The Truth About The Holiday Cottage
And loads of other juicy gossip from an ex-villager who knows.
The picture postcard cottage in the Christmas movie The Holiday has become widely recognised as the perfect country idyll. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen an article or a Instagram post about dreams to move there, marry Jude Law and live happily ever after in a quintessential English village covered in snow.
But, is it based on reality? My home was just a field away from its location. We lived in the parish for fourteen years and I was the village hairdresser, so I knew everyone. Let me tell you what I know to be true, but a word of warning: I’m going to burst a few festive bubbles!
The Holiday is a romantic comedy film written, produced and directed by the incredible Nancy Meyers. It was filmed in both England and California and was released on the 8th December 2006. It stars Kate Winslet as Iris and Cameron Diaz as Amanda, two women crossed in love from opposite sides of the Atlantic, who arrange a home exchange holiday to escape their woes during the Christmas and the New Year festivities.
Jude Law plays Graham, Iris’s brother and Jack Black as Amanda’s friend back in California. I’m not going to tell you the rest of the plot just in case you’ve been under a rock for the last 18 years and haven’t seen it. It received mixed reviews on its release, but went on to make $205m and has become a much loved Christmas classic. It seems to me you either love it or hate it, but I’d say if you’re the latter then you need to find your inner tinsel and perhaps pour a schooner of sherry.
So where is that perfect country village? Which lucky devil lives in the cottage of dreams? Can you really scoop up a hot bit of male totty or swap houses with someone in California and how can you get your own little slice of The Holiday this festive season?
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The Village
It’s not in The Cotswolds as so many people seem to think. The parish of Shere lies in the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Beauty just outside Guildford. It serves the villages of Gomshall (where I lived) Peaslake, Holmbury St. Mary, large parts of Abinger Hammer and Shere itself. Two fields separate Gomshall and Shere villages and my daily walk with our dog Missy would take me past the famous cottage location. I used to visit these villages quite often when I was a student in nearby Guildford and always said I would live there one day. It was a real dream come true and some of the happiest years of my life so far.
All of the villages are pretty, but Shere is the only one with a proper high street with cute little shops, cafes and pubs. It is as idyllic as the movie makes out and when snow does actually fall it’s a winter wonderland.
Carols in the Square, on Christmas Eve in Shere, remains to me the perfect start to the festive season and I haven’t found anywhere else that does it better. All the villages join together to sing an hour of carols with mulled wine in hand, each village taking different verses of the carols. It’s wonderful. But before you start scrolling on Rightmove, what I must tell you is that I would never in a million month of Sundays live in the centre of the village. It is completely overrun with tourists, parking is hell and this post probably isn’t going to make that any better.
You also won’t find many deliciously handsome single men like Graham there either, the good ones have all been taken and I moved away, of course. Joking, joking! The parish has a lot of families and a decidedly older population. It’s way too expensive for beautiful single guys. Although if it’s MAMILs you want then half the Middle Aged Men In Lycra of England can be found sporting their shiny attire on their increasingly expensive bicycles and showing off much more than perhaps they should almost every weekend. Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a brilliant place to live, just don’t go moving there looking for lurve.
Many other movies have been filmed there, including Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wedding Date, The Mummy and Beauty and the Beast to name but a few. But, as beautiful as Shere is, many of the scenes purported to be in the village actually were filmed elsewhere and I’ll tell you about that in a moment.
The Green wooden shop building you can see on the high street in the photo above is actually the village lavatories.
The village has one of the best ice cream shops I’ve ever been to. It’s called Shere Delight.
If you are interested in property in the area then go to Terracotta Estate Agents and ask for Nicola. She’s a friend of ours and sold our weatherboard house there.
The famous Silent Pool Gin is made only half a mile away too. You can visit them as part of your pilgrimage.
