As with so many of the very baddest baddies in film, Michelle Fuller has a sensational pad. Like Blofeld’s base in ‘Diamonds are Forever’ (the Elrod House in Palm Springs) or the sleek Seoul home in ‘Parasite’, Fuller’s modern mansion is as gorgeous as she is despicable.
So, who is Michelle Fuller? Unsurprisingly for a 21st-century villain, she’s a corrupt pharmaceutical CEO, played by Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film ‘Bugonia’. In this remake of a 2003 South Korean film, two disillusioned young men kidnap Stone, whom they believe to be an alien. Bugonia has a brilliant cast, including Jesse Plemons and Alicia Silverstone, but it’s the contemporary stone-and-glass residence that could win Best Supporting Role.
As Fuller drives up to the house, Plemons and his sidekick attempt to kidnap her and she runs frantically around the grounds, giving the camera every opportunity to show off her glass-box pool, outdoor yoga shala and tiered box hedges. But this is not the Hollywood Hills. ‘The house is on a private estate in Oxshott, Surrey,’ says James Prichard, founder of Charybidis Developments, who built the 8,125sqft home in 2019. Coincidentally another of Charybidis’s homes — Greystones, on the same Crown Estate — stars in ‘Luther: the Fallen Sun’. Tabloids love to call Oxshott ‘the poshest village in England’.
‘We try to design contemporary homes that won’t be out of date in 20 years, so we avoid any of the typical styles around at the moment,’ says the home’s architect, Steve Clifton of SCd. ‘My team went to Valencia to source the exterior panelling, which is actually made of slim ceramic sheets. Had we used more common metal panelling, there’d have been staining and water runoff.’ SCd won the commission through a design competition, so they ‘are very excited to see the house on the big screen’.
And it’s not only the house sending signals via design. Fuller’s favourite easy chair, a wingback that cocoons as she scrolls through emails, is the ‘Imola’ by Henrik Pederson for BoConcept (£5,999 in Fuller’s leather version). The two bent plywood armchairs beside the pool were designed by Czech brutalist Jan Bocan, mastermind behind the Czechoslovak Embassy in London, which won the RIBA award in 1971.
Spaces and landscapes hold immense significance for Lanthimos, who opted to rebuild entire fictional versions of London, Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris for his award-winning movie Poor Things, rather than use digitally doctored locations. The director has revealed that, if he’d had his way, he’d have filmed the finale of Bugonia at Athens’s Acropolis. But after weeks of holding out for the ancient site, only to be refused, he filmed at Sarakiniko Beach on Milos instead. Spoiler: it turned out to be a great Plan B.
And the runners up are…
Foster Carling House by John Lautner
Mid-century California architecture superfans may already recognise the exquisite examples that support many a scene in ‘The Studio’, the comedy-drama skewering Hollywood producers. And for those of you who don’t: turn on your TVs to see John Lautner’s hexagonal 1949 Foster Carling House, which stars as the private residence of Seth Rogen’s studio boss. Equally covetable is the home of his ex-boss, played by Catherine O’Hara — the 1950 Harvey House, also a Lautner design.
Propeller Home by SPF:a
Another Seth Rogen turn, ‘Good Fortune’ is a movie about money and morality. And spectacular living. Rogen’s character lives in a Bel Air mansion also known as the Propeller Home, designed by Zoltan Pali’s practice in 2018. Its nine bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, cedar sauna, 1,000-bottle wine cellar and home cinema span three wings in a Y formation, with a pool outdoors — and they represent Rogen’s billionaire status, which he must give up when he swaps lives with a struggling employee played by Aziz Ansari.
New Jersey estate
The Arts and Crafts house steals the show in ‘The Housemaid’, a film based on Frieda McFadden’s novel of the same name. In cinemas on 19 December, it stars Sydney Sweeney as the titular maid, whose secretive boss, Amanda Seyfried, lives in this 1909 Madison, New Jersey, estate — a change from the Long Island setting in the book. It provides sprawling grounds, privacy and an ideal history for filming.
