Jude Law Said The Holiday Cottage Isn’t Real

The perfectly cozy cottage in The Holiday is plenty of people’s dream house. Unfortunately, living in — or even visiting — Iris’ home isn’t possible. In a November interview with BBC Radio 2’s The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show, Jude Law revealed that the Rosehill Cottage “doesn’t exist” in real life, but was built especially for the film.

While discussing the holiday rom-com, Law made it clear that he loves how people turn to the film year after year. “I find it just, honestly, glorious,” he said on the show. And yet, he had a disappointing revelation for fans.

“That cottage doesn’t exist,” Law explained when he was asked if the home was available to rent. Apparently, Nancy Meyers made the house come to life. “So the director, she’s a bit of a perfectionist, toured that whole area and didn’t quite find the chocolate box cottage she was looking for. So she just hired a field and drew it and had someone build it.”

According to Law, the interior shots of the cottage were not even filmed in Britain. “But here’s the funny thing, if you watch it… so we were shooting it in the winter here, and every time I’d go in that door, we cut and we shot the interiors in L.A. about three months later,” he added.

When the interviewers got (understandably) disappointed, he apologized. “Just burst the bubble,” Law added. “Sorry.”

Nancy Meyers, the film’s director, had previously revealed that the cottage wasn’t real. In a special feature for The Holiday DVD, Meyers explained that Iris’ home was built by the crew. “We built that wall and we put in those trees. It really was just an empty field. It was a real tourist attraction while it was there,” she said, per the New York Post. “But it’s gone now.”

In a video about making the movie, Benjamin Greenacre, the U.K. location manager, revealed what the behind-the-scenes process looked like. “The cottage was quite amazing to watch being built. It started off as as a field and four wooden pegs and a crossbar held up by two tall men,” he said. “Within four days, you could actually see the cottage, and then four weeks spent landscape gardening the outside and making it look like the garden had been there for, you know, 200 years, as the cottage had been there. So the house itself just appeared in a week.”

There may be no real-life Rosehill Cottage, but Meyers did get some inspiration from one home in the area, Honeysuckle Cottage in Holmbury St Mary, Surrey. Back in 2022, the home was briefly available on Airbnb. In a press release, Airbnb said the building helped shape the vision for Iris’ home: “Researchers for The Holiday scouted out the cottage before recreating it brick for brick at a studio in London.”