For someone who is so well-versed in all things movie-related, I know very little about Old Hollywood – a fact my mom often admonishes me for. Case in point – though A Perfect Murder has long been a favorite thriller, I have never seen Dial M for Murder, the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece from which it was adapted. Truth be told, up until doing research for this post, I had no idea that the 1998 flick had been based upon anything. (Insert monkey-covering-face emoji here.) Sadly, my ignorance didn’t end there. Somehow I also failed to realize that three different spots were utilized to represent the Manhattan penthouse where Steven Taylor (Michael Douglas) and his wife, Emily Bradford Taylor (Gwyneth Paltrow), lived in the film. The mashup included a studio-built set and two adjacent Upper East Side estates – the Otto Kahn Mansion at 1 East 91st Street and the neighboring James Burden Mansion at 7 East 91st. Prior to writing this post, I had only been aware of the former, which I learned of via the book New York: The Movie Lover’s Guide shortly before my 2016 trip to NYC. So I, of course, ran right out to stalk it while in town.
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The neo-Italian Renaissance-style Otto Kahn Mansion was designed by architects C.P.H. Gilbert (who also gave us the Harry F. Sinclair House from Cruel Intentions) and J. Armstrong Stenhouse for wealthy banker Otto Kahn and his wife, Adelaide Wolff. Otto was once quoted as saying, “It’s a sin to keep money idle” (Why oh why can’t the Grim Cheaper share that belief?), so money was no object when it came to the property’s construction which began in 1914 and took four years to complete.
The 80-room manse was modeled after Rome’s Palazzo della Cancelleria and boasts an oak-paneled library, a garden, a Caen stone entry and stairwell, a large inner courtyard, an enclosed driveway (to keep away prying eyes), a reception room, a ballroom, a music room with parquet floors and an Adams-style ceiling, and accommodations for a staff of forty!
The property’s French limestone exterior is actually rather non-descript and belies the utter extravagance and opulence of the interior, which you can see photographs of here, here and here.
When Kahn passed away in 1934, Adelaide sold the massive home to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private Catholic all-girls school.
Six years later, the Convent of the Sacred Heart purchased the James Burden Mansion next door and combined the two sites. While I did not snap any photographs of that property, you can check out what it looks like here. The 1901 estate was designed by the Warren and Wetmore architecture firm (who also designed Grand Central Station and the New York Yacht Club) and is just as palatial and lux as its neighbor with a grand Hauteville marble spiraling staircase situated underneath a Tiffany glass skylight, a banquet hall lined with Campan vert marble, and an extravagantly-arched carriageway. You can catch a glimpse of its striking interior here.
The Otto Kahn and James Burden Mansions pop up numerous times throughout A Perfect Murder. For exterior shots of the Taylors’ upscale apartment building, the estates were made to appear as one singular property, as you can see below.
The James Burden Mansion’s carriageway . . .
. . . as well as its rotunda and central staircase portray the apartment building’s entrance and lobby . . .
. . . while the Otto Kahn Mansion’s rooftop masks as the Taylors’ private terrace.
The interior of Steven and Emily’s massive penthouse cannot be found in either mansion, though. Per the film’s production notes, their apartment was part of a massive 11,000-square-foot set built at the Jersey City Armory in New Jersey.
A Perfect Murder is hardly the first production to make use of the two properties.
In the 1946 noir The Dark Corner, the James Burden Mansion pops up as the Cathcart Galleries.
The two estates together portray the building where Ingrid Everly (Dyan Cannon) lives, which Robert ‘Duke’ Anderson (Sean Connery) sets out to rob, in 1971’s The Anderson Tapes.
In the 1982 drama The Verdict, the Otto Kahn Mansion masquerades as a Boston archdiocese.
The James Burden Mansion plays the Union Club, where Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) and Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) crash a wedding in the 1988 comedy Working Girl. Only the interior of the property appears in the scene, though. The building used for exterior shots is the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (aka the British Consulate from Jumpin’ Jack Flash) located directly across the street at 2 East 91st Street.
Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) heads to the Otto Kahn Mansion to pick up his son, Nick (Jake Cherry), from school only to learn upon arrival that he has missed Parent Career Day in the 2006 comedy Night at the Museum.
The James Burden Mansion’s Dining Room and Music Room mask as the Rome hotel suite where Ray Koval (Clive Owen) and Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts) stay in the 2009 thriller Duplicity . . .
. . . while the Otto Kahn Mansion’s stairwell and foyer simulate the outside of the suite in the flick.
The Otto Kahn Mansion’s courtyard and the James Burden Mansion’s ballroom mesh together to portray the Roland family estate, where Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer) and Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) head to authenticate a will, in the Season 3 episode of White Collar titled “Where There’s a Will,” which aired in 2011.
The exterior of the Otto Kahn Mansion portrays Harry Osbourne’s (Dane DeHaan) house in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, though interiors were filmed elsewhere.
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Until next time, Happy Stalking! 
Stalk It: The Otto Kahn and James Burden Mansions, aka Convent of the Sacred Heart school, aka the A Perfect Murder apartment building, are located at 1 East 91st Street and 7 East 91st Street, respectively, on New York’s Upper East Side. You can visit the properties’ official website here. Right across the street at 2 East 91st Street is the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, aka the British Consulate from Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
I just watched the Perfect Murder last night and I was thrilled to recognize my old school, at the beginning of the sixties, 1 east 91st was known as Duchesne Residence School, which had a two year program, run by the the Sacred Heart nuns. It closed some years later and the space was taken over by the Sacred Heart Convent.
Louise Charbonneau Baillargeon