I wrote hundreds of posts this year about all kinds of houses, from humble cottages to outlandish mansions. Here are the 20 that got the most clicks and eyeballs in 2011:

#20. Spelling Manor: Most Expensive House in U.S.

#19. Dita Von Teese’s Glam Retro Style

 #18. The “Father of the Bride” House is For Sale…Sorta

#17. Tori Spelling & Dean McDermott’s House

#16. “Modern Family:” 3 Funny Families, 3 Houses

#15. Taylor Swift Buys Historic Nashville Estate

#14. Carrie & Big’s Apartment in “Sex and the City 2″

#13. Kate Hudson Buys Tudor Next Door

#12. Celine Dion at Home in Florida

#11. The Real “American Horror Story” House

#10. New York’s Skinniest House

 #9. Rachel Zoe’s New House (& Nursery!)

#8. The Truth About “Designed to Sell” on HGTV

#7. The Hamptons Beach Houses on the TV Show “Revenge”

#6. The Old Stone Farmhouse from “Marley & Me”

#5. The Duncan’s Denver Home on “Good Luck Charlie”

#4. A Real “Up” Movie House Built in Utah

#3. Lisa Vanderpump’s Mansion in Beverly Hills

#2. Jennifer Lopez’s New House in L.A.

#1. Jennifer Aniston’s House in Beverly Hills

Did any of your favorites make the list? I have to say I’m partial to the Taylor Swift post because my daughter Lily wrote it, and the one about “Good Luck Charlie” because she requested it for her birthday.

Many thanks to all of my readers for making 2011 such an amazing year. Wishing you all a wonderful 2012! -Julia

When I asked you which Christmas-movie houses you’d like to see that I hadn’t featured yet, I got a lot of requests for Orchard House from the 1994 version of Little Women.  I thought that was a great suggestion, so I watched it again over the weekend and revisited the warm and welcoming home of the March family. The sets in this one really are gorgeously done.

The exterior was built to look like the real Orchard House that was the longtime home of Amos Bronson Alcott and his family, including Louisa May Alcott who set her novel there. Here’s the real thing in Concord, Massachusetts, which looks almost identical to the movie version:

The exterior for the movie was built on Vancouver Island in a forest where there were two houses already built next to each other. They constructed new facades for each of them.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot of them filming outside the Orchard House facade:

The location was chosen because there was a second house already next door, which was necessary for the story (Laurie, played by a young Christian Bale, lived there), and the driveways connected.

The movie was filmed at the beginning of summer in Vancouver, so they had to add the snow to make it look like winter.

Laurie’s house is a complete facade in front of a real house that the owners continued living in during filming. The director, Gillian Armstrong, points out that it must have been dark in there!

Here’s a sample of one of the sketches done of how they wanted Orchard House to look–in this case the back of it:

And here’s how it looked in the movie:

The opening scenes of the town were shot in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in the winter (real snow). This was the first film that had ever been allowed to shoot there. They made an exception for Little Women because Louisa May Alcott was from the area.

The interiors of Orchard House were all built on a soundstage, and that’s where the majority of filming was done.

The Production Designer was Jan Roelfs and the Set Decorator was Jim Erickson. They really did an amazing job bringing these houses to life and making them feel like they were real, and had real history in them.

Gillian Armstrong, the director, explained in the DVD commentary that although the sets were built to resemble the real Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, where Louisa May Alcott lived, the rooms had to be built bigger to accommodate the filming equipment.

The colors are much starker and the look is more formal inside the real Orchard House, as you can see on the museum’s website. Lots of white walls.

Most of the furnishings in the Orchard House Museum belonged to the Alcott family, and the rooms are kept the way they did when they lived there. I’d love to see it in person someday.

The filmmakers wanted their version to look warmer than the real thing. They chose “restful, earthy colors in the greens and grays so everything blends together and feels as one in the home,” according to Armstrong.

The Alcott family bought a 12-acre apple orchard in 1858 that came with two early-18th century houses. They moved the smaller of the two houses onto the back of the larger one and named it Orchard House.

Alcott based the Little Women on her real sisters and gave them all different names except for Beth, who had died. She said she couldn’t bear to change her name–she wanted the character to be as exactly as she remembered her sister.

