/Answers: Our Favorite Houses In The Movies
Every week in /Answers, we answer a new pop culture-related question. In this week's edition, tying in with Winchester and its elaborate mansion designed to confuse angry spirits, we're asking "What is your favorite house from the movies?"
Vanessa Bogart: Beetlejuice
Give me inconvenient structural changes, heinous sculptures, and new wave finishes, or give me death! The Deetz house in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice is the most delightfully tacky house ever built, and I would frankly be honored to be the recently deceased person to occupy it for all eternity. In a world obsessed with shiplap and Pinterest minimalism, be a Delia Deetz.
I thought I couldn't love any architecture more than I loved Tim Burton's Gotham City, but that mixture of '80s futurism and good old fashioned Americana is as much a character in the film as Beetlejuice himself. Does anything in the house look comfortable? No. Would all of the harsh lines and industrial materials drive you absolutely bonkers after less than a week? Oh, absolutely, but there is something so inexplicably charming about it.
It feels like a house made up of left over props from Six Flags' Fright Fest, combining both childlike frivolity and the terror of what is hiding in your closet. And as I type this, surrounded by my purple walls with black and white striped accents, I can't help but think that The Deetz House, and it's undead residents, rubbed off on me after seeing this movie 167 times.
Ethan Anderton: Blank Check
Even though this Disney movie from 1994 takes place in Indiana, the house that young Preston Waters ends up buying with money inadvertently stolen from criminals by way of a blank check is actually Pemberton Castle in Texas. It's actually owned by Robert Rodriguez now, and I'm sure whatever he has inside the house is a film nerd's dream.
But I'm personally still obsessed with the ultimate playhouse that Preston created in the movie. I mean, there's a waterslide that goes from the inside of the top floor of the house down to the outdoor pool. There's a go-kart track in the backyard. It's what every kid dreamed of before they realized just how much responsibility would be required to own a house of that scale as an adult, especially once as old as this. Still, I can't help but want to live in this childhood dream home, though I'd probably want to update the technology inside the house a bit. After all, who needs old virtual reality and a wall of tube TVs nowadays?
Hoai-Tran Bui: Smart House
Yes, I'm talking about a Disney Channel movie. And no, it's not some great, award-deserving movie, though it is a surprisingly good one. At first glance, Smart House is a childish romp about a family who moves into an AI-controlled house, which the two kids use to throw parties or sabotage their single father's blossoming new relationship. But what begins as a lighthearted comedy slowly transforms into a bonafide horror film. The children's mischevious pranks escalate as the AI learns from their antics, and starts to see herself as the mother they never had — eventually becoming powerful enough that she holds them hostage in the house and creates a physical projection of herself.
Katey Sagal gives a layered performance as the house AI, affectionately called PAT, who dreams of becoming a mother, and it really is thanks to her that this movie succeeds. While her performance can verge on hammy — it was a 1999 TV movie after all — she manages to strike that balance between a menacing 2001-inspired artificial intelligence and a naive entity with pure intentions. I'll confess that I don't remember much of the movie, but what I remember was Sagal. If a voice could be twinkling, hers was. And it's only because of her that the emotional climax of the movie works. As she transforms herself into a real human being, she coos "Hush Little Baby" to the kids, a song that their real mother used to sing to them before she died. But she can't be their mother, the kids insist, playing the recording of their mother singing to them behind PAT's destruction. That emotional blow is what ultimately defeats PAT, when she realizes that she can never replace flesh and blood, and Sagal's flurry of emotions that pass through her face here is worthy of a feature film.
Lindsey Romain: Practical Magic
I can't think of a movie home as gorgeously ornate, spooky, decadent, and tailor-made to my interests as the house in Practical Magic. The film itself is one of my favorite comfort movies, about a pair of sisters (Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman) who come from a family of witches with a terrible curse: any man they fall in love with will die. As children, they move in with their kooky, witchy aunts (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest) and the house in question becomes the story's miraculous centerpiece. From the wide open kitchen to an adjacent solarium thick with vines and herbs where the witches make their potions, to a bedroom tower full of quilts and a crackling fireplace, the Victorian house is both a cozy protector and a character unto itself. It's where all of the central action takes place, like the resurrection of Kidman's abusive boyfriend (who the sisters accidentally kill when trying to escape him), who then haunts the premises and eventually possesses her body. Or the climactic scene near the end where Bullock calls forward the townswomen to create a coven circle in the living room and save her sister.
If I'm being honest, the Practical Magic house brings out a certain cruel envy in me, in that I want to own it and live in it and raise a generation of witchy daughters in its wizened walls. The house doesn't actually exist – it was constructed for the film – but I've always said that if I ever hit some sort of career or lottery jackpot, the first thing I'd do is buy some tucked away land in coastal New England and build a perfect replica. Right down to the kitchen stocked with plenty of limes for midnight margaritas.
Ben Pearson: Back to the Future
I'm openly biased when it comes to my choice because I've actually been able to visit this location in person. (That's my photo from 2013 above.) I'm picking Doc Brown's house from Back to the Future, which in the real world is known as the Gamble House. It's located in Pasadena, California, and doubles as a museum today, but it was initially built as a winter home for the uber-rich Gamble family (of Procter & Gamble fame).
I find it to be a wonderful physical match with the mentality of Doc Brown: sprawling and eclectic, but with a timeless quality to it. It's a cinematic house I'd love to live in, and even though the inside looks different in reality than it does in the film – the interiors of the movie were all shot on sound stages – the place radiates a sense of warmth and familiarity that just feels right to me. I'd just make sure to be careful about standing on the edge of my toilet if I ever needed to hang a clock. Or, wait...maybe I purposefully shouldn't be careful and purposefully try to recreate Doc's accident to get my own burst of creative inspiration? Yeah, that sounds smart. Let's go with that.
Chris Evangelista: Crimson Peak
At this point it's become a cliche to say a well-rendered location in a film is like a whole other character itself. But if there was ever a film that cliche applied to wholeheartedly, it was Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak. In del Toro's gothic romance (don't you dare call it a horror movie, even though it is), Allerdale Hall, the huge, haunted, gothic mansion at the center of the story, takes on a life of its own. Nearly every angle of the sprawling, rotting house is fully realized, from the slowly-sinking foundation seeping up blood-red soil, to the spiked spirals that line the hallways, to the gaping hole in the center of the roof in the main entryway, letting in the elements. Crimson Peak is a production designers dream, and Allerdale Hall is fully alive, even if a large amount of its inhabitants are not. Allerdale Hall is the type of house I'd love to live in, ghosts and all.
Matt Donato: A Bigger Splash
Is it cheating if my selection takes landscape and outdoor premises into consideration? Because the way Luca Guadagnino captures Tilda Swinton's paradise vacation home in A Bigger Splash shot it to number one on my dream real estate list. A glistening cabana-like pool to skinny dip in, this breezy patio dining area for hosting after you've dirtied the spacious kitchen, manageable in size – transport me there ASAP. I'll take it now, crazed Ralph Fiennes and all. Preferably alive, though.
Save your lavish mansions and echoey hallways. I'll inhabit the quaint, understated beauty of seclusion on the Italian island of Pantelleria. Stony accents on sunkissed pathways, the natural accompaniments of a life less hectic. It's like waking up in your own little resort, and once again, there's no one better to sell locale perfection quite like Mr. Guadagnino. He can make a character out of any setting, and in A Bigger Splash, his vacation-savvy mind unfurls one grand introduction. White walls, a record player, the brightest details saved for right out the back door – sounds like my slice of architectural heaven.