The Real-Life ‘Severance’ Office Building: 4 Things to Know

• “Severance,” an office thriller show, is partially filmed at a real office in suburban New Jersey.
• The office, Bell Works, was originally Bell Labs, a historic incubator for telephone technology.
• Today the building is a mixed-use development with office space, stores, and restaurants.

Lumon Industries, the fictional employer at the center of the workplace thriller “Severance,” is probably not anyone’s ideal employer.

In the Apple TV+ series starring Adam Scott, Lumon is a cultlike biotechnology company that employs some “severed” workers. These employees undergo a procedure to separate their consciousness into an “outie,” who goes about life outside of work, and an “innie,” who toils away in the basement on mysterious tasks. As a result, the innies’ restrictive workspace is the only world they’ve ever known.

Workers at the 60-year-old office complex where parts of the show are filmed, however, have the option to order caviar service and mezcal Negronis at its on-site restaurant and bar.

Bell Works, in Holmdel, New Jersey, a township about 30 miles south of Newark, was once a hub of technological innovation. Formerly Bell Laboratories, the 2 million-square-foot building was designed by the famed architect Eero Saarinen for a division of AT&T and opened in 1962.

There, scientists researched and developed technologies for phones and other devices. In 2015, though, it was transformed into a walkable complex of modernized offices and restaurants, bars, shops, and more.

While Bell Works may still look huge and monolithic, its interior is more bustling and alive than the show’s sterile and mundane aesthetic suggests.

Here are four facts about the office building used as a filming location for “Severance.”

Only parts of Lumon’s office were filmed at Bell Works

“Severance” features Bell Works’ exterior and entrance, as well as its actual parking lot. Its central skylit atrium also appears in a few scenes.

The rest of the show was filmed in New York on several sound stages, according to Curbed.

The production designer Jeremy Hindle built the interior of the office — including the narrow hallways and the iconic green carpet — from the ground up.

“Green is the most common color to your eye, like that’s the theory that it’s calming, it makes you feel calm,” Hindle told Variety in 2022. “Some of the colors, the theories were kind of who they are as characters and what they needed to survive. I think green is something you need to survive.”

Related stories

The original Bell Labs building was a tech incubator

While nobody in the show knows what Lumon Industries’ severed employees really do, we have records of the developments that have emerged from work in the Bell Labs building.

From 1962 to 2007, the Bell Labs building had more than 6,000 employees — including a few Nobel Prize winners — who were responsible for many technological innovations.

The theory for the laser, as well as the Big Bang theory, originated in the Bell Labs building. It’s also the location of the receiving end of the first cellphone call.

Bell Labs is now a mixed-use development called Bell Works

Inside, the Bell Works building is nothing like the office in “Severance.” It’s also much changed from its original look, thanks to some recent renovations.

A New Jersey firm called Inspired by Somerset Development purchased it in 2013 for $27 million with plans to modernize the outdated and unused office building.

“The greatest experiment is yet to come for these walls, and that is the ability of a community to come together,” the company’s president, Ralph Zucker, told NJ.com in 2013. “This building will be repurposed as a place for living.”

Inspired renamed it Bell Works. More than 70 vendors have set up shop there, including restaurants, a bar, an indoor golf simulator, and an ice cream shop. There are also fitness franchises and a basketball court.

Tenant companies include the local utility Jersey Central Power & Light, the HR recruiting software iCIMS, and the insurer Guardian Life. Bell Works also hosts conferences and events.

Bell Works’ website calls it a “Metroburb,” which it defines as “a little metropolis in suburbia.”

The show spent almost 5 times as much money filming the 2nd season in New Jersey

The budget for the second season of “Severance” is nothing to sniff at.

NJ.com reported that while the show in its first season spent $5.1 million filming in New Jersey, for its second season it spent more than $24 million over three years filming there.

Other filming locations in the state included Kings Landing, a condominium complex in Middletown, and part of Palisades Interstate Park in Alpine, which overlooks the Hudson River.

Further north, Phoenicia Diner in the Catskills was used to film scenes at Pip’s Bar & Grille.

Palmer Haasch contributed reporting to this story.