The house in the movie looks as sad as its inhabitants do after Beth’s death:

The fabulous Mary Wickes played Aunt March. (Loved her in White Christmas.) She died a year after the movie came out, in 1995.

The Dining Room:

Claire Danes was Beth:

The movie wasn’t greenlit until Winona Ryder, who was a rising star in the early ’90s, was cast as Jo. (I featured her house here if you missed it!)

The Kitchen:

The Bedrooms:

The cast had to take knitting and etiquette classes before filming so they would know how to behave like young ladies of the 1860s.

I thought Susan Sarandon was wonderful as their “Marmee.”

Look at the woodwork in this bedroom. Love it:

The shot of Beth’s empty bedroom after she dies chokes me up every time:

Meg gives birth at home–to twins:

The screenplay had the movie opening with the girls acting out one of Jo’s stories in the attic.

They later decided it made it too hard to get to know the characters, and the new beginning was shot of them wishing each other a Merry Christmas.

Here grown-up Amy (who was played by Kirsten Dunst in earlier scene) visits her sisters Beth and Jo in the attic. Amy, who was a budding artist in the novel, was based on Alcott’s sister May. She never became a successful artist as she hoped. She illustrated the first edition of Little Women, but her artwork got negative reviews.

May/Amy did, however, teach Daniel Chester French, who became an artist and sculptor. She gave him the tools that he eventually used to sculpt the statue of Lincoln that sits in the Lincoln Memorial. Pretty cool, right?

When May died, she left behind a 2-year old girl called Lulu. Alcott took the toddler in and raised her.

Meg kissing her future husband John (Eric Stoltz) at the front door:

One major change Alcott made in the story is the ending. Jo falls in love with a German professor and marries him. But in real life, the author had no real interest in men and never married.

In one interview she gave, she explained that she had decided to be a lifelong spinster “because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”

She did, however, have a romance during her time in Europe with Ladislas Wisniewski. She later said that “Laddie” was the model for the character of Laurie in the book.

Little Women was one of my favorite books as a girl. This is the copy I had on my shelves, and I must have read it a hundred times. Anyone else have this illustrated Junior edition?

I told my husband that I wished I still had my old copy, and he found one on eBay for me for Christmas. How sweet is that? It was one of my favorite gifts this year. Looking at the illustrations in the book really brings back memories of poring over the book when I was little and wishing I had a house full of sisters like theirs!

P.S. Visit my Movie Houses page to see if your favorite onscreen houses have been featured!

The holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life wasn’t a big hit when it hit theaters in 1946. It was nominated for several Oscars but didn’t win any. Then it was kind of forgotten, until it was rediscovered by a new generation who grew up watching it every December on TV.

Today it’s hard to imagine Christmas without revisiting George and Mary Bailey and their “drafty old house,” as he calls it, in Bedford Falls.

George and Mary walk past their future house, when it’s still empty and in disrepair:

Bedford Falls was a huge set built on the RKO Ranch in Encino, California. It took two months of construction and was one of the longest sets ever created for a movie. It ran 3 city blocks with 75 stores and buildings and covered 4 acres.

They transplanted 20 full-grown oak trees into the town to make it look like it had been there much longer than it had.

The remains of Bedford Falls on the RKO ranch were razed in the mid-1950s. There are only two surviving locations–the swimming pool in Beverly Hills High School and the Martini house in La Cañada Flintridge, California.

Capra’s inspiration for Bedford Falls was reportedly Seneca Falls, a small town in New York (you can read about it in this interesting article: The Real Bedford Falls). They have an annual “It’s a Wonderful Life” festival there every December.

For the winter scenes, the special effects crew used 3,000 tons of shaved ice and created “chemical snow.” Until then, movies used cornflakes painted white, but they made so much noise when actors walked on them that the dialogue would have to be dubbed.

The movie won an Academy Award for its snow. They really were special effects, too. It was filmed during a heat wave in California.

Mary Hatch’s house, where George visits and angrily insists that he never wants to get married:

Capra always had only one George Bailey in mind: Jimmy Stewart. But W.C. Fields was considered for the role of Uncle Billy (who was ultimately played by Thomas Mitchell). Jean Arthur passed on the role of Mary before Donna Reed was offered the part. And Henry Travers was considered for several roles in the movie before he became Clarence.

