Lights, camera, decor: 10 of the best homes from the movies
Why would someone with so much to hide choose to live in a house made of glass?
That’s the question director Zach Snyder subtly asked when he gave his grim, world-weary Batman (Ben Affleck) a sleek, Mid-century glass-walled home, instead of the creaking gothic pile the character is better known to live in.
In Batman v Superman, the black steel and glass suggests so many contradictory, telling things about the billionaire playboy vigilante who swaps a bespoke Kiton K50 suit for a Kevlar cowl every night.
That’s what the best movie houses do – reflect aspects of the characters living in them. They also become wish-fulfilling fantasies to pin our daydreams on, and it never hurts to daydream.
With that in mind, here are 10 of the best homes in the movies:
Batman’s lakeside cage
There are more than a few spectacular glass homes to choose from in the movies – the historic Ben Rose House, which played Cameron’s loveless family/show home in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; the Victorian home as improbable and impossible as the plot from The Lake House; Bradley Cooper’s stunning Mid-century fishbowl home in A Star Is Born, to name just a couple.
Few can match Batman/Bruce Wayne’s Mid-century dream home in Batman v Superman for cunning visual shorthand, however.
Floating over steel-grey water like a bat gliding over the glittering city, this new Wayne Manor is both playboy’s palace and cold, empty cage, perfect for a man whose life is an endless struggle to reconcile two very different parts of his personality.
Twilight‘s forest fortress
They may have been glittery vampires who’ve inexplicably been going to high school for 90 odd years (seriously, just… think about it), but they sure know how to build a house.
According to Fancy Pants Homes, three properties served as the Cullen’s vampiric retreat, but the one we’re really into is the first Cullen home, which in real life is Hoke House in Portland, Oregon.
Designed by Jeff Kovel of Skylab Architecture, the stunning contemporary home has a tiny footprint for its size – it’s 446sqm ranged over three floors, but the base is not much larger than the average three bedroom home – which “heightens the floating, forested tree-house experience”.
Back to the Future‘s legendary craftsman
California is loaded with sensational period architecture that’s made its way into the movies and TV, from Mrs Doubtfire‘s doughty Pacific Heights Colonial to the Brady Bunch‘s Mid Century charmer in LA to the Full House Town House in San Francisco.
But the Mac Daddy of them all… is Gamble House, in Pasadena. Built in 1908, it served as Doc’s family home in two of the Back To The Future trilogy’s films.
Although it’s only glimpsed briefly – we learn it burnt down in the second film – it symbolises how much Doc gives up to create his greatest invention, the Flux Capacitor that lets him and Marty McFly speed through time in a 1.21 gigawatt guzzling Delorean.
Call Me By Your Name‘s dreamy villa
Who doesn’t love a dreamy Italian villa to set a romance, voyage of self discovery and sexual awakening in?
Think of the Villa d’Este in Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love, Casino Royale and Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones’ use of the Villa Balbianello on Lake Como, and Under The Tuscan Sun‘s glorious Villa Laura. Belissimo!
But the one we really want to fall in love in, the one that makes our heart skip that all important beat, is Villa Albergoni from Oscar Award nominated love story Call Me By Your Name. A match made in romantic heaven, the 17th century home is the perfect location for the most perfect film.
The Amityville Horror‘s haunted classic
Yes. The 1927 Dutch Colonial style home at 112 Ocean Ave, Amityville where Ronald J DeFeo Jr murdered his parents and four siblings is real.
Yes. It’s the same house that was used in the 1974 movie about a house haunted by the ghosts of that terrible tragedy.
No. Ghosts are not real.
The Great Gatsby‘s gaudy gadabout
While the glittering East Egg home of Jay Gatsby (Leonard DiCaprio) from the 2013 version of the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald film wasn’t real – there’s something charming about it being as much of a fantasy as Jay’s idea of Daisy is, right? – the home that inspired Fitzgerald’s excoriating satire on wealth and entitlement is.
According to Forbes, it’s located at Sand’s Point in upstate New York, it has 13 bedrooms and 8 and a half bathrooms, and it sits on 5.33 acres with a 120-metre-long private beach. It also has a tennis court, six-car garage, boat and guest houses and a caretaker’s cottage. Capital!
And in 2017, it could have been yours for $25 million – worst luck, old sport.
The Royal Tenenbaums’ NYC corner pile
These days, Wes Anderson likes to construct his whimsical locations and sets from the ground up, but back in the day he scouted out the most unlikely-looking homes to set his family dramedies in.
The grandest (and my personal favourite in the list) is the Tenenbaum house, bought by absentee dad Royal Tenenbaum “in the winter of his thirty-fifth year” for his family of geniuses and disappointments.
A Victorian, gothic revival mansion in Harlem, New York, Untapped New York says the home was empty when Anderson discovered it, which meant he not only used it for exterior shots, but for interiors too, letting its age and style inform much of the film’s romantic, absurdist character.
Practical Magic‘s magical mansion
Like Jay Gatsby’s pile, the home of the magical Owens women owes its existence to the magic of the movies.
According to betweennapsontheporch.net, it was a shell, built on a scrap of land overlooking the sea on San Juan Island, Washington. It’s still glorious, though.
If you’re looking for a similarly magical home that looks like it must have been created for the movies but is in fact real, check out Hatteras Island’s beach house on stilts. It doubled for the inn in the romantic tale, Nights in Rodanthe, starring Diane Lane. It’s real, and better yet, you can stay there.
Sleepless in Seattle‘s houseboat of love
Who knew living on a house boat in one of the US’s coldest cities could look so cosy?
Who wouldn’t want to move in with Tom Hanks and his kid if it could be this adorable? Who came up with the idea of making a literal house that is also a boat? So many questions, almost none of which are answered in this charming 1993 film.
According to Curbed, the houseboat is a $4.6 million home that I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest might have been out of Hank’s charming widower’s price range in real life.
Parasite‘s monument to mammon
The Seoul home in Academy Award-winning 2019 film Parasite is pretty much everyone’s dream home. From the surface anyway.
Like the idea of real social mobility in the capitalist dystopia we’re all trapped in, however (don’t look at me, that’s director Bong Joon Ho’s entire theme), it’s a fantasy, designed by Bong “from scratch”, according to IndieWire, to fulfil his satirical vision.
Ghost Writer‘s brutalist masterpiece
Another cinematic fantasy that fulfils a grim vision is director Roman Polanski’s brutalist beach bunker in The Ghost Writer that squats like an ominous toad at the heart of this chilly, unthrilling thriller.
According to HomeDesigning.com, the actual set was in Germany, because Polanski is a convicted rapist who fled the US, where he is wanted for evading his conviction. But I digress…
The house is worth noting, however, because it inspired an actual house in Denmark. Part sculpture, part landmark, part home, The Dune House is a far more noble monument than its cinematic inspiration perhaps deserves.
This article originally appeared on stuff.co.nz
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