At this time of year, nowhere in Britain has a firmer grip on the public imagination than Rosehill Cottage from The Holiday. In recent years the Nancy Meyers film has overtaken Love Actually as our platonic ideal of a Christmas film; the chocolate-box cottage where Cameron Diaz opened the door to a drunk, gorgeous Jude Law has become the embodiment of a romantic Christmas.
Except, it turns out, little about this beloved movie is as it seems. The Holiday’s devoted following has been rocked in recent months by a series of revelations about Rosehill Cottage.
Last month, Jude Law went on The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show and revealed that the cottage does not exist and never really did. “So the director — she’s a bit of a perfectionist,” Law told a stunned Ball in reference to Meyers, the queen of the romantic comedy, known for Something’s Gotta Give and The Parent Trap. “She toured the whole area and didn’t quite find the chocolate-box cottage she was looking for. So she just hired a field and drew it, and had someone build it.”
Fans duly went into meltdown. “And that’s how Jude Law stole Christmas,” one commented on Instagram.
The Holiday was released in December 2006 and was a box office hit, making $200 million on an $84 million budget, but its mythology has only grown since, inspiring a bevy of fan accounts and blog posts. The film, which also stars Kate Winslet and Jack Black, tells the story of two heartbroken strangers who swap homes for the Christmas holidays. Iris (Winslet) moves into Amanda (Diaz)’s mansion in sunny LA while Amanda escapes to Iris’s snow-dusted cottage in the English countryside.
Law may have blown the whistle on the cottage, but the source of the confusion actually goes back to the bonus commentary on the film’s DVD release, in which the production designer, Jon Hutman, told fans: “We were looking for the cutest, smallest, most English cottage that we could find and we found one, actually, that belonged to the National Trust.”
Here’s where some fans went astray. The National Trust cottage Hutman described was in the West Country, which was too inconveniently located and expensive for filming. Location scouts then found Honeysuckle Cottage in Holmbury St Mary, a village in Surrey. This is not the cottage but did inspire the final product, especially the interiors.
Eventually, Meyers decided to build her own exterior from scratch, choosing an empty field on a hill overlooking St James’ Church in the parish of Shere in the Surrey Hills. The shell of what became Rosehill Cottage was constructed in a matter of days. “We built that wall and we put in those trees,” Meyers says in the commentary. “But it’s gone now,” she adds, casually destroying the dreams of generations to come. It was dismantled after filming so pilgrims wanting to visit today will find an empty field.
The interiors were then created more than 5,000 miles away, on a soundstage in Los Angeles. These were a charming fantasy, an American’s dreamlike conception of the English idyll, featuring inglenook fireplaces, exposed wooden beams and leaded light windows. Interiors obsessives swoon over the bespoke duck-egg blue kitchen, complete with Butler sink and tastefully chintzy curtains.
“And that’s how Jude Law stole Christmas.”
Two weeks before Law’s revelations, the writer JP Clark went viral on Substack with his own insider’s account, The Truth About The Holiday Cottage, which attempted to clear up the confusion about the film once and for all.
Clark reckons he’s seen the film 100 times and, even better, for 14 years he lived one field away from where they built the exterior. “It was so realistic that many people tried to buy the cottage,” says Clark. “I know because I was the village hairdresser and all the estate agents were my clients and recalled they had countless inquiries.”
He also has good weather intel, helping me to clear up some conflicting accounts about the authenticity of the snow in the film. “They’d already used snow machines and then it started snowing for real, so it was everywhere,” he says.
When Winslet’s Iris swaps her rural nest for Amanda’s sprawling Spanish-style San Marino mansion in LA, she revels in the luxury. The sets built for that house were 8,000 square feet, whereas Iris’s cottage was closer to 1,000 square feet. A running gag in the film is that Rosehill Cottage is inconvenient and small: Diaz is constantly shivering under her tonal cashmere layers and her long legs stick out of the roll-top bath. But, of course, it’s all hopelessly appealing.
In 2006, both the concept of home swapping and Home Exchange, the website used by Iris and Amanda, already existed but the film fueled their popularity. Stories of hopeless romantics seeking their own home-swap love stories still make the news, 18 years after the film’s release.
All of this fuels the obsession. Just two weeks ago, the bookmaker JeffBet published its own analysis of how much Iris and Amanda really spent on their respective trips. (Apparently Iris spent $20.61 on Manischewitz kosher wine for her Chanukkah meal with friends, while Amanda spent $90.19 filling up Iris’s Mini Cooper with petrol.)
Why do people remain so fixated by this movie? Of course, it’s not just the cottage that The Holiday’s fans are lusting after but what it represents. The film may be sappy and kitsch, but also has a timeless charm. This is partly by design. Meyers removes contemporary references from her films to avoid them dating, one reason why The Holiday has aged better than other romantic comedies, such as Love Actually.
Ultimately, like all the best Christmas movies, The Holiday and its famous cottage-that-never-was provide comfort and warmth with every viewing, leaving us with the reassuring sense that everything is going to be OK. “It’s the most romantic cottage in the world, isn’t it,” says Clark. “If a child had to draw a picture of a country cottage in the snow, that’s what they would draw.”
Hannah Swerling is a commissioning editor at The Sunday Times