After their honeymoon gets abruptly canceled, Mary sets up an impromptu “bridal suite” in the abandoned house they once threw rocks at:

We see Mary fixing the place up and hanging a pretty toile wallpaper…

…but then we never see that paper again, do we?

Zuzu loves flowers, and her bedroom shows it! Her headboard, nightstand, dresser, and the crib next to her all have flowers on them.

I love this scene, when she refuses to take a nap because she wants to look at the flower she brought home from school. When a few petals falls off, she tells her dad to “paste them back on.”

We only get a glimpse of the kitchen–I always want to see more:

It’s a Wonderful Life began as a short story called “The Greatest Gift,” written by Philip Van Doren Stern. Unable to find a publisher for his story, he made 200 copies and sent them out to family and friends in his Christmas cards in 1943.

Word of the short story spread and RKO Studios bought it for $10,000, intending to turn it into a movie with Cary Grant as the suicidal man who learns how precious his life really is.

Several unsuccessful scripts later, Grant moved on and filmed another holiday favorite, The Bishop’s Wife, instead.

But then Frank Capra read the story and felt it had the potential to “encapsulate everything I was trying to say in all of my films,” as he said in an interview. “That every man is born to do something.”

He bought the script from RKO for the same $10,000 they had paid and changed the title to It’s a Wonderful Life. He later called it his favorite of all his movies.

I must have seen this movie a million times over the years, but I still get teary at the happy ending. Did you know the script originally called for it to end with him on his knees, saying the Lord’s Prayer? They decided to bring the entire town into the final scene instead. Hard to imagine it any other way!

Looking down at the Bailey house from heaven, when the angel Clarence is told that George needs help:

This movie always makes me happy, even after all these years. And it really does make you think about what your life is about and what you can do to make the world around you a better place, doesn’t it?

More Houses from Classic Christmas Movies I’ve Featured:

• Home Alone
• National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
• Christmas in Connecticut
• A Christmas Story
• List of All Movie Houses

Are you one of the many Twihards who stood in line to catch the latest installment of the Twilight Saga over the weekend? Breaking Dawn Part 1 pulled in a staggering $30.25 million on Friday alone. Wow.

I read all of Stephenie Meyers’ books in the series when they first came out and was frankly not crazy about this one (couldn’t get past the “baby” storyline). I was eager to get a look at Bella and Edward’s honeymoon hideaway on “Isle Esme,” though, so I tracked it down. It’s a pretty fabulous beach house. Wanna see?

They filmed the honeymoon scenes at Casa em Paraty, a luxury vacation home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The setting is gorgeous.

The house was designed by Thiago Bernardes of the architecture firm Bernardes + Jacobsen. It was featured in the January 2011 issue of Architectural Digest. Here’s a shot of the front of the house that appeared in the magazine:

AD describes it as “a rustic beach house built for the Fernandes family on the Brazilian fjord of Saco do Mamanguá. The area is so remote that the family can only reach its house by boat or helicopter.”

These pivoting glass doors are so cool. They were designed to let the sea breezes blow through the house. Ahhh…

In this screenshot from the trailer, Edward carries Bella over the threshold by pushing the glass door open:

Architectural Digest recently wrote about this Brazilian beach house again, featuring an interesting interview with the film’s production designer, Richard Sherman. He tells AD:

“A number of the scenes that take place inside the Brazil beach house were actually shot on sets—a bedroom, bathroom, and courtyard—built on a Louisiana soundstage. The production team’s challenge was to create a seamless transition between the house and the sets.

“We see Edward and Bella arrive at the house at night. Then she walks through the living room, and the scene cuts to our set. You can’t tell the difference. It looks like a part of that house.”

Sherman says they even recreated their own version of the exterior of the house with visual effects when they arrive on the boat. “What you see of the real house is the front door, the steps leading up to it, the veranda, and all those glass doors.”

Rates range from $7,000 a night to $15,000, depending on the time of year. So, you know, not for the budget traveler.

I played chess on my honeymoon, too…didn’t you?

