Audiences are falling hard for “Falling for Christmas!” The upbeat holiday movie, which is being heralded as actress Lindsay Lohan’s long-awaited comeback, hit Netflix last week to much fanfare and is still holding fast to a coveted top ten spot on the streamer today. The tale, which reads like a Yuletide-y version of the 1987 classic “Overboard,” features Lohan as Sierra Belmont, a wealthy hotel heiress who finds herself stranded and alone after being hit with a temporary case of amnesia upon falling off an icy cliff in the fictional mountain town of Summit Springs just a few days before Christmas. Rescue comes by way of widowed innkeeper Jake Russell (Chord Overstreet), who offers her free room and board at his quaint family-run inn, the North Star Lodge. Sierra and Jake, of course, fall for each other – and Christmas – by the time the credits roll. While utterly predictable and formulaic, the film still makes for an enjoyable watch – and provides an early dose of seasonal spirit, thanks mainly to its idyllic wintry backdrop.
To bring the fictional enclave together onscreen, the production team looked to Utah, hitting up a succession of snowy spots in the Park City and Salt Lake City regions. Belmont Summit Resort, the sleekly modern hotel owned by Sierra’s father, Beauregard Belmont (Jack Wagner), which Jake describes as looking “like something out of SpaceX,” is actually The Residences at Goldener Hirsch, a two-building complex designed in 2020 by Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig as part of Deer Valley’s Goldener Hirsch, Auberge Resorts Collection. Summit Spring’s annual tree-lighting ceremony takes place outside the Powderhorn Lodge at Solitude Mountain Resort in the Big Cottonwood Canyon area. The Wishing Tree, where Jake’s sweet daughter, Avy (Olivia Perez), makes a special plea at the beginning of the movie, was set up at the Gardner Village shopping center in West Jordan.
And the charming inn at the center of the story, which continually steals the spotlight throughout? Some Hollywood magic was employed to create that location. In reality, the North Star Lodge is a mash-up of two different Beehive State hotels situated about 20 miles apart from each other.
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Image Credit: Netflix Interior scenes were captured at the Goldener Hirsch Inn, which sits adjacent to the aforementioned Residences at Goldener Hirsch in the heart of Deer Valley’s Silver Lake Village. The luxury boutique property was built in 1990 by developer Mac MacQuiod as a sister location to Austria’s historic Hotel Goldener Hirsch, a legendary lodging renowned for its Old-World design and impeccable hospitality that was originally established by Countess Harriet Walderdorff in 1948.
Hoping to re-create the same level of first-class ambiance and service stateside, MacQuiod sought the Countess’ advice throughout every step of his inn’s conception, with The Park Record noting, “She has put her stamp on the design and detail from the level of service expected, to the weight of the down in the pillows.” Modeled after a European hunting lodge (Goldener Hirsch is German for “Golden Deer”), the hotel initially consisted of a single four-story Bavarian-style building with 18 rooms and suites ranging in size from 400 to 1,500 square feet.
Acquired by Utah’s prominent Eccles family in 1992, Goldener Hirsch Inn soon became known as the epitome of luxury in the Park City area, winning a slew of accolades, including being named the Best Ski Boutique Hotel in the U.S. by the World Ski Awards a whopping five times!
The property underwent a massive expansion beginning in 2015, during which the two Kundig-designed towers, consisting of both residential and hotel units, were added. Although the original inn was also updated at the time, not much has changed in the way of the site’s Old-World charm and unparalleled hospitality. Currently managed by the Auberge Resorts Collection, the sprawling ski-in/ski-out hotel now offers 60 rooms and suites, each outfitted with hand-painted furnishings, private balconies and wood-burning fireplaces. Onsite amenities include a rooftop pool and hot tub, a library lounge, a sauna, a game room, meeting and event space, a Zagat-rated restaurant and a state-of-the-art fitness center with a “ski-prep-room.” Rates start at about $400 a night in the off-season but rise well into the $ 4,000 range for multi-bedroom residential suites during peak months.
