Thanks Mary for this wonderful addition to the Ghost and Mrs. Muir posts!!! I tried to look around for interior shots – what a wonderful project she undertook. I wish I could have seen it in person.
Your response to the posts on floor plans, here.
Bangor Woman has built three dollhouses, the latest: The Ghost And Mrs. Muir
Saving a seat for you,
A while ago I provided the floor plans for Gull Cottage. Here is an article on a doll house version.
“As seen in the October, 2005 issue of Doll House and Miniature Scene.
Gull Cottage from “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” is revisited, and Dan’s portrait of Captain Gregg appears throughout the article and on the cover.”
“He took me unaware!”
“My dear, since Eve picked the apple, no woman ‘s ever been taken entirely unawares.”
It amazes me how interested people are in this movie, the memorabilia of this movie and the infamous house.
Mary Casey of Colorado sent this in…the floor plan from the house from in the pilot of the TV show. The house is located in Montecito, CA. They added the Widow’s Walk, the stone lions, and the ship’s wheel on the balcony outside the master cabin.
She went on to tell me “If you are a fan of the show, the differences are easy to spot – the biggest being the real house in CA has 8 steps that lead up to the front porch, where the TV house had two steps and a wide porch that goes around the whole outside of the house.”
I think I first saw this film when I was about… maybe 12 or 13. I saw the TV show first, loved it, especially the ghost, and my mother told me the show was based on the movie, that was based on the book. Of course back then (1970!) there were no VCRs or DVD’s, but I happened to look in the TV Guide and found out that it was running on some afternoon movie channel during the week.
I cannot tell a lie – at that point in my life, my mother was divorced and raising four of us, and sometimes we had babysitters, and sometimes not. I actually faked sick to stay home and see the movie! Loved it, in a whole different way than the TV show, but did think it was rather sad that he left her, and didn’t come back until she died. Then I found the book, in paperback (now a collector’s item!) and read that, and was relieved to know that in the book he left, but came back years before she died.
Tell us when you first saw The Ghost and Mrs. Muir…
Saving A Seat For You,
HERRIMAN, Utah — Cute is the Walt Disney Company’s stock in trade, but there is nothing soft and cuddly about how it protects its intellectual property.
The sherbet-colored structure sits at the intersection of Meadowside Drive and Herriman Rose Boulevard here, but you don’t need directions to find it. Just look for the swarm of helium-filled balloons that the developer tied to the chimney of a house that has a gabled roof, scalloped siding and a garden hose neatly coiled next to the porch — all details taken from “Up,” the 2009 hit about an old man and his flying abode.
The house is a product of the strange obsession of one man — in this case, the son of a former governor — his connections, the film’s powerful director and a company that is trying to evaluate with more care the hundreds of requests it receives a month from people wanting to use its characters and imagery.
Great post from apartmenttherapy.com comparing two films
that utilize the same color scheme in their production design: monochrome grey (or grisaille). The first is Woody Allen’s lugubrious Interiors, a personal favorite; and Hitchcock’s Rear Window, everybody’s favorite.
Interiors made a strong impression on me at an early age, and its production design is indelibly etched in my memory. Geraldine Page plays Eve, a sophisticated matriarch who can only give to others through her work, the decoration of interiors. The rooms she designs are elegant, spare, precise and refined. They are also emotionally withholding and full of refusal.
Interior Grey
Eve’s own dining room in the Park Avenue apartment she moves into after her husband has left her. The room is painted grey, including the follies on the back wall, and there’s no space for other colors, clutter, passion or unwanted emotions.
More on this post, click here.
Saving a seat for you,
Christine
I know I’m a bit late posting on this one, but it’s worth noting the set. I would recommend seeing the documentary and movie back to back, as they were both spectacular on their own, but inform one another.I collected some photos from Grey Garden News and Old Hollywood Glamour.
