Movie Houses…

Oscars have just been distributed, so movies won’t be completely dominating the news again for a few more months yet, but the homes we see and cherish after we catch sight of them in movies will be popping up on Netflix, etc., uninterrupted as we stream into the future.

In “The Oscar for Best House Goes to . . .” Michael Kolomatsky (The New York Times, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/realestate/movie-homes.html) talks about the homes we encounter as we’re being entertained, spaces we never experience directly but that have a continued effect on our design-related expectations and experiences: “To find the houses that movie fans are most curious about, LAHomes, a real estate listing site, found the average number of monthly Google searches over the past five years for the most popular movie titles and the word ‘house’ (and similar queries). . . . [of the] most-searched houses from the movies. . . . Many are real homes and immediately recognizable on Google Street View — the ‘Twilight’ “house, in Portland, Ore., the ‘Father of the Bride’ “house in Pasadena, Calif., and the ‘Hocus Pocus’ house in Salem, Mass., among them. Other popular film houses never existed at all, except on sets — the charming English cottage in ‘The Holiday’, for one. The glass-walled jewel box frozen in time in ‘The Lake House’ was built for the movie, then taken down.”