What Lies Beneath: The Breathtaking Vermont Lake House that Never Truly Existed
Vermont, United States
Released in 2000, What Lies Beneath is a supernatural thriller starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. The film follows a happily married couple whose seemingly perfect life begins to unravel when they experience strange, paranormal events in their newly renovated Vermont home. While the movie was a box-office hit praised for its suspense, for many viewers, the real star of the film was the stunning lakeside house itself. The 3,500-square-foot, Nantucket-style shingled home was specifically designed by production designers Rick Carter and Jim Teegarden, alongside director Robert Zemeckis. It was built to work on two levels: serving as an idyllic dream house in the sunlight, while becoming incredibly ominous and terrifying once the shadows crept in.
Though the film’s fictional setting was supposedly Waterbury, Vermont, the breathtaking house was never a real, lived-in home. It was constructed entirely from the ground up specifically for the movie. The crew built the full working house right on the picturesque banks of Lake Champlain at the DAR State Park in West Addison, Vermont, while the intricate interiors and exteriors were duplicated on soundstages in Los Angeles. Sadly for architecture fans, the beautiful home was completely disassembled and torn down after filming concluded. Today, a state park pavilion stands on the exact site where the house once sat. However, a small piece of cinematic history survived: in 2004, the film’s location manager, Shawn Sweeney, incorporated salvaged pieces of the disassembled set into his own real-life home in Shelburne, Vermont.
Facebook Comments