The cottage from The Holiday – everything you need to know
Nancy Meyers' films are renowned for their covetable interiors, each embodying a certain kind of sophisticated lifestyle. Who wouldn't want to live in Meryl Streep's sprawling Mediterranean-style mansion in It's Complicated, while Diane Keaton's elegant Hamptons beach house in Something's Gotta Give is another favourite.
However, the American director perhaps reached the peak of her interior-design powers with the creation of a very different kind of house: a tiny, charming English country cottage.
The house where Kate Winslet lives in house-swapping rom-com The Holiday (a film we watch every year without fail) is undoubtedly one of the most desirable interiors ever seen on screen. The movie itself appears to be close to many people's hearts, too. It may not have wowed the critics on its release (Anthony Quinn in the Independent noted that while ‘there is property porn here to satisfy the most exacting tastes’, the cast are ‘absolutely lifeless’), but it took over $200 million worldwide at the box office, and has remained a fan favourite over the years. It will be back in cinemas in the US this autumn, to mark its 20th anniversary, and a limited series adaptation of the movie is said to be in development at Apple TV.
How will the interiors in the small-screen adaptation stack up the original, we wonder? For now, let's continue to enjoy Rosehill Cottage in all its 2006 glory, regardless of the fact that its rooms only ever existed on a Hollywood soundstage. Below, we take a closer look at one of cinema's most covetable homes.
Where is the cottage from The Holiday?
Rosehill Cottage is the home of Kate Winslet's character, Iris Simpkins, a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, who conducts a two-week home swap with Cameron Diaz's LA film mogul Amanda Woods, and thus provides the setting for Diaz to fall in love with the dreamy widower Jude Law (Iris's book-editor brother), amidst her comedy dealings with the English countryside.
The cottage from The Holiday has become a phenomenon, summing up the best of the English cottage look and creating a dream of Christmas in the countryside for thousands. The exterior of the cottage, lightly dusted in snow, is almost a composite of all the honey-coloured, slightly wonky cottages you can stumble across everywhere from the Cotswolds to Yorkshire, and the interiors encapsulate the cosy, perfectly-imperfect look characteristic of the ideal cottage. All the features are there, including wooden beams, an open fire, the ever-so-shabby country kitchen of our dreams, faded chintzes – and that tiny, beautiful roll-top bath.
And yet… we were devastated when we found out that the Rosehill Cottage of the film doesn't exist in reality. While inspired by a real house – Honeysuckle Cottage in Holmbury St Mary, which was for sale in 2021 and briefly available on Airbnb – the exterior sets were built from scratch in a field near the pretty village of Shere in the Surrey Hills, while the interiors are sets on a soundstage, 5,000 miles away in Los Angeles. In 2024, Jude Law admitted: ‘So, we were shooting it in the winter here [in England] and every time I'd go through the door, we'd cut – and we shot the interiors in LA.’ Sharp-eyed observers have pointed out that Jude is significantly more suntanned in the interior scenes, perhaps due to the California weather.
If you're one of the film's many fans, scroll down for inspiration on how to incorporate some of Rosehill Cottage's atmosphere into your own house.
MAY WE SUGGEST: Caroline Holdaway's dream Cotswold cottage
1/7Rosehill Cottage's kitchen, where Kate Winslet weeps over Rufus Sewell and has an unfortunate encounter with the gas hob, is a model of the pretty country kitchen, with open shelves housing a collection of blue and white ceramics.
2/7The living room is full of comfortably stuffed armchairs and chintzy, mismatched fabrics. An antique drum has been used as a coffee table. Jean Monro's ‘Salisbury’ fabric is the perfect faded chintz for a country living room.
3/7To keep the room from looking too chintzy, the sofa is upholstered in a gentle pink stripe - find similar at Ian Mankin.
4/7Instead of a coffee table, the living room has a tufted ottoman in the centre of the seating. The ‘Plymouth’ model from Swoon, available at John Lewis, is a similar design that will work well in practically any interior, cottage or not.
5/7No country cottage is complete without a cosy reading nook. The one at Rosehill Cottage has higgledy-piggledy bookshelves and a comfortable, Howard & Sons-style open-arm chair. Such chairs are widely available on Vinterior or via major antiques dealers such as Lorfords, or for a new design try The Odd Chair Company.
6/7The bathtub (and Cameron Diaz squeezing herself into it) may be one of the most enduring images of the film - a tiny tub for a tiny space. Note the floorboards which have been pained with a black harlequin design. Fortunately, you can buy the very same bathtub - the Tubby Torre - from The Albion Bath Company, for all your small bathroom needs.
7/7The bedroom has a distinct shabby-chic aesthetic, with a white metal bedstead and more mismatched furniture, including a white metal bed frame and painted side table. The Original Bed Co is our go-to for metal beds – try their ‘Carie’ model for a similar feel.
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