For most of us, the Home Alone house lives in a kind of snow-globe fantasy. The red-brick Georgian at 671 Lincoln Avenue, under a layer of powdery snow and threaded with fairy lights, is the shorthand image for a certain kind of American Christmas: big family, big staircase, big suburban comfort. It’s the backdrop to Macaulay Culkin’s booby traps and the place we revisit every year without thinking about who actually lived there when the cameras left. John Abendshien has had thirty-five years to think about it. The former owner of the Winnetka, Illinois, property has written a memoir, Home But Alone No More, in which he finally spells out what it meant to own one of the most recognisable houses in cinema history, and why, for a long time, he quietly regretted saying yes.
“Dear God, make It stop”: When a film location becomes a tourist site
In 1990, Abendshien was a health care executive living what he thought was a fairly ordinary suburban life with his wife and six-year-old daughter. When producers approached the family about using their five-bedroom Georgian for a Christmas comedy, it felt like an adventure. As he later put it, it was “a life adventure that we weren’t sure we wanted to turn down, what I call the fear of missing out.” Once filming began, the reality was more intrusive than glamorous. For around six months, the family effectively retreated to the second floor while the rest of the house was turned into a working set. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern spent nights howling, falling and shouting their way through the rooms, while the crew rattled and banged their way around the structure. At one point, Abendshien remembers, they “basically had to wear eye shades to get to sleep.” Even then, he didn’t yet know what was coming. The neighbours, he says, were “unbelievably patient” and never complained to him, even when trucks and lights disrupted the street. The real disruption started after the film came out.
Fans visiting the Home Alone house in 2021 Photo: Youngrae Kim for The Washington Post via Getty Images
One evening, not long after Home Alone had been released, Abendshien, his wife and their daughter had just finished dinner and were watching television when a stranger’s face suddenly pressed up against the family room window. He jumped from his chair and ran to the front door. Outside, the lawn was full. “There were people of all ages all over the front lawn, people peering into the living room,” he recalled to the Chicago Sun-Times. When he went round to the back, he found more visitors. When he told them they were on private property, one man replied: “Sir, this is not private property, it’s what they call public domain.” That exchange captures what the next decades would feel like. In interviews trailing his book, Abendshien describes the shift very plainly. Speaking to Fox News, he admitted he felt “a sense of loss of privacy”. Even dragging the rubbish to the kerb became a spectacle: “Just something as simple as hauling the garbage out to the kerb… it was like being in a British tabloid with the paparazzi.” What began as novelty quickly hardened into exhaustion. “It went from a tinge of excitement during the filming to ‘dear God make it stop’ after the onslaught of visitors,” he says. In the book, he summarises it in one sharp image: “Suddenly, your peaceful suburban retreat is crawling with tourists, their eyes agog with a mix of awe and entitlement as they stare down your front door, the threshold to what was supposed to be your private sanctuary.” For years, people came from all over the world to stand on that lawn. Fans treated the place as an extension of the film, a physical version of a set they felt they already owned. In their heads, it was Kevin McCallister’s house. In reality, it was still his.
Learning to live with a house the world thinks it owns
Abendshien and his family stayed in the house for more than twenty years after Home Alone came out. That duration alone says something about his relationship to the place. He didn’t flee. He adapted. After the first wave of shock and anger passed, he slowly started to change how he dealt with the constant flow of strangers. Rather than shouting people off the lawn, he began speaking to some of them, asking what the film meant to them and why they had come. It didn’t restore his privacy, but it reframed the attention as something human rather than just invasive. The house, for better or worse, had become part of other people’s Christmas rituals as much as his own. Still, there was a limit. In 2012, Abendshien finally sold the property and moved to an apartment in Lake Forest with his second wife, Nancy Kensek. The decision closed a long chapter. The house stayed famous. He got his anonymity back. The building itself has continued to circulate through the culture like a piece of living memorabilia. In 2023 it went back on the market for $5,250,000 (around £4 million), prompting the usual tongue-in-cheek question about what, exactly, the fictional Peter McCallister did for a living to afford it. Listing photos showed that the interiors had been remodelled in line with current taste, less ’90s maximalism, more millennial Whitewashed, greys and neutrals, but the exterior was instantly recognisable. The address still reads 671 Lincoln Avenue. On screen, it never stopped being home to the McCallisters. Abendshien, for his part, now has enough distance to talk about it without flinching. In his memoir and interviews, there’s still clear frustration about the way his private life was swallowed by a piece of pop culture, but there’s also a trace of amusement, and even some pride. The house he bought as a family home became an international landmark almost by accident. The story he tells is not about Hollywood glamour, or about cashing in, or about clever location deals. It’s about what happens when the place you live is suddenly pulled into the global imagination and never really released. The Home Alone house means Christmas to millions of people who will never cross its threshold. For a long time, it meant something much more complicated to the man who had to live there.
