Yahoo Lifestyle The making of an iconic holiday movie house
There’s nothing cozier than curling up on a December night and watching a holiday movie. And very often the warmth we associate with our favorite films comes from the homes we see on screen.
While we love the characters, their houses bring their own star power and often provide major plot points: the romantic, dilapidated mansion in “It’s a Wonderful Life”; the over-the-top light display in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”; the life-changing home swap of “The Holiday”; and, of course, the iconic brick colonial of “Home Alone.” When the real-life properties featured in these films hit the market, it’s news; tourists still flock to the Chicago suburb of Winnetka to see the “Home Alone” house.
It’s no accident that these homes continue to loom large in our collective imaginations - the set decorators and production designers working behind the scenes understand that it’s the small details that transform a movie set into a believable, lived-in Christmas home. The people responsible for two classics of the genre, “Home Alone” and “The Holiday,” explain how they made it happen.
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‘Home Alone’
“Home Alone” - it’s right there in the name. A family leaves a young son behind when heading to France for a Christmas vacation. Kevin at first luxuriates in having the house to himself and then has to build a set of increasingly intricate booby traps to fell bandits attempting a robbery.
Given the centrality of the home to the plot of the movie, set decorator Eve Cauley, now a professor at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, had her work cut out for her.
“It was a bigger job than most people realize, because we did not film inside the now-famous ‘Home Alone’ house at all,” Cauley writes over email. “What the audience saw as the home’s interior settings were all built sets.” So in addition to breathing life into the set, she also had to ensure that there was continuity between what viewers saw during exterior shots and on set.
“I knew [writer and producer] John Hughes preferred an American, upper middle class traditional look,” Cauley writes. “He did not like much aging on furniture or anything else. He liked his audiences to feel entertained when they went to the movies. He wanted to uplift the audience to feel happy after they left the theatre. To me, this was a warm, well-intentioned gift he gave to the world.” They discussed an aesthetic resembling Colefax and Fowler, the famed British fabric and wallpaper company, only with a Midwestern flair.
Cauley picked out the wallcoverings, décor, furniture (including upholstery fabric), accessories and everything else that appeared on those sets. As when decorating a real home, she began with the big items - furniture, rugs, lamps. She sketched out the placement of the furniture beforehand “to be sure, for example, that I had place[d] the couch or chair in a position that worked best for director Chris Columbus’ blocking with the actors.” Then there’s a second layer of “smalls.”
She savors the third layer, which consists of “tiny details of décor that make a set appear to be real. It may be a pile of mail on a table, socks on the floor in a bedroom, clutter, or a little container of fish food by a fishtank.” If there’s a bar of soap, Cauley will wear it down so it doesn’t look brand new.
Because the “Home Alone” house is full of kids, Cauley’s third layer included multiple moments that made it appear like someone started a task, then got distracted before finishing: a wedged screwdriver over the workbench in the basement and a table with scraps of wrapping paper, tape and scissors in the primary bedroom. “Those tiny human-created details with decorating make a place look real to the audience,” Cauley says.
Cauley also puts herself in the characters’ shoes when she is filling the set with items beyond what the script includes: “I imagine what the inhabitants might have bought, who in the story would have decorated the home or location if it were real, what time period the décor would have been from, gifts they might have received and … art they may have created and kept in their room. I think of how tall the person who lives in a house is when hanging their art on their walls. I unify it all visually with a color palette that feels appropriate for the story and supports the emotions the screenwriter would like the audience to feel at any given point.”
While someone watching the movie will get a yuletide vibe from the house on screen, that person may not realize the full scope of the color scheme. Indeed, the entire place is decked out in holiday colors, down to the green countertops and red cookware in the kitchen. “I selected reds, golds and greens in the wallpapers and upholstery, to feel warm to the audience,” Cauley says. Meanwhile, scenes taking place elsewhere adopted a cooler color palette. That way, the family reunion at the end in the home felt even warmer.
All of this is happening somewhat below the surface. “I pictured a flip book, where the pages go by very quickly. The colors would need to be strong to be caught by the eye within all the moving frames,” she says. So Cauley would have small pops of bright color, like poinsettias. “I call that ‘punctuation’ of bright colors within a more muted overall frame of color. It worked. Audiences didn’t think about my color palette but felt it.”
