Two architecture lovers created a real-life version of the home in Utah. It is now on the market for $45 million.
5 min
Near the end of “North By Northwest,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller, the protagonist, Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant), follows the seductress Eve Kendall (played by Eva Marie Saint) to a sprawling Modernist house reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
Except this house is situated not over a waterfall but, absurdly, atop Mount Rushmore.
The Vandamm House, named for the movie’s villain, never existed except on a Hollywood soundstage.
But it seems so real on the screen that Christine Madrid French, an expert on the architecture of Hitchcock’s films, says people sometimes tell her: “I went to Mount Rushmore, but I forgot to visit the house.”
John Boccardo, who grew up in Los Gatos, Calif., was 11 when the film came out. He saw it nearly a dozen times at the Studio Theatre in San Jose.
He was especially taken with the Vandamm House, which seemed completely real to him.
“I promised myself I would visit it one day,” says Boccardo. In the meantime, he drew surprisingly realistic renderings of it, from memory, while still in grade school. undefined
Years later, as an architecture student at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) in downtown Los Angeles, he learned that the house didn’t exist.
A couple of rooms and two small sections of its exterior had been built on MGM’s Culver City lot under the supervision of production designer Robert Boyle.
For scenes in which the house was in the background, Hitchcock relied on paintings of the imaginary building by special-effects artist Matthew Yuricich.
The paintings, known as mattes in Hollywood, weren’t terribly realistic, but with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint moving across the screen, moviegoers didn’t notice.
“It may be the most famous Modernist house that never existed,” says French, an architecture and film historian and the author of “The Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock.”
Boccardo went on to become a successful architect who worked in both northern and southern California.
Then, while semi-retired and living in Utah, he decided it was time to build the Vandamm House. His partner, Derek Esplin, threw himself into the project, working out details of everything from financing to furnishing. Says Esplin, a film producer, “I took it on as my life’s work.”
Boccardo, 78, Esplin, 59, and their three dogs (two schnauzers and an aussiedoodle) moved into the house in February.
The men have used it the last four months to ensure that everything is working perfectly. Now they are offering the house for sale at $45 million. The furniture and fixtures are available separately. “It can be turnkey,” Esplin says. The broker is Paul Benson of Engel & Völkers in Park City.
“I expect to get the full price,” says Benson. “It is not an outlier. We sold a house by the same architect in Park City last year for $65 million. And this is one of the most exceptional homes ever built in the state of Utah. You couldn’t recreate it for $45 million.”
Boccardo and Esplin declined to say how much it cost to build the house. But they got a bargain when they paid about $2 million for the 1.7 acre lot in 2021. (Benson says the land alone would command $7 million to $10 million today.) They chose the site, high above Park City, after searching for property that would let the house, with its dramatic cantilevers, be seen from below.
The property, which offers unobstructed views of the Wasatch Range, is in the Pinnacle , a gated community (complete with a clubhouse and a concierge) within the Promontory, a larger gated community—like a nightclub’s VVIP room entered through its VIP room.
With the site selected, they turned to Salt Lake City architect Michael Upwall, who is known for designing very large houses for the very rich. The dramatic aerie in HBO’s “Mountainhead,” with Steve Carrell, was one of his.
Laying out the house, Boccardo and Upwall, who served as co-architects, knew it would have a large living room with a wall of windows at one end and a stairway at the other. The stairway would lead, via a mezzanine, to one of the bedrooms. But that was all they could glean from the movie.
To finish the floorplans, says French, they had to answer all the questions the filmmakers never asked, such as “What’s behind that door?”and “What’s around that corner?”
And how many bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens are there? Their answer: six, eleven and three. (Boccardo and Esplin met French when they attended a lecture she gave about Hitchcock. The two men have since hired her to write about their house.)
Boccardo and Esplin also had to answer questions the filmmakers, even the wildly imaginative Hitchcock, would never have thought to ask:
How many black leather seats, fully reclining and heated, should there be in the home theatre? (18)
How much will it cost to fire-harden the house? (Over $1 million. “You can’t make a house completely fireproof, but you can improve its chance of surviving,” Esplin says. A special pump allows the water in the extra-deep, 75-foot lap pool to be used for firefighting.)
How much should we spend on custom walnut cabinetry? (Also over $1 million.)
What if our dogs’ feet get cold? (Relax. The house’s 100-foot-long gravel dog run is heated.)
Structural engineer Cambria M. Flowers figured out how to support the living room, which cantilevers 40 feet into thin air. The answer was to build two 160-foot-long steel-reinforced concrete beams, 120 feet of which anchor the cantilever while also supporting the ceiling of the garage.
Thick diagonal beams, like those shown prominently in “North By Northwest,” were slipped in later to provide additional stability. In the end, the project required 400 tons of steel, 4,000 cubic yards of concrete and 24 miles of electrical wire, according to contractor Gary Hill.
Now the men are ready to return to the last dream house they built, against dramatic red rocks in the southern Utah town of Ivins. Boccardo hopes the buyer of the Vandamm house is a lover of “North By Northwest.”
Esplin says that he and Boccardo, who dreamt of the house for more than 60 years, occasionally wonder if they really want to sell it. But then they remind themselves that it will be okay for someone else to own it. After all, Esplin says, “Many houses are built without stories. But this house has a story. And the story of this house belongs to us.”
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Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.
5 min
On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.
Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.
“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”
Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.
With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.
“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.
After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.
But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.
“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.
A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.
“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”
Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.
“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.
Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.
Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.
Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.
Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.
“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.
One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.
Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.
