Noein was the only Satelight show that I found appealing until I watched
Ikoku Meiro no Croiseé. You'll find some interesting postings in the
thread here by one of the
animators and some links to a
blog containing preliminary artwork. They invested an enormous amount of effort in re-creating 19th century Paris. Luckily for them a lot of buildings from that period still exist today, though apparently they also relied on antique postcards as well.
I can't recall ever seeing anyone who actually worked on an anime series post in a thread here before.