This walkway spans from the master bedroom on one side of the living room to more bedrooms on the other:

Bella walks into the honeymoon suite with the white canopy bed, which is actually a set built back in Louisiana (another crappy screenshot from the trailer–will have to wait until the DVD comes out to get better ones):

In the book, the house is on an island owned by Edward’s “mother,” dubbed Isle Esme. It was a gift from her husband Carlisle. It has “the pale-on-pale color scheme preferred by the Cullens.” In the bedroom is an “absolutely huge white bed in the center of the room, hung with billowy clouds of mosquito netting.”

There are 6 bedrooms in the house. This is the master:

I featured Bella’s house and both of the houses used for the Cullens in the past (different houses were used in different movies), so I was trying to figure out if they were the same sets in this one. Turns out Bella’s is the same, but they rebuilt the entire 3-story Cullen house on a soundstage in Louisiana, with exteriors shot in Vancouver.

You can moor your boat right off the beach when you visit. Something to keep in mind when planning your trip!

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson play lovebirds Bella and Edward. My husband was dragged went to the last installment in the Twilight series with me and complained that there’s at least a 5 second delay between each line of dialogue. He swears the movie would have been half as long if they didn’t spend so much time staring mutely into each other’s eyes. Ha. He has a point.

They created a big, open kitchen on a soundstage, but I couldn’t find any photos of it. Or the master bath, for that matter. Bummer.

In the novel, Stephenie Meyer set the honeymoon on an island in the middle of nowhere. That presented a challenge for location scouts. Hard to find something that remote. After four weeks of searching, they settled on this house, even though there are views of other tropical islands from here.

The aerial view of the property:

Have you seen Breaking Dawn yet? What did you think? Did Edward and Bella’s honeymoon house look the way you imagined it would? More photos and information at the Casa em Paraty website, Architectural Digest, and Casa Sugar. AD photos taken by Iain Kemp.

More Twilight Goodness:

• Bella’s House in Twilight
• The Real Cullen House from the First Twilight Movie
• Edward’s House from New Moon For Sale

Last month when I told you about the real-life “Up” house that Bangerter builders created in Utah, the interiors weren’t finished yet. I asked if there were any readers in the area who might be able snap photos of them for us during the Salt Lake City Parade of Homes tour and guess what–a couple of them did! I was so excited to get a look inside, and we have Emily and Kristen to thank.

You know you’re at Carl & Ellie’s house as soon as you walk through the front gate and see the mailbox:

Kristen reports: “We were greeted by a very nice Carl on the front steps and my daughter was able to get her picture with him.”

“The house has a really darling floor plan, smaller hallways and rooms, but lots of charm,” Kristen says. “It feels like an authentic 50′s style home.”

Disney allowed them to create the house on the provision that it could only be built once.

I love the photos that go up the stairs.

Everything that could possibly be replicated from the movie was, down to the objects on the mantel and the painting that Ellie did over the fireplace:

Carl and Ellie’s chairs had to be custom made to look like the ones in the movie:

Only a few of the rooms were actually shown in the movie, so the builder had to get creative and imagine what they’d look like. Here’s the kitchen they created for Carl and Ellie:

Gotta love those baby blue Big Chill appliances!

The house was so crowded with visitors that it was a challenge for Emily and Kristen to get photos of the rooms, but they did a great job.

Let’s check out the second floor now, shall we?

Here’s the nursery that Ellie is seen painting in the movie:

There’s a second-floor laundry with green cabinets:

Carl and Ellie’s bedroom:

Carl’s ties:

It’s for sale for $399,900, but the builder will build the 4 bedroom, 3.5 bath house (not in “Up” style but with the same floorplan) for $299,000.

Some of you asked for a floor plan of the house after my last post and Emily tracked it down for me here. Here’s the main floor:

The second floor:

This house has a basement, unlike the one in the movie, and it’s finished:

The builder says it only took them 4 months to build the house.

There’s a detached 2-car garage:

After I wrote about this house in July, readers from Herriman told me that the neighborhood was insisting that the house be painted beige or something “normal” after the home show. Boo!

But a reader named Natalie who attended the show tells me, “I asked one of the Bangerter brothers who was there if the house is being repainted and he said no! The city loved it so much they said everything could stay!”

You can see more of the house and learn more about it in this video produced by Cimaron Neugebauer for the Salt Lake Tribune:

Many thanks to Kristen (who blogs at More Than the Mulberries) and Emily Miskin (who blogs at Emily Miskin Designs) for taking the photos and sharing them with us! Read more about the house in my first post about it and at Bangerter Homes.