Grey Gardens starred Drew Barrymore as “Little” Edith Bouvier Beale and Jessica Lange as “Big” Edith Bouvier Beale and each gave a very moving and sensitive performance. It’s just had it’s first high school performance, that would have been interesting along side playbills for Hello Dolly!
I was left with strong feelings of what mental illness really means (clearly there was an alternate reality present when cats are peeing behind large artwork) however I also felt these women had really found an independance for themselves and truly cared for one another.
Costume designer Cat Thomas covered the 1920’s through the 1970’s fashion brilliantly. Dressing characters that were based on true eccentrics-come-fashion-icons without turning them in to caricatures is no easy task.
An interview from Glamour.com sums it up best:
STF: Little Edie is one of those characters that has been so deeply mined for inspiration over the years–fashion just seems to love her. What do you think is her enduring appeal? And how did you manage to bring your own new twist to something that we’ve already seen so many iterations of?
CT: I think the thing that’s interesting about her, and one of the reasons people are so drawn to her, is this evolution of a young woman 17, 18 years old, you get to see both of them [Big Edie and Little Edie] at the prime of their lives with all of this glamour and ease and in the context of the Hamptons. It was sort of a careless, carefree, youthful and also very innocent moment. And then you get to see that departure point, which is important. She was beautiful, she was modeling, it was the pinnacle of her life, and then you get the deterioration which she still manages to make fashionable.Edie Beale, Style icon, in her "costume for the day"
Visit Grey Gardens News for all things Grey Gardens!
Resting Decay
Eery to see pianos in such run down condition and seeing the singing in the movie makes this photo even more silent.
The main artery in any home...the stairwell.
Beautiful glass details
Set Design Print of living room
Set Design Print: Living Room
Grey Gardens, in the manner it is accustomed.
Entryway
Living Room
Living room, this portrait later kept Big Edie company by her beside, and was a frequent area for the cats to relieve themselves.
Staged aging...
The start of seclusion...I love the asian inspired wall paper and classic 1950s bedding, everything in that time period had a "frosted paint" job. A pity, because it was generally over very valuable hard wood.
Independant to the end...
To learn how you can get your own Edie Doll, complete with Wonderbread bag for the attic raccoons, click here.
Saving a seat for you,
Christine
I know I’ve written about this in a prior post, but the topic of Nancy Meyers films just never gets old for me.
Jane's Living Room
Jane’s Living Room:
The french-inspired kitchen, very much like the one in the Julia-Julia movie.
Meyers movies are like traveling to Europe (on a $10 budget). You always get the consistency of the First World experience, a color pallette that is unique to that area of the world, specically France in the summer, and leave wanting to bring home a vase you don’t need. Someone, tell me I’m wrong.
Now a staple of Meyer's films, the french sink.
These sinks are doing me in. Every time I see one, I want one – in my stocking.
A perfectly equipped kitchen, for the pastry hobbiest.
I mean, Martha has one…why shouldn’t Jane?
The Norman Rockwell feeling made current.
There are many things in this set that one can get, dare I say…at Ikea. I don’t think that it has to be local pottery on the table and quite frankly, those hanging pots in the back could stand some blackness to them. While the sets are “aspirational” they shouldn’t be so posed. If Jane is supposed to be able to cook, than those pots should be seasoned…dammit. I paid $10 for this escape from my life! But if you must stretch my ability to disbelieve…
Jane’s Dining Room & Kitchen:
As Martha Stewart, one of the first Queens of Aspiration, would have left it.
The still life of the Average American Housewife, with a BIG divorce settlement.
I can see the want ad now...single, divorced woman of ...49, seeks able-bodied male to stack wood (in California).
Now THIS photo made me laugh, truly. The wood pile, stacked so neatly-I can totally see Jane…place an order for that.
Maybe Jane's people know Martha's people.
