One of the first movies I featured on my blog, back in 2008, was The Holiday, starring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, and several really great houses. But that was before I had learned how to lighten photos from movies that were too dark, or get the ones I really wanted by taking screenshots.
So I’m calling a do-over. I’m featuring the movie sets again but with more–and better!–photos for you this time.
Today I’m featuring Iris’s cottage. Next Monday I’ll feature Amanda’scontemporary home in California. Oh, and I already updated my post about Graham’s house, which you can see here (I replaced all the dark and fuzzy photos with clearer, lighter ones–makes it easier to ooh and ahh over the fairytale tent in the girls’ room now!).
This is the ad that Cameron Diaz’s character Amanda sees online for the cottage. It’s part of a “house swapping” program, where you stay free at someone else’s place while they’re at yours.
The Entry:
Living Room:
In this photo, the mantel seems to be decorated for summer:
And here you can see it decorated for Christmas:
The Kitchen:
Lovely stills of the sets courtesy Columbia Pictures. They’re wonderful because they show us details in the rooms that weren’t shown in the movie itself, like the raised beamed ceilings in the bedroom.
Looking from the Kitchen into the Book-Lined Library:
This may be my favorite room in the entire cottage, but we see very little of it in the movie:
Iris’s Bedroom:
From this angle, we can see that the stairs lead straight up to the bedroom and are open to it:
It was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, who always delivers sets that we can drool over. Thanks to her movies, we also have the memorable houses from Baby Boom, It’s Complicated, and Something’s Gotta Give (click those links to see photos of them).
The Bathroom:
It looks charming, but it isn’t very practical–at least not for someone as tall as Cameron Diaz!
Producers chose the picturesque streets of Shere (in Surrey) for the village scenes:
They wanted snow so it would look more like Christmas time, so they added it:
Sadly, Iris’s cottage isn’t real. A fake exterior was built within 2 weeks in the middle of an empty field (photos via the DVD’s Special Features):
They did extensive landscaping around the cottage, even though little of it is shown in the film, and most of what you do see is covered in (fake) snow:
The film crew created everything that you see in the movie, down to the stone wall that seems to have been there forever:
Here’s how it looked in the movie:
Cottages don’t get much cozier than this!
Come back next week to see photos of Amanda’s beautiful contemporary house in L.A. You can see photos of Graham’s Mill House now, though–no waiting!
Visit TV/Movie Houses to see more, like the ones from A Christmas Storyand The Family Stone.