The Cottage
Get ready, it’s not real! I’m sorry. It is based on a real cottage though, which is Honeysuckle Cottage in Holmbury St. Mary. It was on the market in 2018 for £650,000. The production company did extensive research to try and find the perfect cottage for Iris to live in, but the one they found was four and a half hours away from London and too isolated. They eventually found an empty field on a hill overlooking St. James Church in Shere and decided to build the shell of Rosehill Cottage there, where all of the exterior shots of Iris’s house were filmed.
It took four days to build the cottage and just under a month to landscape the area, planting trees, building the stone walls and making it look like it had been there for hundreds of years. The exterior was so realistic that many people tried to buy the cottage. I know because I was the village hairdresser and all the estate agents were my clients. They recalled how they had countless enquiries and it became quite a chore having to tell people over and over that it wasn’t a real house. In any case, being in the middle of a field it would have never have received planning permission from the borough, or the very strict parish council. Just getting a dormer window is hard enough, believe me I know!
Inside the cottage it was just a shell. All the internal scenes were filmed in Sony Studios in Culver City, California. The interior set was actually based on the interior of the real Honeysuckle Cottage in Holmbury St. Mary.
One other point: there’s a cottage on Instagram, which often gets mistaken for Iris’s house and perhaps that’s why people still think it’s real. The home of Bee Osborn of Osborn Interiors in the photo below has many similarities to the set, but notice it has a thatched roof!
This is a free post for all, but my upcoming Christmas Gift Guide, my special guide for preparing ahead for the season and my festive decor ideas will all have paywalls. Consider becoming a paid member. It takes a hell of a lot of time and effort to write all this for you all. You get a lot of bang for your buck! The annual fee is a good £20 less than paying monthly.
Amanda’s scary driving scene
Amanda takes a trip to get supplies in Iris’s stick shift right-hand-drive Mini down an incredibly narrow and winding single track country lane. She is visibly scared to death when a vehicle is coming toward her with seemingly nowhere for her to pass. These lanes, which are cut deep into steep hills with over-arching trees on both sides, making them very dark and a tad scary, were originally created by and for farmers and their horses and cattle. They were never ever designed for the multitude of cars and lorries that try to use them now.
This scene always makes us laugh as we know full well how difficult they were to circumnavigate when we first moved there. Every now and again there are ‘passing places’, but you’d be surprised at the amount of Chelsea Tractors ( oversized 4x4 vehicles) with one little school girl in the backseat called Jemima, that don’t have a clue how to reverse into these tiny lay-bys. It was actually a form of entertainment for quite a few of my local female clients, all perfectly used to manoeuvring in such tight spaces. One lady used to turn her engine off and just sit there with a bag of crisps waiting and laughing.
It’s not certain which lane was used for this scene, however I believe it was the lane we moved to in 2013 in Abinger Hammer. I could be wrong, but it is remarkably similar. Incidentally, when Amanda screeches into the village high street filled with happy christmas shoppers at the end of that lane, she is not, in reality, in the village of Shere.
The High Street scene and The Village Shop
Why Nancy Meyers didn’t use Shere for this scene I don’t know. It would have been so much easier considering they had already covered the village in faux biodegradable snow and altered the look of all the shops. The green grocer at the time would have been perfect in my mind, or perhaps the old tea room, which is now The Dabbling Duck Tearoom. But, they chose Church Street in Godalming, another larger town in Surrey about eight miles from Shere, where I also lived in my middle twenties. The shop scene was filmed in what was a candle shop at the time. I believe it’s now a barbershop.
Little known fact: Godalming was the first town in the world to have electric street lighting in 1881.
Graham’s House
The exterior scenes were filmed at a real home, which was Mill House in Wonersh, another Surrey Hills village some six miles from Shere. The inside shots were all filmed in a studio in California. Incidentally, the New Year’s Eve scene in Graham’s home was one of the first to be filmed and the only time that all four main actors were on the same set. Each couple effectively made their own movie.
The date scene at the mansion
This is why so many people think it was all filmed in The Cotswolds. Amanda and Graham go on a drive through the countryside to an old English manor to have lunch. It was filmed at Cornwell Manor, which is a beautiful country estate in Chipping Norton. This is the only scene in The Cotswolds.
