So, I hear you’ve moved to the country,” people would say when I bought my house in West Oxfordshire 10 years ago. “Do you have any pictures?” Gamely, I’d pull out my phone, swipe through my photos and then choose a nice, pretty, Christmas-y shot where snow covers the front garden and clings to the roof. Nine times out of 10 the reaction would be the same.
“Oh my god…” they’d say. “It’s just like the house from that Cameron Diaz film… The Holiday.”
This happened time and time again. Most often at Christmas time, almost exclusively women excitedly point out my home’s remarkable similarity to the country cottage in the Nancy Meyers romcom starring Kate Winslet, Jack Black, Jude Law and Cameron Diaz.
(I say, mainly women because most men have never actually seen any romcoms, never mind one set in Surrey that has male characters saying stuff like “I sew and I have a cow in the backyard” and features the most spectacularly unlikely “meet cute” of all time – a drunk but collegiately dishy Jude Law, who after finding a gorgeous, sun-kissed Cameron Diaz answering the door, somehow persuades this complete stranger to let him stay on what he claims is his sister’s sofa, for the night and then, almost immediately, sleeps with her.)
Details, details. Eventually, I did watch The Holiday and discovered some remarkable similarities (with the home, that is not seduction techniques).
Okay, so my own honey-coloured stone cottage is in the Cotswolds, not Surrey like the one in the film. Mine is also in a small village and is semi-detached, while the house in The Holiday has no party-wall neighbours and is in the middle of a field, but otherwise, it’s pretty much the same deal. Same four windows drawn on its corners like a toddler’s artwork, same gabled front door, same age-sagged, stone-tiled roof.
Like “Rosehill Cottage” in the movie, you come into mine through the front door (where Cameron Diaz famously struggled with her wheelie suitcase) stepping out of the flurrying snow and straight into the sitting room. Probably dragging in brown leaves, mud, pebbles and possibly a couple of twigs as you go. That’s when you notice something that seems scientifically impossible – it is significantly colder inside than it is outside. How can this be?
Built in the early 18th century as a house for a farm worker – who quite possibly kept sheep in the downstairs living room during the winter – the cottage is made of 2ft-thick Cotswold limestone walls, which are lovely to look at, but really, really cold. Ingeniously, the stone walls retain sub-zero temperatures in the winter, then somehow actually radiate and maintain similar levels of cold during the summer. Often, during a July or August heatwave, I light a roaring fire just to take the edge off the Arctic temperature while I watch the telly. Maybe even give the central heating a quick blast.
An underfloor system with warming elements would be an option if only there was an “underfloor” but basic, serf and turf accommodation like this, thrown together with spit and grit and agricultural labour some 300-odd years back, was constructed without foundations. Instead, there are just stones and huge timbers piled straight on to the dirt, with next to no insulation from below.
It’s a feature that became particularly evident when the house and garden flooded in 2020 – dirty water coming up, through the floor, gushing in at the base levels of the ground floor walls… and, a day or so later, I presume, exiting exactly the same way, Limey Cotswold soil has decent drainage capabilities, I noted.
In most rooms, even on sunny, blue-sky mornings, the house is also dark. Windows in a cottage of this age are small and wonky and deep-set into the interior walls like a castle’s arrow slits, which means that natural light tends to dribble, rather than stream in. I’ve decided to describe this quality as “cosy”, like Diaz’s Amanda.
I have also, on occasion, just like Cameron/Amanda, put myself to bed with a glass of Malbec and a woolly hat of a winter’s night, and laid there, my breath clearly visible in the cold air above my mattress, wondering what the heck I am doing in this rural, ice-box Gormenghast… and why I choose this over Malibu.
In these moments of gloom and doubt (and frequent power cuts) lighting the sitting room’s inglenook fireplace, large enough to burn heretics and tree trunks on, always adds a bit of winter cheer and Christmas crackle.
Would a sozzled Law have noticed in his self-confessed room-spinning state that there is not a straight line anywhere in the house? Wooden floors slope and camber like a pirate ship’s poop deck. Ceiling heights, door frames, floor pitches, all look as if they have been erected by a team of blindfolded clowns unfamiliar with spirit levels or plumb lines. The un-flat walls, plastered like a wedding cake, have the consistency of an unmade bed.
