Where Was Knives Out Filmed? Inside the Real Thrombey House

Where was Knives Out filmed? Around Boston, Massachusetts, in the last weeks of 2018. Rian Johnson’s producer found the house before the script was even finished. “It’s the reason we went to Massachusetts,” Johnson told ScreenCrush.

That house is only part of the story. The Thrombey mansion on screen is two real mansions and a soundstage stitched together, and the rest of the film is spread across six small towns west and south of the city. Here is every location, which one you can walk into, and where the two sequels went.

All 6 Knives Out Filming Locations

Location	Scene	Can You Visit?	Town
Ames Mansion, Borderland State Park	The library	Yes, free guided tours	Easton
Private Gothic Revival mansion	The Thrombey house exterior	No, it’s a private home	Not disclosed
Downtown Maynard, Natick and Waltham	The car chase and the dry cleaner	Yes, public streets	Maynard, Natick, Waltham
Former Registry of Motor Vehicles building	The medical examiner’s office fire	From the street	Marlborough
263 West Street	Ransom and Marta at the bar	Yes, it’s a restaurant	Berlin
Brown’s Wood	Ransom’s house	No, private homes	Lincoln

The list counts down to the one place you can actually step inside.

6) Brown’s Wood, Lincoln: Ransom’s House

Ransom Drysdale’s sleek modern home is a real 1957 house in Brown’s Wood, a quiet modernist neighborhood in Lincoln, about 15 miles west of Boston.

Brown’s Wood is a planned enclave of about 23 modernist homes built in the 1950s, each designed by a local architect. Ransom’s house is all flat roofs, glass and wood, the opposite of his family’s creaky Victorian pile.

That contrast does a lot of work. One look at his house and you know Ransom has built a life away from the family’s dark wood and clutter.

5) 263 West Street, Berlin: Ransom and Marta at the Bar

The wood-and-brick bar where Ransom gets Marta to tell him the truth is a real restaurant at 263 West Street in Berlin, Massachusetts.

At the time of filming, the restaurant was the Flat Penny Bar and Grill. It later became On the Trax, and today the same building is the West Street Tavern. The booths and brick walls on screen are real, warm, a little worn, and nothing like a set.

The scene is the turn of the film. Ransom stops being the family’s black sheep and starts acting like Marta’s ally, and the cozy room sells it. Check opening hours before you go, because small-town restaurants change often.

4) Marlborough: The Medical Examiner’s Office Fire

The medical examiner’s office that goes up in flames was the old Registry of Motor Vehicles building on Maple Street in Marlborough.

The fire is the moment Blanc realizes someone is covering their tracks. Losing the report would leave Marta’s account of Harlan’s death as the only story anyone has.

Marlborough is about 25 miles west of Boston. The building is a plain government block, which is exactly why it works. Nobody looks twice at a building like that, and that is how a cover-up should look.

3) Maynard, Natick and Waltham: The Car Chase

The car chase and the blackmail meeting at a dry cleaner were shot on the main streets of three towns west of Boston.

The chase cuts between three towns as if they were one. You get Natick’s Main and Central Streets, Maynard’s mill buildings at Clock Tower Place and a Waltham alley off Moody Street.

Maynard is the best stop if you only have time for one. It’s a small mill town where you can walk from the cleaners to the clock tower in a few minutes.

2) The Thrombey House: A Private Gothic Revival Mansion

The red-brick Gothic Revival mansion you see from the outside is a real 19th-century house outside Boston, and a family lives in it.

The Boston Globe reported that the filmmakers are contractually barred from disclosing the house, and fan guides name different towns for it. We are leaving it unnamed too. Please don’t go looking for the gate.

Johnson said the crew shot “outside” and “inside, all of the stuff on the ground level,” except the big library. The family stayed the whole time. “They mostly would hang out in their kitchen with Jamie Lee Curtis doing crossword puzzles while we were filming,” he told ScreenCrush.

1) Ames Mansion, Borderland State Park: The Library

The great wood-paneled library where the family gives their alibis is inside the Ames Mansion at Borderland State Park in Easton, about 25 miles south of Boston.

