Where Was “The Holiday” Filmed? All About the Iconic Christmas Movie’s Real-Life Locations (Including What Happened to the Cottage)

Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday isn’t just a festive rom-com; it’s a cinematic escape.

Released in 2006, the film follows two women, Iris (Kate Winslet) and Amanda (Cameron Diaz), who swap homes across continents to outrun heartbreak. What begins as an impulsive holiday experiment turns into a story of second chances, with unexpected love found in the English countryside and sunny California.

“It’s set in the real world, but it’s like, ‘Who’s getting on first class, and flying, and taking this cute little cottage in the middle of England?’ Who gets to do that? You always wish that was you. You want to go do that,” Diaz told Vulture of how aspirational the film is in 2020.

Filming for The Holiday kicked off in Los Angeles in early 2006 and wrapped the following June. In between, the production spent about a month in England to capture the scenes set in Iris’ countryside cottage.

While the story may feel like an escapist fantasy or a dream, the locations are very real (well, mostly). From a postcard-perfect English village to sun-soaked California streets, here’s where Meyers brought her vision to life.

Iris’s Cottage in Holmbury St Mary, Surrey

In The Holiday, Iris lives in a cottage called Rosehill tucked away in the English countryside.

But that cottage doesn’t actually exist. It was a set built in Shere, Surrey, located in the south of England, and modeled after Honeysuckle Cottage, a real home in a nearby village in Holmbury St Mary.

In a November 2024 appearance on BBC Radio 2’s The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show, Jude Law, who plays Graham, Amanda’s love interest, said that Meyers was a “bit of a perfectionist,” which is what inspired her to make a house of her own for the movie.

“[Meyers] toured that whole area and didn’t quite find the chocolate box cottage she was looking for,” he said. “So she just hired a field and drew it and had someone build it.”

While the interior of the home was shot on custom-built sets at Sony Studios in L.A., the exterior shots took place in Surrey — and were built in just weeks.

“The cottage was quite amazing to watch being built,” location manager Benjamin Greenacre shared in a 2017 video about the making of The Holiday. “It started off as a field and four wooden pegs and a crossbar held up by two tall men.”

He continued, “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.”

The White Horse Pub in Shere, Surrey

Amanda and Graham share some of the film’s most romantic and flirty moments over drinks in an English pub. Those scenes weren’t shot on a soundstage; they were filmed at The White Horse, a pub in the village of Shere, Surrey.

Nearby Godalming also appears in the film as the village where Amanda goes shopping and buys an excessive amount of food.

“We came upon Shere in Surrey almost by chance,” production designer Jon Hutman said. “Once we found the perfect site, production began just up the hill from St. James Church and down the road from the 16th-century White Horse Tavern.”

Cornwell Manor in Oxfordshire, Cotswolds

Most of the village scenes in The Holiday were filmed in Surrey, with locations including Shere, Godalming and Wonersh. The Cotswolds, a picturesque vacation spot in England where Amanda is presumed to be, make only a brief appearance, albeit an important one.

Cornwell Manor, a 2,000-acre estate near Chipping Norton, in the Cotswolds, served as the backdrop for Amanda and Graham’s lunch date. While the manor isn’t open to the public, it is available for weddings and private events.

Southern California locations

Amanda’s sprawling California mansion was designed by renowned architect Wallace Neff, whose portfolio includes homes later bought by Hollywood stars like Jennifer Aniston. According to Zillow, the property was built in 1928 and features seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms. It sits on Orlando Road in San Marino.

Other California locations were also used for the film. Iris’s friend Arthur’s (Eli Wallach) house was shot in Brentwood, while the airport scenes took place at the Los Angeles Convention Center and the Huntington Library.

The interiors of both Iris’ and Amanda’s homes were shot on a sound stage, and filmed in between takes in the U.K.

“But here’s the funny thing, if you watch it … so we were shooting it in the winter here [in the U.K.], and every time I’d go in that door, we cut and we shot the interiors in L.A. about three months later,” Law shared on The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show.