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Image Credit: Netflix The “Falling for Christmas” cast and crew descended upon the property last winter, taking over the historic inn building for the extensive shoot. Boasting regal archways, Saltillo tile flooring, French doors and handsome wood accents, the structure proved the ultimate spot to portray the inside of the North Star Lodge. Virtually every area of the locale was utilized onscreen, with many scenes taking place in the lobby, which the production team thoroughly decked out in holiday finery, affixing thick garland and twinkling lights to nearly every surface.
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Image Credit: Netflix Other than the holiday décor, the lobby was largely left in its natural state for the filming – right down to the room keys hanging from heavy gold keychains fashioned with deer reliefs (an homage to the property’s name) behind the front desk.
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Image Credit: Goldener Hirsch, Auberge Resorts Collection As noted in a 2014 Boston Globe article, the unique key display is a “European tradition the inn copied from its Salzburg namesake.” Then general manager Kelley Davidson explained to the paper that “storing the keys this way – so you have to ask for them – ‘allows us to have communication with our guests,'” promoting “a level of Old World service practically non-existent in today’s hotels.”
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Image Credit: Goldener Hirsch, Auberge Resorts Collection Other areas featured onscreen include Alpen Stube (aka “Alpine Room”), the inn’s bar and lounge, which sits adjacent to the award-winning Goldener Hirsch Restaurant. Portraying the North Star’s onsite eatery, it is there that Jake teaches the utterly clueless Sierra such culinary skills as how to fry an egg and flip a pancake.
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Image Credit: Netflix The restaurant’s private dining room, complete with opulently carved doors and a stained glass window depicting a buck, was transformed into Jake’s office for the film.
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Image Credit: Netflix For Sierra’s room, the production team took over one of the inn’s one-bedroom suites. In real life, the luxe accommodations feature a living room, a sitting area and a separate bedroom (not to mention hand-painted fireplaces and vaulted ceilings). But the space was made to look more like a traditional studio-style hotel room for the shoot, with the bed relocated to the living area. The enclave was also dressed with a few Craftsman-style furnishings, a Christmas tree and sage green paint during filming.
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Image Credit: Goldener Hirsch, Auberge Resorts Collection While Goldener Hirsch’s exterior is undoubtedly idyllic, producers decided to look elsewhere when it came to shooting the North Star Lodge’s outdoor scenes. The switch most likely occurred due to the fact that the inn sits smack dab in the middle of Silver Lake Village, a bustling complex consisting of a multitude of hotels, restaurants and residential buildings, which likely proved far too populated for the extensive outdoor sequences the film required.
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Image Credit: Netflix So cast and crew instead headed about 20 miles south to the Blue Boar Inn. Tucked against the Wasatch Mountains on a sleepy tree-filled corner in Midway, the quaint lodging fit the production’s needs perfectly. Enveloped in gorgeous stonework, the AAA-Four-Diamond property is noted on its official website as being regularly patronized “by hundreds of return guests who frequent the inn for vacations, anniversaries, weddings, golfing, off-sites, getaways and special occasions,” which may as well be a descriptor of the North Star!
Named in honor of Robin Hood’s favorite tavern from the classic 1883 novel “The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood,” the Blue Boar Inn was initially founded in 1990 by John and Marva Warnock, who purchased what was then the Huckleberry Country Inn and transformed it into a “romantic and elegant European-styled bed and breakfast chateau complete with turrets and wrought iron balconies.”
Each of the property’s 14 rooms is themed in honor of celebrated authors like William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, with custom bedding and furnishings fashioned “in accordance with the time period or style of writing by the author or poet the room is named after,” according to the Park Record. Accommodations also include more modern elements, such as television sets and BluRay players. If you’d like to make like Sierra and spend a couple of nights on the premises, rates start at around $200.
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Image Credit: Netflix Interestingly, “Falling for Christmas” did not utilize the front of the Blue Boar Inn. Instead, the rear of the property was featured as the North Star Lodge, with the back parking lot and patio area transformed into a glorious winter wonderland complete with a thick blanket of snow, red globe ornaments and boughs of holly for the movie.
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Image Credit: ABC “Falling for Christmas” is not the Blue Boar Inn’s sole cameo. Back in 2018, Becca Kufrin shared a romantic dinner with suitor Wills Reid at the hotel during the 14th season of “The Bachelorette.”