Oakes Ames, a Harvard botanist, and his wife Blanche, an artist and women’s rights activist, built the 20-room stone house in 1910. Blanche designed much of it herself. The state bought the estate in 1971, and it is now the center of an 1,843-acre park.

“The movie cuts in and out of that room for pretty much the whole film,” location manager Charlie Harrington told Boston.com. “As everyone tells their story, their alibi, we stayed in that room.” That is why it sits at number 1: it’s the Knives Out room you are most likely to recognize, and the only one you can walk into.

Is the Knives Out House Real?

Yes and no. The Thrombey house on screen is three places cut together:

1. The private Gothic Revival mansion for the outside and most ground-floor rooms.
2. The Ames Mansion for the library.
3. A soundstage for Harlan’s red study and the upstairs hallway.

Production designer David Crank built the study because “the way the office hallway and upper floor we built on set wouldn’t have fit in the actual house.” It took about three weeks. The ring of knives behind the chair took more than a month of versions before Johnson signed off. Crank said the bigger influence was the 1972 film Sleuth, not Clue, which is why the house is full of automatons and dollhouses.

Even the books are designed. Jeremy Woodward made Harlan’s book covers to span four decades, so you can watch his branding change on the shelves. It’s mise en scène doing the storytelling before anyone speaks.

Where Were Glass Onion and Wake Up Dead Man Filmed?

The sequels left Massachusetts behind.

Film	Year	Where It Was Filmed
Knives Out	2019	Easton, Lincoln, Berlin, Marlborough, Maynard, Natick, Waltham and Wellesley, Massachusetts
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery	2022	Spetses and Porto Heli, Greece, plus stages in Belgrade, Serbia
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery	2025	London, the Church of the Holy Innocents in High Beach, Essex, and Cold Spring, New York

Glass Onion started shooting on 28 June 2021 on the Greek island of Spetses. Its billionaire’s estate is Villa 20 at the Amanzoe resort near Porto Heli. Interiors and the New York scenes were shot in Belgrade.

Wake Up Dead Man began in London on 10 June 2024. Its church is set in upstate New York, but the outside was filmed at the Church of the Holy Innocents in Epping Forest, England, with more exteriors in Cold Spring, New York. For more on how series keep growing like this, see our guide to what a sequel is.

How to Tour the Ames Mansion

Borderland State Park sits on the line between Easton and Sharon. The park is open year-round, with more than 20 miles of trails and ponds. The mansion opens for a limited number of tours each year.

• Tours are free and last about 30 minutes. They cover the first floor only.
• Register in advance. Space is limited, and tours can be cancelled in the rain.
• Parking costs $5 for Massachusetts plates and $20 for out-of-state plates.
• Tours usually run on spring Sundays, plus special events. Check the Massachusetts state parks site for the current dates.

To see the rest, pair the park with a loop west of Boston. Maynard, Natick, Berlin and Marlborough are all within about half an hour of each other.

Behind the Scenes of Knives Out

• It had a fake name. Filming ran from 30 October to 20 December 2018 under the working title “Morning Bell,” across about 38 days.
• It was a big return on a modest budget. Knives Out cost $40 million and made $312.9 million worldwide.
• Critics loved it. It holds 97% on Rotten Tomatoes from 472 reviews.
• It earned an Oscar nod. Johnson was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and the film earned three Golden Globe nominations, including Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas.
• Blanc’s accent has a source. Johnson based Craig’s Southern drawl on the Civil War historian Shelby Foote.

FAQs About the Knives Out Filming Locations

The Final Cut: Where Knives Out Was Filmed

So, where was Knives Out filmed? Around Boston. The Thrombey house is a private Gothic Revival mansion, the Ames Mansion library and a soundstage. The rest of the film runs through Lincoln, Berlin, Marlborough, Maynard, Natick and Waltham.

Only one of those rooms is open to you. Book an Ames Mansion tour, stand in the library, and you are standing where Benoit Blanc heard every lie.

Planning more film trips? See where Tremors was filmed, or browse all our film locations.