Serendipity, the romantic inn with blue shutters that had a starring role in the Richard Gere-Diane Lane tear-jerker Nights in Rodanthe, used to sit on the edge of the Pea Island Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. But then it started to wash away.

After I featured the beach house a couple of years ago, several local residents wrote to tell me what a bad state it was in. It was on a “death watch.” One reader said that after every bad storm, everyone wanted to know whether Serendipity had survived it.

Here’s how the Inn at Rodanthe, as it was called in the movie, looked onscreen:

The shutters and wraparound decks were added for the movie and removed afterward . Here’s how the house looked without them, after filming ended:

Not only was it looking kind of naked after the film crew left, but it was declared a public nuisance and condemned. One local wrote to tell me that vandals had been breaking into it and stealing things.

This photo was taken after a bad storm (source) when the water came up so far that the road buckled:

It was built in the ’80s with piling driven down 14 feet and set in concrete.  At the time, there was 400 feet of beach in front of the house.

The owners told the Island Free Press that they had “everything tied up in this house,” and didn’t know what to do next. They had tried to sell it for a couple of years but no one was willing to take it on.

Then, last year, I got an email from Ben and Debra Huss, who described themselves as “extreme fans” of the movie, telling me they had decided to buy Serendipity and move it to safety. Not only that, but they wanted to “restore it to the original splendor of the movie.”

They did just that. It has been moved, renovated, and reopened for business (on higher ground!). Some of you have written me, asking for an update on the inn. Here’s how the exterior looks now, on its new lot:

Much better, right? They have also given some of the rooms a makeover to look more like they did in the movie (the interiors were filmed on a separate soundstage). For example, here’s how the kitchen looked before:

And now, with blue cabinets:

They even replicated the swinging doors from the movie:

Here’s how the kitchen set looked when Diane Lane and Richard Gere were in it:

The new owners tracked down the same wallpaper used in the movie kitchen:

Another room that was replicated was Richard Gere’s blue bedroom. Here’s how it looked in the movie:

And in the actual inn today:

I also noticed that they included an antique organ like there was in the movie. You can see a little of it to the right of this screenshot:

In Serendipity today:

My hat’s off to Ben and Debra for taking on the monumental (and expensive) task of buying, moving, and redecorating this inn. You can see all of the photos on the website along with rental rates and info.

To see more photos of how it looked in the movie, check out my original post: Nights in Rodanthe: A Romantic Inn on the Beach.

Click here to see a list of all the movie houses I’ve featured!

Ireally liked the animated Disney/Pixar movie Up and the colorful little house that Carl and Ellie spent their lives together in. I still get sniffly just thinking about that opening montage that tells their love story.

So I was intrigued when I heard that some enterprising homebuilders were recreating the house from the movie in Herriman, Utah. What a fun idea! Here’s how it turned out:

Love it! Local station KSL.com reports that Bangerter Homes first got Disney’s permission to build it and then went to work.

It’ll be open for the Salt Lake Parade of Homes July 29-August 14 (man, I wish I could go!) and then it’ll be sold for around $400,000–just enough to cover the building costs.

They paid attention to every small detail, from the weather vane on top of the house:

To Carl and Ellie’s mailbox:

Remember the murals Ellie painted in the nursery and above the fireplace? Those were recreated, too:

The interiors aren’t finished yet, but they’ll have furniture designed to look like what was in the movie.

I would love to see it when it’s finished. Any readers in the Salt Lake area who could go to the Parade of Homes and snap some pics for us? Pretty please? 

There were a lot of colors in the animated version of the house for the builder to replicate:

This makes me wish we used more colors on all of our houses. It’s so cheery!

“The movie kind of captured the idea that a house is a place where you live and you grow up and you live your life,” builder Blair Bangerter says. “We’ve tried to take this movie and bring it to life in a real home.”

They added a little extra space to the house and included a basement that the one in the movie (obviously) didn’t have. Their version has 2,800 square feet and a 2-car detached garage.

With the exterior finished, lookiloos are already stopping by to snap photos of the Up house. The builder adds balloons to the roof on the weekends for fun. “But not too many,” he laughs.

I’m sure there are some Disney/Pixar fans out there who would love to live in a house like this. Would you?

