From Groundhog Day to Wuthering Heights: what it’s like to live in a famous house
We are used to estate agents boasting about south-facing gardens and excellent catchment areas. But some homes offer a truly unique selling point – a prized claim to cinematic, literary or musical immortality. Last month, “one of the most iconic movie residences in American pop culture” went on the market – the five-bedroom, six-bathroom Georgian-style dwelling of Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister in 1990’s Home Alone. The property in the Chicago suburbs was listed for $5.25 million (￡4 million) and was snatched up within a week. But what is it like to live in a piece of cultural history?
Groundhog Day
Lori Miarecki lives in and runs the five-bedroom Cherry Tree Inn B&B in Woodstock, Illinois, with her husband George, which she bought in 2017 for $695,000 (￡550,554). It was used as the setting for the 1993 fantasy romcom Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s weatherman Phil Connors wakes up every morning to find it is 6am on February 2.
“We stayed at the B&B as guests in 2017. I spent three days planning everything I would do with the house if it were mine. On the fourth day, I found out it was for sale, and said “How much?”
The previous owners had giant “No Trespassing” signs everywhere around the house. The first thing I did was have my son rip them all out and we opened the front gate. The next day we gave four tours. I get my joy out of making other people happy and if people are willing to get on an aeroplane and fly to Chicago and then drive here, I’m keen to show them around.
In the film, it is called the Cherry Street Inn, but we changed it to Cherry Tree Inn because my husband was afraid we’d be sued.
Groundhog Day was actually the first thing we spoke about on our first date. He is from Woodstock, where it was filmed, and I am from Pennsylvania, where it’s set. But we had no idea how big of an impact the movie was going to have on our lives.
Actor Stephen Tobolowsky (Ned Ryerson) and the writer Danny Rubin have both stayed here, but we never tell guests so they never know who they’re going to be sitting next to at breakfast. I have a strange life – I can text celebrities, and they text me back.
Every room has a DVD player and a copy of the film. In the parlour, we’ve got a cabinet that’s filled with gifted memorabilia. And we have one of the Groundhog Day alarm clocks, which guests can borrow to make YouTube videos.
We also filmed another movie here this past year, Reporting for Christmas. Three days after it was released, in November, I had 14 phone calls and we have people booking out into December.
We’ve never had any problems that have anything to do with Groundhog Day. Its appeal is that if you’re a good, kind person, your life will dramatically improve. So most of the people are coming here because that’s a philosophy that they live by.”
Far From the Madding Crowd
Katharine Butler lives in Waterston Manor near Puddletown in Dorset – the inspiration for Weatherbury Farm in Thomas Hardy’s 1874 hit novel Far from the Madding Crowd. She bought the Grade I-listed property in 2007 for over ￡4m. It includes eight bedrooms, a stable cottage, squash courts, an orchard, two swimming pools and a croquet lawn.
“The novel wasn’t a reason to buy it by any stretch of the imagination – it’s just a very exceptional, beautiful house – though the estate agent definitely made a thing about the Hardy connection as something supposedly bringing value.
But it affected me once I’d moved in, when I reread the book. It’s interesting seeing the layers of unreality in your hard everyday existence – being in a house that was sort of famous, but famous for being in a fiction. Nothing historical actually happened here.
There are reports Hardy played in the grounds as a child and there are hints that he might have had a bit of a soft spot for one of the daughters of the family that was here, so I think he probably knew it pretty well.
When the 2015 film with Carey Mulligan was being made, the director came here with an entourage of women with clipboards and sashayed around the garden. Then he declared it wasn’t quite right – which was amusing because obviously it was right! But it didn’t have the hill view he wanted.
Before we put in an electric gate, we would have people frequently just driving in and gazing at it. The Thomas Hardy Society comes here quite often and one of their chief preoccupations seems to be trying to work out in smaller and smaller detail exactly where things happened. There’s a lot of humming and hawing about which window it was that the heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, paid all the farmhands out of.
Two summers ago, they were so inspired, one of the group got his pipe out à la the hero Gabriel Oak and played a jig, to which they all got up and did a wonderful English folk dance.
