The ‘Notebook’ House: Everything You Need to Know About the Real-Life Home From the Love Story

The white house that Noah restored for Allie is located at Martins Point Plantation in Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina—a private, 900-acre waterfront community of 18 homes that was established in 1989. Prior to that, the area was home to a plantation, presumably with enslaved people, as far back as 1699. The Notebook house was built after the Civl War, in 1875, when the land featured a large farm owned by Daniel F. Towles. The quintessential 4,255-square-foot Southern mansion has five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms. The private residence sits on a private lane, which you can’t access without permission. The current estimate of the home is $3 million, according to Zillow, and it is located on Martins Point Road.

While no movie scenes were filmed inside the actual house, the exterior played a leading role in Noah and Allie’s love story. At the start of the film, the two lovebirds visit the run-down mansion, and he vows to fix it up for her one day. In order to achieve the look of a crumbling home, The Notebook team had to work their movie magic. “They tacked up old boards and made the house look like it was falling down,” the current owner of the home told Southern Living in a video tour. “In the yard, they brought in all of this debris and sticks. And then when he [Noah] fixed it up, they put on the blue shutters and added the side porch. It was amazing to see the amount of effort and people that are needed to make a movie.”

In real life, the family home also underwent changes and renovations over the years. “It had a lot of Victorian architecture and porches, and those burnt down. After the porches burnt, the columns were added to make it look more stately,” the current owner of the home told Southern Living. The home is privately owned and not open for visitors.

Other filming locations from The Notebook

The American Theater

Like many young couples, Noah and Allie chose a movie theater as the setting for their first date. The setting in the film was the American Theater, a retro cinema opened in 1942. Like many of Charleston’s buildings built during the ’40s, the movie theater was designed by Greek architect August E. Constantine. “The theater is a standout design that employs Art Deco while many of the surrounding buildings are designed in the neoclassical architectural style,” states Accidentally Wes Anderson, a viral Instagram account and project dedicated to architecture in the style of the beloved film director Wes Anderson. “It is also one of Constantine’s only remaining works in the city.”

Sophia Russell, who is from Charleston, worked selling tickets and concessions at the American in 2004, right after the movie came out. “It was a very small art-house style theater, so it was always packed,” Russel tells AD. She was lucky enough to see the movie in the theater itself. “My best friend and I came, and we sat in the very last row because there were so many people. I cried. I was 15. It was amazing.” While the theater no longer screens movies, those looking for a glimpse inside the American can rent the space for events such as weddings. Fans can also wander down historic King Street or opt to dance under the traffic lights à la Noah and Allie. “I remember the old cars on King Street during filming. I think they filmed the movie in the winter, so there were all these heat lamps around, which was funny because Charleston never got very cold,” Russell tells AD.

Boone Hall Plantation

Noah and Allie’s love story blossoms throughout various idyllic settings in Charleston. And unlike the American Theater, many of these movie locations are open to the public today. The first is Boone Hall Plantation, which served as the exterior of Allie’s family’s summer house in the film. Located in Mount Pleasant, the historic plantation house and gardens is a 25-minute drive from downtown Charleston. Boone Hall considers itself one of America’s oldest working plantations, continually growing crops for over 320 years. The plantation home and gardens are open to the public seven days of the week.

Williams Mansion (formerly Calhoun Mansion)

Due to the fact that filming and photography isn’t allowed at Boone Hall, the team used a second location, the Williams Mansion, to film indoor scenes of the Hamilton summer home. The Italianate mansion was called the handsomest and most complete private residence in the South when it was built in 1878. The 24,000-square-foot home includes 35 rooms, 23 period fireplaces, and a stairwell that reaches to a 75-foot domed ceiling. Tours of the mansion are on an appointment-only basis and in limited quantities once they resume sometime this year.

Cypress Gardens

Fans of the movie vividly remember the fateful rowboat scene in the film. Noah and Allie spend a picturesque afternoon gliding through calm marsh waters filled with swans. In the film, these waters were meant to be right behind Noah’s home. In reality the scene was filmed at Cypress Gardens, a man-made swamp lined with cypress trees. “Although the lake that Allie and Noah row through is filled with swans, these birds are actually not native to the area,” states Independent. “Filmmakers bought the ones seen in the movie as chicks and then raised them on a nearby lake in a playpen so that they would get used to the location before using them in filming.” The idyllic gardens are located 40 minutes outside of Charleston and offer guided and self-guided boat tours.

College of Charleston

While Allie went to college at Sarah Lawrence in New York, producers of The Notebook utilized the College of Charleston as the backdrop for her studies. The public university was founded in 1770 and is the 13th oldest educational institution in the United States.

Black River Plantation

In the film Noah and Allie’s love story operates on two timelines—one in the past when they’re young and one in the present day when they’re elderly. Allie develops memory loss in her old age and lives in a nursing home reminiscent of her dream home built by Noah. The exterior shots for these scenes were filmed at Black River Plantation, a neoclassical revival home located in Georgetown County, South Carolina. The historic old house is no longer open to the public.

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James Garner as the older Noah and Gena Rowlands as the older Allie in the film.

Photo: Cinematic / Alamy Stock Photo