Where Was The Holiday Filmed? Inside Shere, Surrey and the Truth About Rosehill Cottage

Nancy Meyers’s 2006 romantic comedy The Holiday sold an entire generation on the fantasy of a Christmas house swap — Cameron Diaz trading her sleek Los Angeles mansion for Kate Winslet’s chocolate-box English cottage. Both houses became more than backdrops; they became characters, two of the most-Googled film homes of the past two decades. So here’s the answer to the question fans ask every December: where was The Holiday actually filmed, and is Rosehill Cottage real?

The Short Answer About Rosehill Cottage

Rosehill Cottage — Iris’s beautiful, snow-blanketed English country cottage — is not a real house you can drive up to. It is a purpose-built film set. Production designer Jon Hutman designed the exterior, and the cottage shell was constructed in a field near the village of Shere in Surrey, in the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, about 30 miles southwest of central London. The set was built for the shoot, dressed with snow effects, and dismantled afterwards. The interiors were filmed on a soundstage at Shepperton Studios.

So while you can’t ring the bell at Rosehill, you can absolutely visit the village it sits next to.

Shere, Surrey — Iris’s Village

The “town” Iris and Graham (Jude Law) wander through is the genuine, lived-in village of Shere. The cobbled lanes, the parish church of St. James, the bridge over the Tillingbourne stream, and the village’s pubs — particularly the White Horse and the William Bray — all appear on screen. The exterior of the local pub where Iris and Graham first share a drink is the White Horse on Middle Street, which dates back to the 15th century.

Shere has handled its film-tourism fame with grace. It is regularly listed among the prettiest villages in Surrey, and visitors who come for The Holiday usually stay for the surrounding walks in the North Downs and Shere’s small but excellent independent food shops.

Getting to Shere

• Around 45 minutes by train from London Waterloo to Gomshall, then a short taxi or pleasant 20-minute walk.
• By car, roughly an hour from central London via the A3 and A25.
• The village is small — there’s a paid car park behind the village hall; street parking is heavily restricted to protect residents.

Amanda’s House — Brentwood, Los Angeles

Cameron Diaz’s character Amanda lives in a perfect-looking, slate-roofed, hedge-walled mansion in Los Angeles. Like Rosehill, that house is a specifically constructed location — a hybrid of exterior shots filmed at a real Brentwood property in the affluent neighborhood between Sunset Boulevard and the Getty Center, and interiors built on a soundstage. The exact street address has been deliberately kept low-profile by the homeowners over the years; the production was careful to shoot it from angles that don’t make the property easily identifiable from public roads.

What you can recognize on screen is the broader neighborhood: the wide jacaranda-lined streets, the lush hedging, and the architectural style of upper Brentwood, which Nancy Meyers has used for several films as a kind of cinematic shorthand for a particular kind of L.A. comfort.

Iris’s Office and London Streets

Iris’s London life — her newspaper office, the bus stops in the rain, the early scenes that establish her wedding-engagement disaster — was filmed in central London, with some interiors at the now-closed offices of the Daily Telegraph at Canary Wharf and street exteriors in Bloomsbury and around Marylebone. The Christmas-party scene at the start of the film was shot on a stage at Shepperton dressed with seasonal decor.

Arthur Abbott’s House — Beverly Hills

The home of the elderly screenwriter Arthur Abbott (Eli Wallach), where Iris develops one of the film’s loveliest friendships, was filmed at a private residence in Beverly Hills. As with Amanda’s house, the production has not publicly identified the address — and the property is screened from the street — but the surrounding neighborhood is recognizable to anyone who has spent time on the residential side streets east of Coldwater Canyon.

Why The Holiday’s Houses Still Matter

Nancy Meyers’s houses always sit somewhere between aspiration and comfort — Diane Keaton’s Hamptons house in Something’s Gotta Give, the L.A. courtyard home in It’s Complicated, and Rosehill Cottage all share the same set-decoration vocabulary: warm lighting, well-worn books, kitchens that look like they’re actually used. That’s the reason Rosehill, even though it never existed, has spent nearly two decades inspiring genuine British property purchases, real-estate features, and a small industry of “live like Rosehill” interior pieces.

The cottage doesn’t exist. The village does. And going to Shere in winter, snow or not, gets you close to the feeling the film was selling.

If You’re Planning a Visit

• Best time to visit Shere: Late autumn through January for the Christmassy feeling the film captures; spring for the surrounding country walks.
• Local pubs: The White Horse and the William Bray both serve food; both fill up at weekends.
• Walks: The North Downs Way passes near the village, and the walk to nearby Albury is highly recommended.
• Respect: Shere is a working village. The residents have been good-humored about the film for nearly 20 years, and being a quiet, considerate visitor is the way to keep it that way.

Looking for more film-home guides? See our growing collection of Movie Locations features.

Sources and further reading: behind-the-scenes interviews with production designer Jon Hutman, archival production notes for The Holiday, and the village of Shere’s tourism information from Visit Surrey.