Richard Curtis Confirms Notting Hill’s Iconic Blue Door Was Actually the Front Door to His Own House

If you were to knock on the bright blue door at 280 Westbourne Park Road in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood in the late ’90s, you’d be far more likely to find Richard Curtis inside than Hugh Grant.

The Academy Award-nominated screenwriter was on the Nov. 14 episode of SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show where he confirmed that the famous blue door that stood in for the entrance to Grant’s character’s building in his 1999 rom-com Notting Hill was in fact the door to his own one-time home.

But it wasn’t initially Curtis’s idea to feature his own front door so prominently in the film. As he explained to Cagle and co-host Julia Cunningham, Notting Hill production designer Stuart Craig suggested the address completely by chance.

“We had a big meeting with him and we said, ‘Find the house.’ So he went out for two days and came back with one Polaroid and I said, ‘Oh yeah, very funny,’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ and I said, ‘Well, that’s my house,’ and he said, ‘No, that’s gotta be the house,’ ” Curtis, 68, recalled. “So it was in fact.”

Curtis went on to explain that the film only used his front door for exterior shots, including one memorable scene in which Grant’s character’s flatmate Spike (Rhys Ifans) gets locked outside in his underwear with a gaggle of paparazzi angling for a photo of Julia Roberts’s movie star character, Anna Scott. The interior of the much more modest apartment was built in a studio, Curtis said.

The Four Weddings and a Funeral writer also noted that the original blue door has since been auctioned off for charity. A listing for the door on auction house Christies’ website describes it as “a 19th century blue painted pine door with four fielded panels, brass letter box, ring-handled knocker and numbers 280.”

“This door, until the time of cataloguing, was located at 280 Westbourne Park Road, Notting Hill, London and represented William Thacker’s [Hugh Grant] front door in the 1999 Working Title production Notting Hill; behind which much of the film’s action took place,” the listing continues, noting that Curtis was a “former occupant of 280 Westbourne Park Road.”

The address has become something of a tourist attraction in the years since the film’s release, drawing fans eager for a photo opp. While the original door has long since been replaced, Curtis noted that the door currently at 280 Westbourne Park Road is still bright blue.