Saving a seat for you,
Christine
See Jane juggle. See Jane tumble, into bed…and be the object of two men while in her 50s. Meyers creates the ultimate fantasy movies for women. Jane is a mom, girlfriend, garden hobbiest, mistress, gal pal, hostess with the mostess, owner of a thriving bakery, and therapy patient. Most of us can relate, mostly. Her balancing act reflects what most of us deal with: many roles. But Hollywood casts a sheen of sugar coating over all of it, and it’s like looking at a glistening sugared fruit bowl. You want to pick at it, even steal from it, but you know hers is a life of unattainable surrounding beauty that is just meant to look at.
The token photograph showing several of the luxury materials in Jane's environment.
Let’s start with the environment of perfectly chosen materials which create an aire of casual serenity, where barely a square inch of floor is ungraced with sisal, no window untreated with glazed linen. In the comfort of her rambling, terra-cotta-shingled ranch, Jane bathes in a claw-foot tub (which we love) and dines atop gray-veined Carrara marble. You want for her to find love, if only to have someone to admire it all with her. You hanker for one of her homemade chocolate croissants, afterall we believe she can actually make them. But something about Nancy Meyers films, I just wish I was holding a gift-registry scanner.
But Hollywood is Hollywood because they “do aspiration” so well.
Jane actually lives in the fictional space of It’s Complicated, the film starring Meryl Streep and directed by Nancy Meyers. Meyers’s movies (Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday) have earned her a cult following among the design-porn set; the Hamptons beach house from 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give was a sensation—it even inspired a headboard collection for Williams-Sonoma Home. But It’s Complicated sashays into theaters at a very different time. Before Home Depot closed its tony Expo Design Center, before “HGTV” became a slur for compulsive nest-feathering, Meyers’s Hamptons set was termed “aspirational.” Now a quarter of mortgaged American homes are underwater, and movie montages about cashmere sheets are an irksome reminder of how we can’t afford them. This is our generation’s Hollywood glamour.
Gone are the glossy titans House & Garden, Vogue Living, Domino, Metropolitan Home, Southern Accents, and Cottage Living (for which I wanted to light a candle), all boarded up alongside the housing market. In fact, It’s Complicated appears in December’s Traditional Home, where a “real” home might once have been.
What has irked me as elitist and exclusionary though, attracts me as well and has turned into an asset, and not just for Meyers. A Single Man is like so many of director-designer Tom Ford’s glossy ad campaigns: it may be one page deep, but you almost don’t notice amid all the brooding, the sexual tension, and the va-va-voom ’60s ambience. Nine’s fizzy Fellini redux is Chanel No. 5, all-Marilyn musk, and Harlow ostrich feathers. Are these great movies? Unfortunately not. They are design porn. Their over-the-top tableaux distract the heck out of me (as opposed to serving narrative purpose, in the way MadMen’s visual experience leaves shadows for the viewers to bring meaning in the absence of a chatty script; true hollywood glamour). But it almost doesn’t matter. Escapism is all too enticing right now, and no one takes you out of your own head like Hollywood—witness the $10 billion record-breaking box office for 2009. For proof you can really take to the bank, look (yes, look) at Avatar. Even its most ardent fans dismiss the plot and writing—the bad guys are on the hunt for a rare ore called unobtainium. Wow. I would have loved to be in that pitch session. Yet this is a world built on flowing, gossamer, almost tactile beauty. Director James Cameron takes even the most ordinary hunk of blue rock (the über-literal unobtainium) and spotlights it in the manner of Ming porcelain.
It’s amazing what a little light can do. The destruction of the world never looked so good. When there’s less magic and Ming in our own lives, marveling at fantasy is not altogether unpleasant. It’s unfortunate though that we can only use our eyes and not our brains when watching though.
Saving a seat for you,
Christine
So…yet another film where I completely by passed the leading man (whom if he became available I would drop everything) and fell in love (again) with a house in Rhode Island. It was a green, three story home, all wood interior, lots of book cases, in/outdoor shower (for those long days playing touch football outside), and have a very warm, lived in living room and kitchen.
The house is available for rent here for a *gulp* fee of $6k per week.
