“Little Fires Everywhere” presented big challenges everywhere for production designer Jessica Kender, starting with having to recreate 1997 Shaker Heights in 2019 southern California.

Kender had some firsthand knowledge to draw from for her work on the series, which is available on Hulu. Her father grew up in greater Cleveland, and Kender regularly visited her grandmother, who lived near Drew Carey’s mom in Brooklyn.

“My dad is one who loves to reminisce,” she said during a telephone interview. “He’d take us driving through Cleveland. I felt I knew the people who lived there.”

Kender also made a trip to Shaker Heights to scout the locations that inspired Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel about the increasingly tense relationship between two mothers — one white and wealthy (Elena, played by Reese Witherspoon), one African-American and more bohemian (Mia, played by Kerry Washington) — with very different parenting styles.

“When we came out, we had a couple of core places we wanted to visit,” Kender said. “We wanted to get into the high school, and they were super welcoming about having us there. I wanted to see where our two heroes’ thoughts were, where Elena’s and Mia’s houses were. We made a big point of hitting those neighborhoods and driving around.

“Once we covered those main things, where is the main square of Shaker Heights? Where would you go out to have a bonfire? Where would the kids hang out if they were going to take a stroll, teenagers in love, what would that look like? Because we knew we were going to have to recreate that in LA, what does that outside life look like? Inside life we can create on a soundstage. If I’m doing my job right, you shouldn’t know it’s a soundstage.”

Finding architecture to mirror the majestic homes of Shaker Heights wasn’t difficult, although though the director had to be careful of the angles used so the Spanish-style home two doors down didn’t make it in the shot.

They also added local touches to the interior design, like an old Cleveland Indians pennant on a wall in Elena’s house and a box of Jack Frost Donuts in the office of the small Shaker Heights newspaper where Elena works.

“My dad always lived close to that doughnut shop on Pearl Road, and we got permission to reprint their boxes,” Kender said.

Mia is an artist, and one element integral to the design of the show was recreating her work. Some pieces are discussed in great detail in the novel, like the “spider woman” manipulated photograph that hangs in the apartment that Mia and her daughter rent from Elena. Other works were written into the television episodes.

“We actually ended up hiring an artist who is an L.A. female, black artist,” Kender said. “Being the art behind Mia, there are certain things we wanted to accomplish with that art … Here are the constraints. Show us what you’ve got, and she took that and developed it further. When she came to the interview with us, she already used a bunch of the techniques that were in the book and we incorporated into the script.”

Kender has been a television production designer since 2005 and worked in the art department on several shows before that. Ironically, she grew up in a house in New Jersey where her parents never had a television. Her father was a computer scientist and her mother was an environmental engineer, and they wanted to encourage reading over television.

“I think this might be my greatest rebellion,” Kender said.

When she got her first production design job on the CBS series “Medium,” starring Patricia Arquette, her parents got a 13-inch television that they kept in a box in the attic, except for when the show aired. Mom would watch the credits to see her daughter’s name, but then turned it off because she found the show “too scary,” Kender said.

“Medium” and other shows Kender has worked on did around 20 episodes a year. “Little Fires Everywhere” only is eight episodes (number five became available on Wednesday), but required nearly as much work. “Little Fires” took between eight and nine months while a 20-episode network show has a 10-month schedule.

“They really were committed to the project,” she said. “When I’m on a typical show, we do eight days of shooting (per episode). On this we’d go up to 11 or even 14 days of shooting for one episode, and there was more time given to get ready for each of those episodes.

“I particularly love this show because they were very open and gave you the support to be really creative, which was exciting.”