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A popular trend among some hardcore film fans these days is the pilgrimages to the real-life locations used for their favorite movies. If you’re in Lutz, Florida, you can visit the house from Edward Scissorhands. Horror junkies can spend days in California, visiting West Hollywood to see the house from A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Pasadena to see the Michael Myers home and all the places where The Shape carved out his destruction in Halloween. If you love the original Scream, go to Northern California, where Stu Macher’s (Matthew Lillard) mansion-like residence is now an Airbnb.
If heart-warming, family Christmas films are more your thing, a stop in Cleveland will show you the home from A Christmas Story. One of the most famous and instantly recognizable holiday homes is the McCallister residence in Home Alone, the Christmas favorite written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus. Take a trip to 671 Lincoln Ave. in Winnetka, Illinois and you can see the massive place in all its beautiful glory. To stand there, you can imagine Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, and Daniel Stern running through the rooms. Now, here’s the part where we break your heart. Outside of the exteriors, Home Alone wasn’t filmed in that house. Where it actually took place is something even stranger than fiction.
Almost All of ‘Home Alone’ Takes Place Inside the McCallister House
Macaulay Culkin might be the human star of Home Alone, but just as important as his charisma, or the veteran acting chops of Pesci and Stern, is the setting. Home Alone doesn’t work if it takes place inside of an apartment or a small ranch home. For all the shenanigans that were about to go down, Home Alone needed a large playground. You can’t get much larger than the McCallister home, a place so big that for decades many have wondered just what the heck Peter McCallister (John Heard) did for a living to afford such a place.
The McCallister house also had to be big enough to hold the massive number of family members who gather together in the opening act. Despite its size, the house looks cozy and inviting rather than intimidating. It feels like its own character, with its large rooms, tall staircase, and creepy basement. That size, with all of its emptiness, encompasses Kevin’s eventual loneliness and fear. It gives him ample room in which to play and run away as well.
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Outside of a few places Kevin travels to, he spends the entire movie in his house. The iconic moments of Kevin running up the stairs screaming into the camera, creating a fake yet elaborate party, hiding under his parents’ bed, and setting up traps in every room and doorway all happen in this home. There’s just one problem: they didn’t really happen in the actual house that so many fans flock to see.
The ‘Home Alone’ House Was a Set Built Inside a School
The Illinois home, located just outside of Chicago, is not a complete lie. Home Alone scenes with Kevin, Harry, and Marv running outside, including both men falling down the steps, are filmed here. That poor pizza guy running for his life was shot here, but everything inside was actually filmed elsewhere. Why was this? Well, according to an episode of the Netflix series The Movies That Made Us, as big as the home was, it wasn’t large enough when it came to fitting a crew, cameras, and lights inside. “It was far too small to get the crew in the door,” said director Chris Columbus. The interior of the home was perfect, though, so what to do?
“We just didn’t have great sound stages in Chicago,” Columbus added. “We couldn’t really shoot in their house,” production designer John Muto said. “It was obvious we needed a proper set.” Executive producer Scott Ronsenfelt said they decided to look at a local high school, where their production offices already were. “We walked into this gym, and we were like, it’s got a grid in the ceiling, and it’s big enough, and we could build a house in here. The next thing we knew, we built all the sets in the school.” While that idea might sound out there, the exact same high school was used to build sets for two other John Hughes classics, Uncle Buck and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Sorry to ruin two more of your childhood memories with those reveals.
For Home Alone, an exact replica of the actual house was built, following the floor plan exactly, but widening everything just a bit so that the crew could fit inside. A few years ago, the real house was used as Airbnb during the Christmas season, with it made to look like the Home Alone days. Look at pictures of the real home, and if you didn’t know any better, you would think this was the actual house used for filming. It’s impressive that a film crew could build an entire two-storied home, and decorate it as well, all inside of a high school gym.
Another House From ‘Home Alone’ Was Filmed Inside a Swimming Pool
The child ruining doesn’t end there, sadly. There is another house in Home Alone that isn’t what you think it is either. In the climax of the film, Kevin has wounded Harry and Marv with his traps, but they’re still coming for him, so he flees across the street to another home, daring his tormenters to follow him. We see Kevin outside of a real house going in through the cellar door, but Harry and Marv won’t follow, knowing he has more in store for them. When Kevin gets down into the basement he discovers that it’s flooded, with water pouring down the steps. Harry and Marv (more Marv, really) call themselves the Wet Bandits, due to Marv’s proclivity to turn on all the taps inside of a house after they rob it. It’s Marv’s idea of a calling card, and having robbed this home earlier, it’s now a watery trap for Kevin.
This house was filmed inside a set in the same high school, but how do you have thousands of gallons of water running through it without flooding the entire gym? That’s easy: you simply build the house in the pool. The Movies That Made Us revealed that the basement and the small portion of the upstairs we see when Kevin gets to the top and is saved by Old Man Marley (Roberts Blossom) was built inside the shallow end of the school’s empty swimming pool. For thirty-three years now, generations have turned to Home Alone every Christmas season. With its laughs and adventure, it’s seen as a magical movie that brings the family together. What you now know is just how much actual movie magic went into creating that experience.
The ‘Home Alone’ House Isn’t in ‘Planes, Trains, and Automobiles’
Okay, the Home Alone house isn’t as real as I thought. It hurt to find that out, but that’s how movies work. They trick us and get us to believe everything we see. At least the outside scenes were actually filmed at the real house. It also helped that I believed, like many, that I could still see the real Home Alone house in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. There, it can be seen in several scenes, not just from the outside, but the exterior too, as the home where Neal Page (Steve Martin) lives with his family and takes Del Griffith (John Candy) for Thanksgiving dinner in that heartwarming finale that makes me cry every single time I see it. Then I learned this belief was wrong too.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that the Planes, Trains, and Automobiles house isn’t the same one from Home Alone. It made sense why I thought it was: Both homes look strikingly similar, with their brown brick facade, white door frames, and windows sticking out of the roof. Both houses are also around Chicago, and both are in movies with John Hughes involved, but they’re quite different places. While they have the same type of design, the one in Home Alone is much larger. It makes sense, as the home needed to be big enough to hold so many McCallister family members, while Neal Page’s family is much smaller. The houses aren’t even in the same city either. The Home Alone house is located at 671 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, Illinois, and if you have a cool $5.25 million in the bank, it can be yours!
Meanwhile, the Planes, Trains, and Automobiles home is at 230 Oxford Road in Kenilworth, Illinois. It was up for sale this year as well and at half the amount for the Home Alone house for $2.6 million! It was disappointing to learn that the two iconic John Hughes comedies don’t have the connection that I believed was true for so many years, but I can find solace in the fact that we have the movies. Their magic is much more important than where they were filmed.
Home Alone is available to stream on Disney+ in the U.S.
- Release Date
- November 16, 1990
- Runtime
- 103 minutes
- Writers
- John Hughes
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