This kind of eccentric, skew whiff architecture can be painful and I am still not used to the comically Lilliputian proportions of door frames and ceilings. Clearly, the house was built at a time when the average height of a British male was somewhere in Jack Black’s 5ft5 region.
If my 6ft1 frame is fully upright, some doors won’t even clear the bridge of my nose. I also have to bob down like a soldier exiting a helicopter and dodging the rotors when I walk through them, and there are always four or five occasions throughout the year when I will somehow completely forget where I am, head straight for a doorway and smack my face into its crude, overhead carpentry. A couple of times, like a bird flying into a window, I have actually been knocked down flat by an unscheduled hit.
Also, want to make a cup of tea or get a brandy for that unexpected caller? Come through to the kitchen, but do mind your head.
I say, kitchen. Really, more of a corridor with a cooker and cupboard and a sink. For the first nine years of living here, I made do with a tiny galley kitchen and a dining table that could, at a push, seat four. The bathroom was in a small and grim, jerry-built extension next door.
Bathing and cooking as neighbours. Not nice. Even worse, if I woke from my second-floor bedroom and needed a pre-dawn pee, I’d have to go down two flights of stairs and cross the house to find relief in the Arctic temperature of the lean-to loo.
This kind of eccentric, skew whiff architecture can be painful, and I am still not used to the comically Lilliputian proportions of door frames and ceilings
In an attempt to add a bit of Diaz’s California to the property, I’ve since added a larger, more airy kitchen, another bathroom and two more loos. (Fun fact: my home is reputed to be the last house in Oxfordshire to get indoor plumbing – a previous owner survived until the 1980s with a freshwater well for water and a bucket khazi set-up at the bottom of the garden, which is still standing.)
So, with all this in mind, I reckon Law probably had Diaz at “boot room”. “Boot room” actually being one of the most searched-for hashtags on social media, in case you didn’t know.
Mine may be more of a passageway with hooks but it contains some of the correctly cine-genic boot room clutter; a brace of Hunter wellies, LL Bean duck boots, sturdy veldtschoen, a handful of photogenically waxy impermeables from Patagonia, Carhartt and Cordings. A number of curated tote bags are also all slung laissez-faire style (ie arranged with aspirational, anally retentive care) on a series of wooden coat pegs.
The utility room/cloakroom/downstairs loo is equally significant. A butler’s sink deep enough for canine bathing, a cute, curtained storage area below, a ceramic cistern that drops water in riot police torrents onto lavatorial ceramic crafted by Victorians. A bookshelf and a basket full of white Andrex.
As for upstairs, a spiral of oak steps winds its creaky way up, like a goblin’s helter-skelter, to the next floor (two bedrooms, one bathroom, a study, a second open fireplace ) and then up another flight to the attic bedroom.
This was most probably a 20th-century modernisation – the house was originally just two storeys with a simple lean-to stair. The second flight leads to a converted A-frame loft – a lovely bedroom for both me and the nocturnal animals that scratch away at the roof insulation and skitter along the wood beams while I sleep.
Visitors under the age of 40 do love the cutesy staircase. Any one older… not so much. Firstly, it is a potential death trap. I’ve slipped down it twice (leather shoe soles and slippery socks being the culprits), once banging my coccyx with such jarring force that I actually vomited.
Another time, I fell forward and hit my head on the decapitation-capable door jam at the stair’s foot. Secondly, because it is so narrow and windy, no piece of substantial furniture can be coaxed upwards via its low and constricted wooden course.
When I first moved in, several chests of drawers and a lovely old double bed from Provence had to be smashed up for its vertical transportation… then painstakingly reassembled, braced and glued.
A few chairs didn’t make it all and had to be given up. Getting a steel bathtub up the stairs required the Hulk-like strength of three men. Manoeuvring a king-sized mattress was akin to disposing of a Michelin Man corpse in the attic.
I feel sure that Law didn’t have the same problem getting Cameron upstairs.
This post was originally published on here
