“Home is where the heart is. It’s also the place where it can be broken.” So said Claire Fraser (Caitríona Balfe) in Outlander Season 7, when Fraser’s Ridge, the North Carolina settlement she and dutiful husband Jamie (Sam Heughan) share, burned to the ground.
When the Frasers finally return to the spot in Outlander Season 8, things will look a bit different, and they will find themselves in a place that production designer Mike Gunn calls “Christieville.”
“Jamie and Claire are building their new home, and to be able to furnish and facilitate that home, we wanted to create a small, bustling community,” Gunn says. “So we created a trading place and marketplace where people from all environments could come to Christieville. It gave us an excuse to explain, ‘Where did Jamie and Claire get their provisions?’”
Starz Entertainment
Unfortunately for Jamie and Claire, the post is overseen by old nemesis Hiram Crombie (Antony Byrne) and new baddie Capt. Charles Cunningham (Kieran Bew), neither of whom are fans of the Frasers. So it’s no surprise when Gunn says the crew was inspired by spaghetti Westerns (like Clint Eastwood‘s 1966 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) when building those sets.
“I wanted to envisage the Man With No Name [Eastwood] striding through the marketplace. There’s a scene with Jamie this season that echoes that,” Gunn teases.
Starz Entertainment
With threats all around them, and after angry settlers attacked their last home, Jamie is feeling fiercely protective of Fraser’s Ridge No. 2. Gunn says the goal was to build the new house — which took five months from the ground up — “on a site where Jamie could defend it and see people coming from all directions.”
The new site is on the crest of a hill, with an extended upper balcony, “so that you could circumnavigate the top of the house,” he says. Still, it’s not a fort but a home, the designer promises: “The new house is the phoenix out of the flames of the old house, of their love, their relationship, their life together, so it needed to encapsulate that.”
Sounds pretty sweet to us.
Outlander, Season 8 Premiere, Friday, March 6, 8/7c, Starz
For more inside scoop on the final episodes of Outlander, straight from the Season 8 set, pick up a copy of TV Guide Magazine’s Farewell Outlander Collector’s Issue, available at Outlander.TVGM2026.com and on newsstands now.
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Originally published on tvinsider.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
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