’s themes of artificiality and psychological control. Despite being in the "real world," the mall still feels designed, structured, and monitored—much like Lumon itself. This location underscores the show’s message: even outside Lumon, true freedom is elusive.

7. Bayonne, New Jersey – The Severance Elevator Exterior

The streets of Bayonne, New Jersey, serve as the setting for the crucial entry point into Lumon’s world—the ominous elevator that marks the boundary between an employee’s severed and unsevered consciousness. On the surface, these ordinary city streets might seem like an unlikely choice for a show rooted in sci-fi horror, but the location’s gritty realism creates a stark and chilling contrast to the sterile, artificial world inside Lumon’s walls. In these scenes, we watch as Mark and his fellow outies navigate a mundane, everyday environment—walking down streets, entering buildings, and taking what should be a normal elevator ride. However, this seemingly ordinary commute masks an unnerving transformation, as the characters step into the elevator’s unremarkable metal confines and emerge as completely different people. The choice of Bayonne’s weathered, industrial landscape adds to the theme of duality that runs through Severance. While the city streets feel real, flawed, and alive, they also carry an eerie detachment, as though they, too, are part of a carefully controlled illusion. The elevator itself becomes a metaphor for corporate control, a place where personal agency is erased in seconds, and the person stepping out is no longer the same as the one who entered. The inconspicuous setting of this transition scene emphasizes the hidden horror of severance, reinforcing the show’s disturbing implication: that the most terrifying prisons aren’t always the ones we recognize—they’re the ones hidden in plain sight.

8. Red Hook Grain Terminal – Brooklyn, New York (Surreal Warehouse Sequences)

The Red Hook Grain Terminal, an abandoned industrial complex in Brooklyn, serves as one of Severance’s most visually surreal and psychologically unsettling locations. This massive concrete structure, once a bustling part of New York’s shipping industry, has long been left to decay, creating a space that feels both forgotten and oddly frozen in time—the perfect parallel to Lumon’s own twisted, outdated corporate environment. With its towering silos, darkened hallways, and crumbling infrastructure, the Red Hook Grain Terminal becomes a physical manifestation of corporate neglect and abandonment. It enhances the show’s themes of lost humanity, psychological imprisonment, and the eerie remnants of a bygone era, where workers were once treated as expendable parts of a machine—a fate the employees at Lumon know all too well. The warehouse’s empty vastness and echoing silence give it an almost dreamlike, otherworldly quality. Within Severance, the space is filmed with soft lighting and slow, disorienting camera movements, making it feel detached from reality—as though the characters are walking through a half-forgotten memory, rather than a physical location. The juxtaposition of industrial decay and the cold sterility of Lumon’s corporate world makes the Red Hook Grain Terminal feel timeless and inescapable, reinforcing the show’s haunting vision of an oppressive, all-consuming workplace.

9. Willowbrook Ballroom – Willow Springs, Illinois (The Perpetuity Wing)

The Willowbrook Ballroom, a once-elegant but now ghostly historic dance hall in Willow Springs, Illinois, serves as the bizarre and unsettling setting for Lumon’s Perpetuity Wing—a place where the company’s cult-like devotion to its founder, Kier Eagan, is meticulously preserved. The Perpetuity Wing is meant to be a monument to Lumon’s history, filled with portraits, artifacts, and unsettlingly worshipful displays dedicated to Kier Eagan’s legacy. But rather than feeling inspiring or nostalgic, this space is suffocating, eerie, and deeply unnatural. The choice of the Willowbrook Ballroom, with its high ceilings, faded grandeur, and labyrinthine layout, enhances this feeling of forced reverence and corporate brainwashing. The long hallways, dim lighting, and slightly outdated décor make the space feel like a museum frozen in time, reflecting Lumon’s obsession with controlling both its past and its employees’ perception of reality. The ballroom’s eerily quiet atmosphere further reinforces the isolation and disconnection the employees experience, making the Perpetuity Wing one of the most chilling locations in the series. By using a real-world venue with a history of its own, Severance blurs the line between fiction and reality, making Lumon’s manufactured history feel even more sinister and inescapable.

10. The TWA Hotel – JFK Airport, New York (Corporate Interiors & Break Room Scenes)

The TWA Hotel at JFK Airport, an architectural masterpiece of mid-century modern design, serves as one of Severance’s most visually striking corporate interiors, including portions of the break room and Lumon’s meticulously controlled workspaces. Originally designed by Eero Saarinen in the 1960s, the TWA Hotel is a perfect real-world counterpart to Lumon’s unsettlingly polished aesthetic. The smooth, sweeping curves, sharp geometric symmetry, and cold minimalism of the space create a futuristic yet soulless environment—the ideal setting for a company that treats its workers more like data points than people. The red-carpeted hallways, expansive white interiors, and retro-futuristic furniture give the hotel an almost timeless quality, making it feel simultaneously nostalgic and dystopian. This aesthetic choice reinforces Severance’s core theme of corporate control wrapped in an illusion of comfort. The break room scenes, which are filmed in this space, become even more haunting and surreal against this backdrop. The meticulous, almost too-perfect design of the TWA Hotel mirrors the psychological manipulation at play within Lumon, where employees are expected to blindly accept the company’s fabricated reality.

11. The Portland Building – Portland, Oregon (The Testing Floor & Archives)

The Portland Building, one of the most controversial examples of postmodern architecture in the U.S., serves as visual inspiration for Lumon’s archives and testing floors. With its brutalist-meets-surrealist design, the Portland Building embodies a feeling of cognitive dissonance—it’s both visually striking and deeply disorienting, much like Lumon’s corporate world. Its blocky, geometric shapes and lack of traditional symmetry create a sense of unease and detachment, making it a fitting inspiration for the show’s cold, maze-like workspaces. This location helps reinforce the feeling that nothing in Lumon is quite real, that the company’s sterile, rigidly controlled interiors are meant to keep employees psychologically off-balance, questioning their own sense of reality.

12. Nyack, New York – Mark’s House & Outie World

The picturesque suburb of Nyack, New York, serves as the filming location for Mark’s quiet, grief-laden home, where he struggles with the loss of his wife and the artificial compartmentalization of his life. Unlike the cold, corporate sterility of Lumon, Nyack’s tree-lined streets, cozy houses, and intimate settings should offer warmth and normalcy—but instead, they feel slightly hollow, subtly eerie. The small-town quietness only amplifies Mark’s emotional isolation, reinforcing the idea that even outside of Lumon, he is still trapped in a world shaped by loss and control. The contrast between Nyack’s seemingly peaceful environment and Mark’s psychological turmoil highlights the show’s central theme: that true autonomy may not exist, even beyond the walls of Lumon.

The Haunting Legacy of Severance’s Locations

From stark corporate corridors to unsettlingly serene retreats, the filming locations of Severance play a vital role in shaping its eerie, psychological horror aesthetic. Each space, whether a sterile office or a lonely suburban street, reinforces the show’s themes of control, isolation, and lost identity. The real-world locations used to create Lumon Industries are not just places but psychological battlegrounds, where employees grapple with their severed realities. Whether wandering through endless, windowless hallways or trapped in an outdoor world that feels just as constraining as Lumon’s walls, the characters—and viewers—are constantly reminded that true freedom is an illusion. As Severance continues to captivate audiences, these hauntingly stark filming locations will remain integral to its unsettling, thought-provoking legacy.