Must Love Dogs is one of House Crazy Sarah’s favorite standby lonely-girl movies. It’s a real cutsie flick about internet dating after divorce, and loving dogs (two things House Crazy Sarah knows a lot about!)
But her favorite part of the movie is the darling craftsman bungalow that the main character *Sarah* lives in! 🙂
Below is a screen shot from the film…
And here’s the real-life house in Pasadena, California:
Now, please note that House Crazy Sarah is not responsible for sniffing out the location of this house. That honor goes to another crazy blogger known as I Am Not A Stalker. This not-stalker lady goes around and finds real life locations of movie sets. House Crazy Sarah highly recommends her website – she’s a hoot!
The film credits didn’t give any indication of the where the house was, so Not A Stalker did her investigative thing and found the house in a historic neighborhood of Craftmans in Pasadena.
The real house was built in 1921 and has 4 bedrooms, but only one bathroom.
House Crazy Sarah was bummed to learn that although the exterior of this home was used extensively in the film, all the interior scenes in Sarah’s bungalow were filmed on a sound-stage on a production lot. 🙁
But the cool thing is that the sets of the interior were modeled fairly closely after the interior of the real life house.
Luckily for us, the home’s owners still have their house listed on a filming location website so there are plenty of photos of the interior.
Let’s have a look inside the real house…
Here is that gorgeous multi-pane front door:
And in the screen shot below you can see the door they built for the sound stage:
Isn’t that incredible? It looks so much like the real house!
In the real house’s living room, check out the tiles on the fireplace:
And the movie set:
How cool is that??
The dining room is another room the set designer’s used as inspiration for the sound stage.
Real house dining room:
Movie set dining room:
The built-in china hutch is almost identical!
The kitchen is a different story.
The set designers went to town and gave Sarah an adorable gourmet chef’s kitchen…
Whereas in the real-life house, the kitchen is much more plain and modest…
Kind of a letdown 🙁
The master bedroom in the real house doesn’t much resemble Sarah’s bedroom in the movie…
Where are your BOOB shirts?!
But it’s still lovely with those large sliding doors!
We didn’t see much, if any, of the upstairs of Sarah’s set house, but the photos from the real house depict a cozy upper level:
According to public real estate records, the house last sold in 1997 for $280,000. Can you IMAGINE what it would sell for in today’s California market?!
We didn’t get to see any of the backyard in the film, but look at how perfect it is in real life:
Too bad Sarah (Diane Lane) and her beau Jake (John Cusack) couldn’t have hung out more in the backyard with their doggies, rather than the dog park.
House Crazy Sarah can’t let the opportunity go by to tell you that the adorable John Cusack once bought her a drink at a bar in Vancouver in the 1990’s! True story! But not many people had cell phones back then, so there is no photographic evidence of the encounter. 🙁
He was a perfect gentleman so House Crazy Sarah has always thought highly of him.
In any case, the charming bungalow was the star of the movie in House Crazy Sarah’s eyes!
Source websites for photos and info:
~ House Crazy Sarah