I had a Ukrainian family living with me at the time. They’d never seen anything so bizarre and I think they thought these people were completely mad. The house definitely inspires people’s more poetic and exuberant natures, but it’s just a delight to see people appreciating its beauty.”
Wuthering Heights
Bola Ranson lives in Wuthering Heights, a six-bedroom Victorian property in Eltham, south-east London, that was home to Kate Bush between 1985 and 2003 – and named after her 1978 debut single. The property investor bought it for ￡1.9 million in 2019 and calls it home, with his wife and three children. A large wrought-iron “Wuthering Heights” sign installed by the owner in between Bush and Ranson is still up on the front gate.
“The property was quite old and needed a significant refurb. The top floor was Kate Bush’s dance studio, with mirrors everywhere, which we turned into my son’s bedroom. It did cross my mind to keep it as a piece of pop history, and it was a little bit painful watching the decorators start to strip the stuff off the walls. But the architects couldn’t think of a way to keep that while still having a space that people would want to use.
Kate hasn’t lived here for 20 years, but we still get her fan mail – probably a dozen letters a year. Some are just addressed to “Kate Bush, Wuthering Heights”, but it has a way of finding us. We pass them on to her brother, who lives close by.
We still get people posing outside the gates and taking pictures. They usually don’t know that we’re watching them on the doorbell camera and if we do turn up, they’re usually quite embarrassed. I’ve also had people walk into the compound as if it’s a museum.
Two years ago, I couldn’t figure out why there were suddenly kids of 15 and 16 posing as well. Then I found out that Running Up That Hill was at number one after featuring in season four of Netflix series Stranger Things. I sat down with my daughter and watched the whole series. I actually thought it was brilliant.
The song Wuthering Heights and the book that inspired it are set on the Yorkshire moors. I’ve never been, so am not entirely sure what they’re like, but there is green all around us.
This property backs on to a golf club, there are a lot of trees around here and you’ve even got a bird sanctuary around the corner. You can walk into the garden and hear the birds whistling.
When I was at school, her songs were the soundtrack of the Eighties. But before, she was just another artist that you’d see on Top of the Pops. Since moving here, there’s a lot more meaning to it. I definitely have a softer spot for her now.”
Atonement
Caroline Magnus has lived at Stokesay Court since inheriting the country house in Onibury, Shropshire, in 1992, from her aunt, Jewell Magnus-Allcroft. It has remained in the same family, through marriage, since it was completed in 1892. It was used as the location for the Tallis house (occupied by the characters played by Keira Knightley and Saoirse Ronan) in the 2007 movie adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel Atonement.
“I only discovered my inheritance when I came back from work in London one day and there was a long brown envelope on the floor with a copy of a will in it. I was in total shock for a week and then a state of semi-shock for about six months. I was 40 and living in a semi-detached house in Shepherd’s Bush.
Stokesay Court was pretty bleak. The roof leaked – you had to go round and literally put the buckets underneath – and the wiring was pretty non-existent. Sadly, I had to auction all the contents to afford to make the house habitable.
I always hoped a film producer would come along – and I knew they’re always looking for “new” properties that haven’t been used before. The makers of Atonement found us when they were going through old copies of Country Life. I had absolutely no hesitation. I was just thinking this was too good to be true.
They did quite a lot of decorating rooms that otherwise would never have been decorated. The wallpaper in one of the bedrooms was just fabulous – I said, I’ll keep that. But they covered another in nightmare stuff – migraine paper – and I said, no, we’ll get rid of that, please. They also converted the old tennis courts into a car park for the unit base – which enabled me to later host events here.
It took seven weeks to make up the house, five and a half weeks of filming and three weeks of putting it all back. I got a six-figure rent – which all went on repairs – and was able to open for thousands of visitors.
Before Atonement, it would only have been people who were interested in High Victorian architecture. We’ve had people from Japan, Korea, just all over really. I was very lucky – it could have been a film that just died a death and was never seen again.
I would absolutely say yes to another crew any day. I like working with creative people. And the film has given the house new history.”
