Why Everyone Wanted the Old Home Alone House Back
Remember back in 2018 when someone renovated the most famous house in Winnetka, Illinois, and the internet took it personally? The house was built in 1926, and in 1990, it played the McCallister home in Home Alone. The renovation stripped out the warmth and repainted the place in a sleek, all-white modern idiom. We posted about it last year. Fans of the film and interior designers who had never set foot inside the home called the new interior sterile, depressing, and a straight-up insult. The house sold again in January of last year for more than $5.5 million, and the new owners have publicly committed to restoring the home to its former Hollywood glory. "Our vision is to bring back the warmth and just the love from the movie," their project manager, Scott Price, told reporters. Macaulay Culkin had already joked to the Times that he wanted to buy it and turn it into a movie fun house, so maybe we know who our mystery purchaser is now.
Is this fan service? Is this a real estate stunt aimed at the Christmas-movie economy and trying to maybe cash in on a new asset that can publicly make you 10x on your investment and privately give you something to make you more interesting when you have to talk about what you did last year? Whatever the beef, the people who hated that soulless renovation with passion most likely did so because that house was as much their home as it was Kevin's. We're talking about one of the biggest films to come out in its year, doing almost half a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, and becoming the highest-grossing movie in 1990, beating Ghost. Home Alone was so big that it was the highest-grossing Christmas film until Jim Carry's The Grinch came along in 2018. So for generations, every December for more than thirty years, first on VHS and then eventually on cable, and now whatever platform's turn it is to stream it, people tuned in and joined Kevin in surviving the night alone. The owner who gutted it and hit it with the Airbnb Starter theme pack didn't realize the value of the property as it was, and so they fumbled the ball.
Now this is an extreme case of something true about every house. A home is a building that has absorbed enough of your life to give it back to you in the little stains, chips, marks, and signs of use that can only come from years of living and repetitive action.
Martha Stewart Made Homemaking Matter Again
The decade's most successful theorist of the home understood this better than maybe anyone else of her time period, and it's no coincidence that she shared it with the world around the same time Home Alone hit the streets. Martha Stewart Living launched in 1990 as a quarterly from Time Inc. and went monthly in the middle of 1994. Martha Stewart then launched a weekly half-hour television show in the fall of 1993. People didn't get it at first. People made fun of her, her gilded pumpkins, the homemade wedding cakes, and laughed off the assumption that anyone with a job and a family had time to be a homemaker as well. What they assumed was a pompous act of perfection was actually an attempt at highlighting the value of small domestic acts that, when done carefully, add meaning to a home. Then, doing it again the next year, the meaning can become a ritual. And now that it's a ritual, the home can acquire its own memory.
Nancy Meyers Designed Homes That Looked Lived In
Even the movies of this decade, shout-out to my fellow 90s babies, supported her vision for the ideal home. The kitchen in Father of the Bride has double sinks and copper pots hanging overhead; the Napa ranch in The Parent Trap has blue cabinets, plastic yellow mixing bowls, and a kid allowed to eat dinner in her room. Nancy Meyers is famous for building these sets as if people lived in them for years, scuffing things, wearing them down, and designing spaces like the kitchen with the assumption that people spend time with family there. Thirty years later, design magazines are still writing essays about why we want to live in them.
Modern Interior Design Has a Before-and-After Problem
Compare that to how rooms are designed now. We think reveal first. We imagine the before-and-after, the walk-through video, the photograph of the key; every one of those formats only rewards the room on the day it's finished and never for the space being lived in. That's exactly how we end up with the Winnetka Home Alone house problem.
None of this is to indoctrinate you into living like it's 1997 seven again. I'm all for nostalgia, but I'm not a pastist. I'm just sharing with you the importance of meaning, habits, memories, and choosing things that improve with handling. Or the importance of repeating these small acts until they begin to give your home or space texture that let's others know who you are and what kind of live you've lived. It's not a quick thing. It evolves and can only accumulate slowly. So buckle up, enjoy the ride, and if you get a little anxious along the way, watch Home Alone and relax.
This essay explores the domestic culture of the 1990s through the interiors of Home Alone, the influence of Martha Stewart, and the films of Nancy Meyers. Residence Supply does not own, nor does it claim ownership of, any third-party images featured in this article. All such imagery remains the property of its respective copyright holders and is included for editorial reference and commentary. This story is part of Residence Supply’s The Nostalgic Edition, a creative exploration of the objects, memories, and domestic rituals of the 90s that make a house feel like home.