The Pub scene
Guess what? The pub is a real bonafide watering hole and it is actually in Shere! It’s The White Horse and is a lovely pub to go for a pint. We would gather on Christmas Eve for the carols just outside it. There is a second pub in the village - The William Bray, which up until the time we moved away in 2020, had much better food.
Little known fact: The Bray family estate, which still owns huge swathes of Shere Parish, has been in existence since 1485. A diary of Sir William Bray covering 1754-55, was found in a garden shed in 2007. In it he records playing Base Ball somewhere near Guildford. It is the earliest ever known reference to the game in existence.
Other classic movie moments and facts
Amanda is rudely dropped off outside the church by her driver because the road to the cottage is not passable due to heavy snowfall. In real life there is only a very narrow, steep and muddy public bridleway that takes you up from St. James Church to the fields above. She begins to walk down the driveway passed the church, which actually takes you to the estate offices and is a dead-end lane.
Amanda’s running scene near the end of the film, when she finally realises she needs to be with Graham took over a week to film. In the script it was only a four line description. They filmed Cameron Diaz running towards the cottage in various locations, of which all bar one were nowhere near the field. She is seen running across a bridge, which crosses the Tillingbourne. In reality she is actually running out of the village in the opposite direction to the field towards the A25. The long snowy lane is called Lime Walk and is actually down past the village allotments and again she is running out of the village toward Little London. It’s called Little London because the original settlers had fled London to escape The Black Death.
It snowed three times in Shere and the surrounding fields and villages during the shoot. The film crew had already hired snow machines because they hadn't counted on any snow. All of the wider shots and aerial views are showing real snow and boy it can snow there! 2009 and 2010 were the heaviest I remember. We were stuck for weeks at home and although the villages are relatively close to civilisation, the snow causes havoc because of all the steep hills.
The filming location for Amanda's house in California was the San Marino estate at 1883 Orlando Rd. This luxurious property was sold in early 2018 for $11.8 million (£8.7 million). While the exterior shots were taken at the actual location, the interior scenes were filmed at a Sony Studio.
The parish didn’t actually receive that much money for its location services. They were paid what they asked for, but if I ever moved back there I would want the job of parish location shoot agent. If it had been me back then I would have definitely made sure that the high street christmas decorations and lights were thrown in as part of the deal. It would have been great to see those every year and be reminded of the film.
The DVD was released a year later in 2007. It contains special features 'with a 20 minute documentary of the filming. Worth buying for diehard fans.
How can you experience your own little slice of The Holiday?
Up until recently you could actually rent out Honeysuckle Cottage in Holmbury St. Mary, but unfortunately it has been removed from Airbnb. However, there is a lovely little guesthouse called Rookery Nook, in the centre of Shere, where you can stay and get that festive holiday feel. You can walk in the footsteps of the stars who featured in the film and even sit on the same seat as Jude Law in the White Horse, or run down Lime Walk just as Cameron Diaz did. Can’t promise the snow though.
Can you really swap houses for a holiday?
Yep, you sure can. Take a look at: Home Exchange first of all. It is the actual website that Iris and Amanda use in the movie. Also try The Guardian Home Exchange. Another is Third Home - although for this website you’ll need to already own a second home to qualify.
So who’s watching The Holiday this evening? Hope I’ve got you in a Yuletide mood. Until next time, stay merry and bright!
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This is probably the best post I’ve ever read and will ever read, JP! I don’t think the words do it justice when I say this is my favourite film ever.
I watch it at least once a week 🤣 I don’t care if it sounds silly and I won’t bore you with why, but it holds a lot of significance and meaning to me.
Thank you so so for sharing some behind the scenes that I’ve never seen before - I’m quite literally giddy with excitement.
Love this !!! Always a popular film in our house , so much so that my elderly mother-in-law tried to smuggle the DVD out in her luggage after a Christmas visit 😂😂😂