*UPDATE: Readers sent me some great interior photos of the house that I posted here.

You can read more about it and watch the video on KSL.com. There’s more information and photos of the house being built on the builder’s website. Parade of Homes info here. Thanks to Sherrie for telling me about it!

At the beginning of the drive to Katharine Hepburn’s estate in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, a hand-painted sign politely requested potential lookiloos to “Please Go Away.” If that wasn’t enough to convince them, a “Keep Out” sign was tacked below it. Gotta love it–especially when she posed next to them with flowers and a big grin on her face.

The film legend died at the age of 96 in 2003; her home sold a year later to Barbara and Frank Sciame for $6 million. They renovated it and just put it back on the market for $28m. Here’s how the house looked then:

And here’s how the house looks today, after the extensive renovations:

The waterfront estate had been in the Hepburn family since 1913. The house was built in the late ’30s and Katharine did little to update it over the years. Well, everything has been now. It has been so updated, in fact, that it looks like it could be a brand new house.

The Sciames bought the property as an investment but they say they fell in love with the house and spent summers here. I can see why! I wouldn’t mind having this as a summer home…

Here’s a photo of Hepburn in the kitchen. This little glimpse inside the house gives you an idea of how much work the new owners did to it.

Here’s that same kitchen today, and it’s pretty unrecognizable as the same one:

The renovated pantry:

In this bedroom, it’s all about the view:

The house has 6 bedrooms in all…

…and 7.5 baths.

So much of the house is so white that I wish there were more signs of warmth like there is with the wood around this fireplace. I imagine things were a lot warmer and darker before. (Note the books they have on the coffee table about her.)

The house has over 8,000 square feet. One of my favorite spots has to be this screened porch overlooking the water:

Those of you who remember the houses and sets from movies better than the plots in them probably thought of the Hepburn Estate as it was portrayed in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Aviator, right? I remembered loving it when I saw the film back in ’04. I watched it again today to snaps some photos and compare the two.

Here’s how the Hepburn house looked in the movie when Howard Hughes (played by DiCaprio) and Kate Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) pulled up the long drive:

Sadly, a hurricane destroyed the original house shortly after Hepburn and Hughes broke up in 1938. It floated away in the water while the Hepburn family watched it from higher ground. Foundation bricks and a claw-footed bathtub were all that was left of it. They rebuilt this house in the same spot, but higher off the ground. (Source.)

This is the only room of the house that we really get to see in the movie. Boo. Hiss. I wanted to see more.

I kept trying to get a better look at the kitchen over Cate Blanchett’s shoulder. When she ducked under the table at one point, I snapped this photo:

According to the listing, the property has its own private dock and beach, with “a pond opposite side securing privacy.”

You can read more about it and see more photos at The Daily Mail and the listing. Thanks to all of the readers (and fellow Hepburn fans) who emailed, FB’d, and Tweeted me about this listing. You guys rock.

P.S. I loved both Katharine Hepburn and her country house in the classic comedy Bringing Up Baby. You can see my post about those sets here.

Hooked on Tours of Famous Houses? Click Here to See More!

Imagine my excitement when I saw a real estate listing declaring, “The Father of the Bride house is for sale!” I love that house and have written about it several times over the years. But then I saw this photo of the exterior and something didn’t seem right. I found one of the house from the movie to compare the two:

They are similar, but there are key differences from the door to the windows to the addition on the left.

Then I remembered hearing that they had used two houses for the movie, filming along the side and back of a different house for those outdoor scenes when Steve Martin plays basketball with his daughter Annie, etc. (Source: Iamnotastalker tells all about it!)

The other house that was used for the movie is located in Pasadena on El Molino Avenue. You can see that the front of it looks just like it did in the movie right down to the white picket fence when you check the streetview on Google Maps.

The house that’s for sale was also used in the movie Guess Who with Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher. On the IMDb website, it lists this address (500 North Almansor Street, Alhambra, California) under Filming Locations.

Here’s how the house looked in Guess Who:

The siding was painted a darker shade for the movie, and some landscaping was done:

That’s Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher in the driveway:

And the front of the house pictured in the listing:

Yep, that’s it, all right! Mystery solved. I’m a regular Veronica Mars of Real Estate.

