Although she won an Oscar for The English Patient (1996), the set decorator Stephenie McMillan, who has died of cancer aged 71, will be best remembered for the creation of the magical world of Harry Potter on film. Stephenie helped to bring JK Rowling's intensely imagined world to the screen across all eight films in the series, from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2001 to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 in 2011.
Directors and cinematographers changed in the course of the series, but the art department that Stephanie and I oversaw remained a constant, providing a real sense of visual continuity. Stephenie's work was always characterised by technical finesse, elegance and wit. She was responsible for the details that brought my vision as production designer to life.
It was Stephenie who organised the thousand-plus chairs into mountains in the Room of Requirement at Harry's school, Hogwarts, and who over a period of three months supervised the makeover of the Great Hall set for the Hogwarts Yule Ball. As she once explained: "The key to set decoration is noticing the little things. You learn through observation. Look around and see what is in a person's room. I always look to see what books people have sitting behind them in interviews. It's the details. Sometimes that means spotting an old art deco bath in a Tunisian market or a kidney-shaped dressing table sitting in a rubbish tip."
Stephenie was born in Chigwell, Essex, to a toy wholesaler, Leslie Gardner, and his wife, Joan. On leaving Woodford high school for girls, she worked as a secretary in the London office of the architects Stillman & Eastwick-Field. It was there, she often said, that she learned to appreciate space and design. She then became a freelance stylist, often working with the photographer Michael Boys, helping to arrange furniture, food and various props for stills photography in interior design magazines. From there she graduated to television commercials, finally entering the film world with the Paul McCartney concept movie Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984).
Stephenie and I worked together on Chaplin (1992) and had our first real success together with The English Patient, the film based on Michael Ondaatje's novel and starring Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas. Before that, she had conjured up the madcap world of A Fish Called Wanda (1988), which briefly made John Cleese a pin-up for middle America. Lighter in tone, but equally funny and hugely successful was Notting Hill (1999), with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, and the highest grossing British film released that year; Chocolat (2000), with Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp; and her last film, Gambit (2012), with Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz.
Stephenie instinctively preferred understatement. The English Patient's bedroom in the deserted monastery is a perfect expression of her talent. In an extremely sparse interior, the chair, the headboard, the diary and the syringe all become very significant and are perfectly judged. For Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands (1993), we gave CS Lewis a small CF Voysey house, appropriately rich in English vernacular architectural detail but made more humble by Stephenie's addition of simple 1950s furniture, fabrics and bookshelves from some previous situation refitted none too well. These were subtleties that cumulatively added much to support the characters and tell their story.
The end of the Harry Potter films did not end our partnership. We worked together on the Harry Potter theme park in Orlando, Florida, and on the exhibition which Warner Bros mounted at Leavesden, the studio where the Potter films were shot. She led the project, a celebration of the sets, in selecting the objects and choosing how to present them. She was the inspiration and mentor to many young people starting a career in the art department.
For our work on Harry Potter, Stephenie and I were jointly nominated for an Academy award in art and set direction four times and Bafta-nominated three times. The series as a whole won the Art Directors Guild contribution to cinematic imagery award in 2012.
Stephenie was twice married, first to the writer Russell Miller and subsequently to the film-maker Ian McMillan. Both marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her partner, the writer Phil Hardy; two daughters, Sasha and Tamsin, from her first marriage; a brother, Richard; and four grandchildren.
• Stephenie Lesley McMillan, set decorator, born 20 July 1942; died 19 August 2013
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