Some photos:
Spare Bedroom
Love the light in these rooms. They beg for an afternoon nap after an early morning swim. Bed clothese likely from solid New England companies: LL Bean being a favorite of these rental homes.
Living Room (note Stone Fireplace)
Love the living room here. The hearth is warm an inviting, the wicker chairs a classic “been here forever” look. I’m marveling at the space here, you can practically throw a square dance – or at least a healthy game of Twister.
Stairway, warm wood interior
Love the staircase here. Perfect for little ones pearing through and spying on the long, drawn out conversations of the adults catching up after a long year.
And...another view of those stairs
The warm wood in this home is really appealing. I like the look of exposed, aged beams.
Claw foot tub
I mean really, there is no woman out there who doesn’t appreciate a claw foot tub. One of my friends said to me once, “I would be in the bathtub all the time, if my legs would fit in it.” I realize we are all in a conservative phase right now in terms of consuming resources, however, a deep bathtub should really be a minimum luxury everyone should have an opportunity to enjoy. Work is hard enough for crying out loud!
It was filmed in Rhode Island in the cities of Newport, East Greenwich, West Greenwich, Jamestown, Westerly, and Providence in November and December 2006. The opening scene was filmed at Seven Stars Bakery in Providence. However, the facade of the building and the interior are altered. When Dan is pulled over by the Newport Police, he is on Ocean Ave. in Newport. In scenes filmed in Jamestown, two bridges are clearly visible: the Jamestown Bridge and its replacement, the Jamestown-Verrazzano Bridge. Demolition of the Jamestown Bridge was initiated on April 18, 2006.
In researching Dan In Real Life, I happened upon an interesting trend: tours related to the experiences of the movie. I had seen this phenom with Sex In The City where bus tours of over make up’d, 4+-inch heel-wearing women are shuttled from one vapid cocktail destination to another – the offering seems rather cultish to me.
However, this offering seems a little more down to earth and within reach – if you are looking to emulate a sort of life style that seems unapproachable for most. Namely getting along with your family for more than 4 straight days, in a beautiful home where people gracefully rotate to cook the meals, and get up early to work out together – um, this isn’t my family per say…but I can see the romance in the idea. I think if Liz could guarantee that I would somehow, bump into (through some sort of “pre-arranged happenstance”) the perfect guy at that bookshop AND he be THE ONE, I might be up for the idea of doing one of these tour-things. As it is, I’ll stick with real life.
Dan In Real Life
One of the residual perks of all the moviemaking going on in Rhode Island these days is that even after the filmmakers decamp for Hollywood, you can have a hands-on experience with the places you’ve seen on screen.
So now you can bowl at the very place Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche bowled in Dan in Real Life.
You can visit the site of the bookstore where Dan and Marie, the characters they play, first met.
You can hang out at the bakery where Dan pulled his daughter away from her new boyfriend at the start of the film.
You can even stay in the secluded Jamestown house where the whole Burns clan gathered in the movie.
The eight-bedroom house, called Riven Rock, is available for rent from June through September, according to Liz Brazil, the Realtor who showed the house to the moviemakers more than once, helped make the deal with Disney and now is the exclusive agent for it.
She wouldn’t quote prices, nor even say exactly where the house, built in 1911, is located, except that it is on a secluded road and looks out over the West Passage of Narragansett Bay. One of the reasons the filmmakers liked the house, besides its rustic lived-in look, is that it was off the beaten path, away from the prying eyes of folks who might want to catch a glimpse of moviemaking in action. The filmmakers also looked at other houses — from Misquamicut to Little Compton — “but finally the mood of the house won over the director.” Complete Article
Saving a seat for you,
Christine
With the concentration on “green,” low impact living – those hobbits are looking more and more progressive each day I view my electric bill. Someone has even posted blue prints so you can build your own. Happy foundation stomping!
Exterior: Hobbit Home
There is something rather cozy about those curved walls and porthole windows.
Inside the Hobbit Home
Photocredit: www.tentonhammer.com/node/12459
Saving a seat for you,
Christine
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