Primal Real Estate

Not even the terrors of its upstairs bathroom keep moviegoers from wanting to own the house from What Lies Beneath.

________________________________________

Last summer's hit thriller What Lies Beneath, in which Harrison Ford proved to be a less-than-perfect husband to Michelle Pfeiffer, gave audiences an impressive dose of old-fashioned ghost-filled jolts to the nervous system. But what truly haunted a for of people once they'd left the theater was the breathtaking house where most of the film's scream-inducing action took place. Like the modern glass house in 1959's North by Northwest or the slick apartment Mel Gibson owned in 1996's Ransom, Ford and Pfeiffer's home in What Lies Beneath made you want a house tour when the story was over.

"Norman and Claire Spencer have exactly what you would want to have," says Rick Carter, the film's production designer (who just wrapped Robert Zemeckis's Cast Away and is currently designing Steven Spielberg's A.I.). "It's an idyllic house, though one that becomes, finally, a place of terror." In fact, Carter searched the entire coast of New England for a house that would strike moviegoers as a dream house, one that would perfectly embody "an upper-class, Yankee, blue blood veneer of respectability." But none of the houses that had the appropriate exterior feel had interiors that were viable for the extensive indoor shooting. So, after he, fellow production designer Jim Teegarden and director Robert Zemeckis found the perfect location--on Lake Champlain in a Vermont state park--they designed and built the exact house they needed. "We knew the look we were drawn to, a Nantucket shingle style," says Carter. Sometimes called "Nantucket Simple," the style loosely refers to residential architecture on Massachusetts's Nantucket Island, some of which dates as far back as the late seventeenth-century. It's a style generally characterized by weathered shingles and minimal ornamentation, though many variations have developed as the look has evolved and spread across the country over the years. "When people think, 'I want a New England-esque house,' this is what they think of," says Carter, "It's iconic, something that everybody associates with the Northeast."

There was no particular model for the house Carter and his team created. The specifics of the design actually emerged from the inside out. Carter developed the studies, bathroom, kitchen and main rooms that were called for in the story before he turned to the outside. "We didn't have a particular exterior shape in mind other than the turret," he explains. "The form grew out of content." The finished house was, at it happens, and not really finished at all. It was "structurally sound" and contained basics like electricity and plumbing, but nothing was "up to code" because the whole architectural wonder was constructed only to provide the setting for What Lies Beneath's inside and outside day scenes. Both the interior and exterior of the house were then duplicated onto a soundstage in Los Angeles for the movie's night scenes. Unlike the Vermont house, the stage house was "completely adaptable," with removable walls and multiples of certain rooms (there were seven versions of that eerie bathroom).

Where, then, is the magnificent house these days? Hollywood possesses the only evidence of it. After the movie wrapped, the Vermont house was torn down. But just for purposes of fantasy, what would a place like the Spencer spread go for in real life? "Let's put it this way," Carter laughs. "Even though Norman Spencer was the head of" his department at the university, to afford that house he had to have inherited a lot of money from his parents, too."

________________________________________