For fans of Nancy Meyers’ romcom classic The Holiday, it might come as a shock to learn that the iconic English cottage featured in the film isn’t real. Jude Law, who plays Graham in the rom-com, broke the news to many last year that the charming countryside home where Cameron Diaz’s heartbroken Hollywood executive, Amanda, retreats at Christmastime was actually filmed on soundstages.
The revelation certainly came as a surprise to Georgia-based home designer Lucy Small. “I assumed it was a real place,” she tells The Independent. “I didn’t realize that they went so far as to build the exterior.”
The 37-year-old interior designer therefore embarked on a nine-month journey to create a replica of the movie’s cottage that could be rented out to fans of the 2006 film and to those simply looking for a cozy escape.
The Holiday, Small says, was “very foundational for me.” And judging by the amount of interest that her Holiday Cottage has garnered, she feels it says the same of her peers. “I just feel like I’m part of this romantic comedy cohort that really remembers these movies. There’s just something very nostalgic about it.”
Opened in October, The Holiday Cottage is available for short-term rentals. Located in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia, U.S.A., its going rate starts at $399 per night during the summer months and $499 per night for the winter and fall.
Small worked with an architectural designer, with whom she watched The Holiday “over and over again,” taking numerous screenshots to ensure the layout and design details were perfect.
When it came time to put pen to paper, she realized just how much of the film’s cottage was unrealistic. For example, in the movie, only one bedroom is featured upstairs. “They’re really trying to make it look small and cozy and really intimate,” Small explains. “But when you see the house from the outside, clearly there’s more than one room under that attic.”
In Small’s Holiday Cottage, she improvised by adding a second identical bedroom upstairs. “We tried to make it so that if two couples were staying, they both had a similar experience. So it’s the same bathtub, same bathroom, same bedroom,” she says. “We just tried make it fair so that it’s not one good room and one bad room.” With a queen-sized sofa sleeper downstairs, the space accommodates up to six guests.
She also notes a quirky detail: the cottage in the movie has three indoor fireplaces, yet the exterior shows only two chimneys. “It’s not even just that there were three fireplaces, two chimneys; it’s that the fireplaces are so big that it’s very, very hard to accommodate with modern-day code,” she says. By her admission, much of the film’s architectural design simply doesn’t make sense.
“We really had to squeeze in a lot of engineering in a house that — if it was built in the 1700s — it wouldn’t have had it to begin with, but it would have had to be retrofitted. But in a soundstage in Los Angeles, they didn’t have to think about any of that. So they just did whatever they wanted,” she says. “In essence, we’ve made something that makes more sense.”
In the movie, the quaint cottage belonging to Kate Winslet’s lovelorn Iris is “so kitschy and outdated,” Small points out. “It was made to have Iris feel very frumpy, and like a young person living this old lady’s life, and she doesn’t get out, and she doesn’t do anything.”
To fit Iris’s aesthetic, Small used Google Image Reverse Search to find decorative pieces and furniture that closely matched those featured in the movie. Ironically, she found that “the old, frumpy stuff” tended to be quite expensive.
What was meant to appear drab and unfashionable, she says, were all pricey antiques. “If I were to look up that piece from the movie, it’s like $20,000, like that chair or that coat rack or something. And so having to find a lot of look-alikes, that was probably the biggest improvisation.”
While she declines to comment on the exact cost of the entire project, she shares that the most expensive aspect was “really having it built to modern-day code.”
“You can’t have six-foot-tall ceilings, or a bathroom under the stairs, or things like that,” she explains. “And so meeting modern-day code to try to build this 1700s cabin was essentially what made the project a lot more expensive than a typical house of that size.”
But again, “what I told all the contractors throughout the whole thing was that it doesn’t matter what you think, or how we usually do things, or even what I would choose myself,” she says. “The only thing that matters is that it looks like the movie.”
Currently, The Holiday Cottage is already booked through May 2026. There are still available dates next summer in June and July, during the area’s off-season.
“I am just incredibly fortunate to be able to be at a point in my career where I can take on passion projects that people actually love,” Small says proudly, “And so it’s just great that this is one of these, and people have had a really good reaction to it.”
She admits that had the film used a real cottage, she would not have built her own Holiday Cottage. Because if it had been a real place, like the Illinois house used in Home Alone, she would’ve risked her getaway being labeled “the next best thing.”
“I didn’t want to build something that would be second best,” Small says. “In our case, it is the only thing.”