The Home Alone house has a basement that terrified the crew

671 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, Illinois is a red brick Georgian built in 1920, four bedrooms, a good staircase, a front door with a fanlight. In 1990 it became the most famous house in America for about six weeks every December, permanently.

Most film houses are exterior only, with interiors built on a soundstage. Home Alone did both. The main floor, the staircase and the front hall were shot inside the actual house, and the family who lived there moved out for the duration and came home to find their banister had survived a small boy launching himself down it repeatedly.

The basement is the exception people always ask about. The furnace that snarls at Kevin was not a real furnace. It was a built piece with a face, and crew members have said the practical version was genuinely unsettling to work around under stage lighting at two in the morning. The pool and the top floor scenes were shot at a nearby school gym and on sets.

The house sold in 2012 for around $1.5 million and the new owners did a careful renovation, opening the kitchen and updating the back of the house while leaving the front elevation exactly as filmed. That was a deliberate choice. They knew what they had bought.

Every holiday season the street fills with slow cars. Locals have made a truce with it. Take your picture from the sidewalk, do not ring the bell, and move along.

In 2021 the owners listed it on a rental platform for a single night as a promotion, complete with the pizza and the plastic wrap over the door. Millions of people tried to book it.

One family got it. Everyone else got to imagine, which is arguably the whole point of the film.