The Design Museum is paying homage to Wes Anderson’s pastel perfection in its new exhibition about the filmmaker’s design-focused movies.

Over this three-decade career, the filmmaker has carved out a popular niche in stylistically rich movies that have adoring fans swooning over the appearance as much as they do the plotlines.

Now, from Anderson’s own archive, his uniquely quaint world has come to London.

As an exhibition, it’s going to appeal to the fans, and like all person themed exhibitions, if you’re not a fan it might be a tad hard to know what you’re looking at.

Fortunately, it’s the Design Museum, so this is as much a retrospective of the movies as it is a look at the design process. So expect lots of sketches and scale models, and later in the exhibition, claymation characters.

It’s largely chronological in its layout, from his early experiments to his silent films as a teenager to Hollywood and later to his move into animation.

A major highlight is the monumental 3-metre-wide candy-pink model of the Grand Budapest Hotel, which is one of the largest and most recognisable items in the exhibition.

Other highlights include the vending machines from Asteroid City, the fur coat, behind a protective glass case, worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums, and the original stop-motion puppets from the Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs.

Also on display is Boy with Apple, the ‘priceless Renaissance portrait’ that is unexpectedly inherited by Ralph Fiennes’ character Gustave H in The Grand Budapest Hotel. In reality, the painting is a contemporary work by British artist Michael Taylor, commissioned by Wes Anderson specifically for the film.

As an exhibition, if you love Wes Anderson (platonically of course), then this is a fans delight of a display. For everyone else, it might be as good a gateway drug into his movies as any could be.

The exhibition, Wes Anderson: The Archives, is at the Design Museum until the end of July 2026.

Standard Ticket: £24
Children (5-12): £12
Under 6: Free
Concessions / Students: £18
National Art Pass : £12

Details are here.