For our recent Big Apple vacation, the Grim Cheaper and I took a red eye into New York, leaving Palm Springs at 11 p.m. and landing in NYC at 6:30 a.m. Working off zero sleep, we were obviously exhausted upon arrival (me especially considering the copious amounts of calming drugs I ingested to curtail my flight anxiety), but obviously were not able to check into our hotel at such an early hour. So what else were we to do, but head out for some stalking? (And major props to the GC for going all-in with me that day. Despite the lack of sleep and even after we were informed that our room was ready, we decided to stay up the rest of the day and stalked from one end of the city to the other! “We can sleep when we’re dead” pretty much became our trip motto.) For our first foray, we ventured over to Brooklyn so that I could see one of the locales I was most excited about – the house where Jules (Anne Hathaway) lived with her husband, Matt (Anders Holm), and daughter, Paige (JoJo Kushner), in The Intern. The romcom was easily my favorite movie of 2015 (I’ve literally watched it about twenty times since it came out) and Jules’ charming brownstone was easily my favorite location from it.
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I began the search for Jules’ house the moment I found out we were headed to New York. Said to be located in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood in the movie, thanks to this Architectural Digest article I learned that the pad was actually a renovated brownstone in Clinton Hill. That information led me to a post on the Brownstone website that stated that The Intern had done some filming at a home located at 385 Grand Avenue. Upon closer investigation, though, I discovered that the Brownstone website reporting was slightly off. Jules’ house can actually be found at 383 Grand Avenue.
Several of the houses along the 300 block of Grand Avenue bear strikingly similar façades, which made figuring out the exact spot where filming took place a bit difficult. I finally managed to pinpoint the locale, though, thanks to a few unique characteristics. Namely, the edge of the faux portico above Jules’ front door was shown to be a greater distance away from the crosshead of the window directly next to it. That was not the case with the neighboring homes. Jules’ house, which has a black door, was also shown to be situated next to a dwelling with a brown door and stairs with a concrete railing, and two doors away from a home with a brown door and stairs with a metal railing. From there, I simply headed to Google Street View and searched for the residence on that stretch of Grand with a large gap between its portico and window crosshead and a black door/concrete railing combo that was located next door to a house with a brown door and a concrete railing and two doors down from a house with a brown door and a metal railing. It was not long before I found the right spot.
Jules’ brownstone was featured extensively throughout The Intern.
In the movie, Jules says, “I love this house. It just looks happy to me, like if it was in a kid’s book, it would make you feel good when you turned the page and saw it,” which is the perfect way to describe the place.
In person, the residence did not disappoint.
It is not very hard to see how filmmakers came to choose it for the shoot.
The dwelling is charming, picturesque, and screams of being the quintessential New York brownstone.
It is very reminiscent, in fact, of Carrie Bradshaw’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) idyllic home from Sex and the City.
The entire street is quite heavenly, actually.
I was shocked to learn while researching this post that filming took place inside of the brownstone, as well, which is not in keeping with a typical Nancy Meyers shoot. Usually, the esteemed director constructs elaborate sets for the interior of her characters’ homes, as was the case with It’s Complicated and The Holiday. But for The Intern, the actual inside of 383 Grand was utilized as the interior of Jules’ spectacular house. You can check out some photographs of the inside of the residence here.
Though many of the living areas look much the same in reality as they did onscreen, the kitchen was completely redone for the shoot. The property’s dark wood and glass cabinets were swapped out for dark blue drawers and open shelving, the center island was replaced with a larger, bluer version that was then moved to the center of the room, and the oven was relocated to the back wall. You can check out how the kitchen is set up in real life here, here, and here.
Though the actual space is gorgeous, personally, I prefer the look of Jules’ kitchen.
According to a fascinating 2016 The New York Times article, the homeowners had to move out of the property for 11 weeks to accommodate the production, for which they were paid a whopping six figures! The lengthy shoot irritated neighbors, though, and the city eventually put a temporary moratorium on filming in the area.
The moratorium was rather unfortunate for the homeowners as the 4,032-square-foot, 4-story, 5-bedroom pad, which was originally built in 1900 and includes a separate ground-floor unit, is a virtual A-Lister of locations. According to The New York Times article, the residence has been featured in countless shoots since its onscreen debut in the 2011 movie Friends with Kids, in which it was used to portray two locales. It served as both the home of Missy (Kristen Wiig) and Ben (Jon Hamm) in the beginning of the flick . . .
. . . and then later masked as the dwelling that Julie Keller (Jennifer Westfeldt) moved into.
Some of the home’s other credits include a Nordstrom commercial and print ads for West Elm and Best Buy.
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Until next time, Happy Stalking!
Stalk It: Jules’ house from The Intern is located at 383 Grand Avenue in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. (Note – the map link I’ve included is for 381 Grand Avenue as, for some reason, the 383 Grand Avenue link does not lead to the correct house.)