So. Bottom line is that it would be more accurate to say that the side and back of the house from Father of the Bride and the front of the house from Guess Who is for sale. (Are you still with me?)

Now let’s take a look at what the real interiors of the house look like. As far as I can tell, neither movie filmed inside the house, but it’s a good excuse to take a look back at the FOTB sets that so many of us loved!

The entry hall and staircase in the house are much bigger than they were in FOTB:

The dining room in the listing:

And the dining room in FOTB:

I haven’t been able to find many photos the sets of Guess Who, but here’s the dining room, with a glimpse of the foyer and staircase behind it:

The house was built in 1925 in a Traditional Colonial style. The living room:

The FOTB version had built-ins on either side of the fireplace instead of French doors. Note how similar the mantels are, though, and how both fireplace walls have a “bump-out:”

The kitchen is kind of tragic if you’re expecting it to be anything like the ones in either of the movies:

Get a set designer in this place, STAT, who can make it look more like the FOTB version…

Or how it looked in Guess Who:

The study in the real house has a fireplace, paneled walls, and built-in bookshelves:

There are 5 bedrooms and 3.5 baths.

The master bedroom was a lot smaller in FOTB:

The Master Bedroom in Guess Who:

I loved Zoe Saldana’s bedroom:

The real house has what appears to be a second-floor sunroom:

There was a sunroom off the master bedroom in Guess Who:

This photo of the back of the house shows where they filmed the outdoor scenes:

How the back of the house looked in Guess Who, which filmed several scenes in the backyard:

The listing says that this arbor was built for Father of the Bride:

Sure enough, I tracked down this photo of the bride and groom dancing under it:

Not only that, but you can see it in Guess Who, too, when they renewed their vows at the end of the movie:

The listing price for the Father of the Bride-slash-Guess Who house is $1.35m. You can read more about it and see the rest of the photos in the listing, offered by Mark Paulson of Anthony Venti Realtors. I noticed that Zillow has some different/additional photos on its site, too.

If anyone has additional info about the filming that was done at this house, fill us in! (Thanks to Realtor David Montgomery for the tip-off.)

You can see more photos in my posts about Father of the Bride and Father of the Bride II.

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Candy Spelling–widow of TV titan Aaron Spelling and mother of Tori–has been trying to sell her famous 57,000 square-foot mansion in Los Angeles, known as “The Manor,” for years (I first wrote about it in early 2009 when the listing became public).

She refused to budge on her asking price of $150 million, which seemed a little crazy when house prices were falling all around her, but her persistence has apparently paid off. The 22-year old U.K. heiress Petra Ecclestone has reportedly decided to buy the Manor with its (in)famous gift-wrapping room and doll museum.

The whole place is just so freakin’ big, I can’t imagine living in it. Candy admitted in one interview that even she wasn’t sure how many bathrooms it has–23? Maybe 26? Something like that.

In this video tour, Candy admits that the house got so big because she didn’t understand the scale of blueprints and thought the original room sizes looked “too small” on paper. She says that Aaron put his foot down and nixed the plans for another huge wing that was going to be built on, or this place would’ve been even bigger.

I think what surprises me most about this is that I can’t imagine a young woman living in this mansion. It looks like an older person’s house to me.  Can you picture 22-year old Petra…

…hanging out in this living room?

I can’t. I predict a lot of redecorating in this home’s future. She getting married in August and will be splitting her time between L.A. and London.

Here’s a shot of the famous doll room (taken from this video tour):

And Candy Spelling showing a reporter the breakfast room with the wallpaper and matching upholstery that makes me dizzy:

The house also comes with 3 kitchens, 2 swimming pools, a bowling alley, beauty salon, and parking for 100 cars. The garages should come in handy considering Petra’s dad is British billionaire and Formula One racing boss Bernie Ecclestone.

Candy and her daughter Tori had a falling out after Aaron’s death but have reportedly repaired their relationship. Did you know Tori has a new website with a section devoted to her love of decorating? It’s called EdiTORIal.

Tori is trying to sell some real estate of her own. The house she shares with hubby Dean McDermott and their kids in Encino is on the market.

It’s a much more modest abode than Candy’s, with an asking price of $3.1 million. You can see photos of Tori’s family-friendly home here.

For more information about the sale of the house, go to WSJ. To see my original post about this house with the video tour, click here.

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