Diane Keaton doesn’t miss a beat when you ask her to name her favorite location from the set of her new romantic comedy Book Club. “I liked Andy Garcia’s house best,” the Oscar winner and design aficionado tells Architectural Digest. “Andy’s house is an old Spanish. I wanted to buy it. That place is gorgeous.”
Garcia plays Keaton’s love interest in the movie about four lifelong Los Angeles friends – Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen – whose love lives are turned upside down when they begin reading the Fifty Shades of Grey series for their monthly book club. Keaton plays a widow who begins to move on from the death of her husband when she meets Mitchell (Garcia), a handsome and independently wealthy pilot from Sedona, Arizona.
As soon as production designer Rachel O’Toole saw photos of Hummingbird Nest Ranch, a sprawling 123-acre equestrian estate in Simi Valley once owned by Texas billionaire David Saperstein (he sold the property in 2016 for $33 million), she knew she had found Garcia’s home in the film. The estate features a 17,000,000-square-foot Spanish Colonial mansion, but O’Toole and first-time director Bill Holderman opted to use one of the property’s 16 guesthouses for Garcia’s house.
“I think it’s the original main house built on the property,” O’Toole says. “It was just so perfect with the archways and the way that the light dapples through the yard and the pool. Standing at the front door you can see all the way through the kitchen into a bathroom, through an arched brick passageway and then outside through leaded glass to a fountain. I said to Bill, ‘We shouldn’t waste our time looking elsewhere because this is it.’”
While the 1970s kitchen was updated for the film, the rest of the house just needed some redecorating. “For the color palette, we had burgundies and browns and tans with lots of textures like Persian rugs,” O’Toole says. “We wanted Andy’s character to be a grounded and approachable with things he collected from all his travels.”
Fonda, Bergen, and Steenburgen in the bedroom of Keaton’s character’s house.