“I like to keep wallpapers or wall paint colors just a little less intense in color than the costumes, so one’s eye is directed to the actors,” Cauley says.
And when it came to the exteriors, she paid careful attention to the Christmas lights her crew installed throughout the neighborhood. She varied the colors and sizes for visual interest, and then ensured that “the lights on the main house were shining just a bit brighter than the rest on the street, so the audience’s eye (and the burglars!) would be directed in a subtle way to the main home in the story.”
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‘The Holiday’
In “The Holiday,” a woman in Los Angeles and a woman in an English village swap homes to avoid a lonely Christmas, and each of them finds love and a deeper sense of meaning in the other’s abode.
“My job is not to create … what your house ideally should look like,” says Jon Hutman, production designer for “The Holiday” and a frequent collaborator with filmmaker Nancy Meyers. “I think what I’ve always been attracted to is how people actually live in those spaces.” When he’s scouting a location, he’s delighted if the owner didn’t have time to straighten up. That way, he can see how a living room looks when it’s in use.
Because Meyers is a writer and director, “she has an idea of what these places should look and feel like,” he says. “What I do is I read the script and I say, ‘Okay, what happens here?’” So Hutman sets about conveying those elements of character in the homes. He lets these questions from the characters’ perspective guide him: “What is this space that I’ve made for myself to inhabit? How does it reflect who I am? And how does it also reflect what I want, what I lack?” That’s especially important in “The Holiday,” when the homes in question have to be stifling for the person who lives there but thrilling to the person vacationing there.
The home that seems to have stuck with people is the cottage in the English countryside. “You know, we actually built that cottage,” Hutman says. Through a National Trust website, Meyers had found a charming cottage in Herefordshire near Wales. “The cottage was so unbelievably teeny tiny. It was on a big, big estate, and it was four hours from London. There’s no practical way you could bring a crew out there to shoot, so we built our own version of that cottage in Surrey.”
What he sought to translate was that the cottage was a haven: two rooms upstairs and two rooms downstairs with a staircase in between, all nestled under a tree.
Inside, Hutman decorated it shabby chic and infused with a specific French blue shade. They had to get the balance right on the eclectic mix of patterns and furnishings. “The idea was, how do you not just furnish but inhabit this place so that she doesn’t look like a little old lady?” Hutman says. It had to look like Iris, the character who lives there, accumulated all of these items over time, rather than purchasing them all at once. He wanted it to reverberate with a “various and eclectic warmth” and show the British affinity for patterns: “They have a real art with pattern on pattern on pattern on pattern.”
In one scene from the British plotline, the male love interest’s kids have a gorgeous tent in their bedroom. “That was all very specifically designed and detailed and researched,” Hutman says, and ultimately created with “these antique, like, tablecloths and curtains. And, you know, we get very, very specific, right? And I think it shows.”
Just as a cottage felt true to the British countryside, Hutman had to find the equivalent for Los Angeles. At first, he went down the wormhole of the “streamlined colonial, Paul Williams, classic Hollywood house,” he says. “And somehow it was hard to separate that from, let’s say, ‘The Father of the Bride’ house.” He switched gears to a Spanish-style home and landed on a San Marino house designed by iconic L.A. architect Wallace Neff, who used to live there himself. The exterior needed to give a moment of awe when the character first arrives.
Compared with the cottage, the interior had a more minimal palette, “which I love,” he says. “The thing that makes Amanda’s house, I believe, young and modern and timeless is that it’s quite minimal.” Indeed, the only thing he finds outdated when he rewatches the movie is the slew of DVDs in the media room. “Obviously, you know, you would scrap the DVDs now,” he says. “But that was the thing at the time.”
Ultimately, it’s all about tying the home itself and the items within back to its inhabitants. “What makes them cozy is not the shopping list of specific pieces and fabrics and art and tchotchkes, you know, stuff,” Hutman says. “It is how those elements reflect the people who live there.”
Hutman knows that the homes have become a major feature of a Nancy Meyers film but says that “the reason that people love and remember those houses is because of the stories that take place in them.”
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Video: Holiday classics "Home Alone" and "The Holiday" are iconic, not just for the stars and storylines, but for the painstaking set decoration that sets them apart. The Post's Rachel Kurzius talked to some of the creative professionals who brought the magic to this movie homes.(c) 2024 , The Washington Post
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