The Cape Cod Beach House From Sleeping With The Enemy

When Julia Roberts fakes her own death in the 1991 movie Sleeping With the Enemy, she flees this contemporary Cape Cod beach house where she had lived with her abusive husband, played by Patrick Bergin.

Just like her marriage, this house looks good at first, but we soon learn that it’s a kind of isolated prison for her.

Tortured wife Laura Burney spends a lot of time looking out at the ocean. Later in the story, we learn that it’s because she is planning to escape in it.

Let’s take a look back at the beach house that was designed for the film.

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The Modern Beach House in “Sleeping With the Enemy”

The beach house isn’t really on Cape Cod like it is in the movie.

According to several sources, the exterior was a facade built at the Shell Island Resort in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.

A reader named Evie tells me that a single-family home was used for exterior shots, not the hotel on the property. She adds that it still stands on Figure Eight Island near her family’s beach house.

A reader sent me photos of how the beach house facade

looked during filming (thanks, Mike!):

Here’s how it looked from the back, revealing that it was only a shell:

According to IMDb.com, the interiors were filmed separately:

Filmmakers created a 3,000-foot temporary structure on Shell Islanta, a man-made extension on the north end of Wrightsville Beach.

The house overlooked Mason Inlet and nearby Figure Eight Island.

After wrapping, 20th Century Fox demolished the house and restored the dunes to their original condition, planting sea oats and beach grass (from A Film Junkies’ Guide to Wrightsville Beach).”

An article in The New Yorker cites Cathy Whitlock on the topic:

A beach house was built from scratch for the film ‘Sleeping with the Enemy.’

Whitlock writes that the entire design concept for “Sleeping with the Enemy,” kudos for which go to production designer Doug Kraner, was centered on the notion that the film would be divided visually into two worlds.

There would be Laura’s secluded life at the beach house with her abusive husband, and her “new” life in a small town in Iowa with Ben, the painfully dorky drama professor.

The kitchen is gray, sleek, and modern.

The whole house seems to reflect Martin Burney’s personality.

Laura spends a lot of time in here preparing gourmet meals for her husband and hoping that they meet his approval. In her spare time, she arranges flowers in vases.

There doesn’t seem to be much else for her to do, besides making sure all the towels are perfectly lined up…

Everything is black and white, including the artwork over the fireplace:

The black floors are so shiny you can see yourself in them:

In the bathroom, the hand towels aren’t as straight as Martin likes them to be…

After Laura “drowns,” Martin closes up the beach house.

In this shot of their bedroom, you can see the walls of windows overlooking the water:

In Roger Ebert’s review of the film from 1991, he questioned some of the details, which made me laugh:

(1) If the wedding ring is still in the bottom of the toilet, does that mean the toilet hadn’t been used for weeks?

(2) How did the woman in the YWCA class get Bergin’s number at work?

(3) How did Roberts pay her mother’s nursing home bill in the six months after she told her husband the mother was dead?

(4) How did Bergin know where Roberts lived before she led him there?

(5) How is it possible, in a small house, for a man to avoid discovery while slinking around rearranging all of the towels and canned goods?

(6) Why would he bother, anyway?

The movie was based on a novel by Nancy Price that’s no longer in print. (Amazon affiliate link.)

The beach house in the book was kind of a ratty little shack. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the movie as much if they had gone that route! 😉

Which house from this movie do you prefer,

the modern one on the beach or the Victorian cottage?

Visit my Houses Onscreen page to see the other movies I’ve featured, listed A-Z,

as well as the Victorian Cottage from Sleeping with the Enemy.

Are you hooked on houses? More to tour:

• The “Something’s Gotta Give” Beach House
• Cameron Diaz’s Beach House in “Head Above Water”
• The Classic San Francisco Victorian in “Mrs. Doubtfire”
• Julia Roberts’ Victorian Cottage from “Sleeping with the Enemy”
• The Lake House From “What About Bob?”