Alfred Hitchcock Wanted Frank Lloyd Wright to Design the North by Northwest House: An Architect Just Built It for $45 Million

Vil­lains who live in opu­lent, remote mod­ernist hous­es may have been a cliché since the last cen­tu­ry, but giv­en Hol­ly­wood’s addic­tion to the tried and true, they do still turn up now and again. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, few film­mak­ers have man­aged to use them any­where near as mem­o­rably as Alfred Hitch­cock did. Think back to North by North­west, that show­case of both late-fifties high style and unadul­ter­at­ed Hitch­cock­ery, and any num­ber of images come right to mind: the dead­ly crop duster bear­ing down on Cary Grant, the hang off the edge of Mount Rush­more, the cheeky cut to the train enter­ing the tun­nel. But on the archi­tec­tural­ly inclined, the deep­est impres­sion is made by not a shot but a set: the house — mod­ernist, opu­lent, remote — occu­pied by James Mason’s vil­lain Phillip Van­damm.

“The pio­neer­ing deci­sion to fea­ture a mod­ern house as the villain’s lair in North by North­west arose from both the prac­ti­cal needs of the script and the desire to explore inno­va­tion in archi­tec­tur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” writes Chris­tine Madrid French, author of The Archi­tec­ture of Sus­pense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitch­cock.

The look of the Van­damm House betrays con­sid­er­able inspi­ra­tion from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, espe­cial­ly his “icon­ic Falling­wa­ter, best known for its aston­ish­ing pro­ject­ed porch­es can­tilevered over a run­ning stream.” As the Hol­ly­wood sto­ry goes, Hitch­cock asked Wright him­self about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of design­ing the house, but when the archi­tect asked for ten per­cent of the film’s entire bud­get, the job went to pro­duc­tion design­er Robert F. Boyle.

Despite the high­ly un-Wright­ian steel beams sup­port­ing the can­tilevered liv­ing room (insert­ed because Grant need­ed a way to climb in), movie­go­ers left the the­ater assum­ing that they’d wit­nessed a show­down in one of his hous­es. In fact, like so many of Hitch­cock­’s famous built envi­ron­ments, the struc­ture did­n’t actu­al­ly exist: Boyle and his col­lab­o­ra­tors con­struct­ed pieces on sets, com­plet­ing the rest with mat­te paint­ings. Yet their work did, in a sense, bring the Van­damm House into the world. A North by North­west fan since child­hood, archi­tect John Boc­car­do just this year achieved his $45 mil­lion dream of build­ing it for real. Apart from faith­ful­ly repli­cat­ing onscreen details, he also put in an eigh­teen-seat home the­ater, pos­si­bly on the safe assump­tion that the buy­er will be a fel­low cinephile — who, giv­en that the house over­looks Park City, Utah rather than sits atop Mount Rush­more, will sure­ly rue the day Sun­dance decid­ed to move to Boul­der. See pho­tos here.

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