“This is my house. I have to defend it.”

With those nine words—plus a dozen or so booby traps fashioned out of paint cans, pillow feathers, and Micro Machines—eight-year-old Kevin McCallister would thwart a pair of bumbling burglars, and make box office history along the way. Written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus, Home Alone opened on November 16, 1990, and went on to earn $476.7 million worldwide. And while the movie catapulted actor Macaulay Culkin to child-star status, it also made an instant icon out of his stately costar: a redbrick Georgian nestled in a tony Chicago suburb.

Almost immediately, tourists began flocking to 671 Lincoln Avenue, hoping to capture a little movie magic of their own—and giving little thought to the Abendshien family, who actually lived there. “We would have not believed back then that there would be sightseers coming to look at that house for years afterward,” John Abendshien told me in an interview.

But such is the price of Hollywood stardom. From visits by a Japanese ambassador to toilet paper pranks, here’s what it was really like to live in one of the most famous movie homes of all time.

The Home Alone house’s saga began on an autumn day in November 1920, when—according to building permits supplied by the Winnetka Historical Society—construction was approved for a three-story home in the Village of Winnetka, about 20 miles north of Chicago. Its first brush with fame came in 1974, when the house’s newly renovated kitchen (think: rust-colored mosaic floor tiling, track lighting, and kelly green director chair seating) was featured in the September issue of Better Homes & Gardens. Then owners Carolyn and Kully Rohlen explained how they reconfigured their kitchen to accommodate frequent soup parties, and added a center island to ensure plenty of counter space for canning. “Like many homemakers these days,” the magazine noted, “Carolyn finds canning homegrown tomatoes a joy.”

In the late 1980s, the house was purchased by John and Cynthia Abendshien, transplants from another Chicago suburb: Evanston, where John Hughes had filmed his 1984 movie Sixteen Candles. There, the couple had met location manager Jacolyn Bucksbaum, who was interested in using the Abendshiens’ Evanston home for Hughes’s upcoming film Uncle Buck.

That didn’t happen. But a year and a half later, they encountered Bucksbaum again—this time, scouting in Winnetka for a Christmas comedy called Home Alone. “I couldn't imagine it being a big hit,” John said. “But my wife thought it was very clever and would be a really good movie. She was right, of course.”

The couple agreed to let the production film at their home for about six weeks. The crew wound up working at the house for roughly four months.

Though much of the film was shot on a soundstage, the house itself was featured in exterior shots, as well as interior shots centered around the living room and the foyer’s grand staircase. The team got to work, hanging festive new wallpaper and building an exterior stairway to the basement that burglar Marv would eventually slip down. “They brought in a backhoe and dug up the property and put in fake steps and a fake door,” said John. “And then after the shoot, they filled all that back in and resodded. You could never tell that that had happened.”

The crew also erected a rather ramshackle-looking treehouse and rigged it to a zip line, which Culkin’s Kevin would use to escape the Wet Bandits. After the shoot, it wound up on the Abendshiens’ cutting-room floor. “People have asked why we didn’t keep the treehouse,” said John. “Well, number one, it was a little bit of an eyesore. Number two, I thought it could be a public nuisance, that it might not be safe.”

When filming officially began in February 1990, production rented an apartment for the family to stay in. They spent just a few nights there before transforming their second-floor primary bedroom suite into a makeshift apartment instead. “We brought some cooking hardware up there and a hot plate and fridge,” John explained. The littlest Abendshien found nourishment elsewhere: “I was in kindergarten when they were filming, so I would go to school for the morning and then come home and go straight for the craft food services cart,” John’s daughter Lauren remembered with a laugh. “I would take coffee cups and just fill them with candy.”

At craft services, the family would rub elbows with the stars of the film, including Catherine O’Hara (who played mom Kate), John Heard (who played dad Peter), and Daniel Stern (who played burglar Marv). Lauren also spent time with the film’s child stars, Macaulay and his younger brother Kieran Culkin—who played Pepsi-swigging cousin Fuller in the film, and now stars on the HBO series Succession.

“I remember Daniel Stern going out of his way to spend time with the kids in the neighborhood—to clue them into the movie magic,” Lauren said. “He would tell all these crazy stories about how they had filmed certain scenes, [like] the scene where his character goes through the back window of the house and steps on all of these Christmas tree ornaments. In order to film that scene, they put Daniel Stern in a pair of rubber feet that would go over his bare feet to protect him from getting cut from the glass. And he would show us his rubber feet.”

When the family would venture out of their ersatz apartment, they watched a number of scenes being shot, including when Kevin toboggans down the stairs and out the front door—a carefully orchestrated stunt in which a cantilevered ramp was constructed over the bannister, allowing the stunt double to slide down and land on a crash pad outside.

If you’re wondering whether any residents of the home took their own sled ride down the stairs, the answer is a definitive no.

“I knew that if I tried to go down the actual stairs on a sled, I’d end up in the wall,” said Lauren. “I did, however, send my Cabbage Patch [doll] down the ramp in between takes.”

For the Abendshiens, it could be difficult to stay out of frame. Lauren had to army crawl from her parents’ room (where the TV was) to her own bedroom in order to avoid casting any shadows in the window. John unwittingly wrecked a snowy tableau the filmmakers needed for the big moment when Kevin finally reunites with his family.

“I was coming back that evening,” John recalled. “I pulled into the driveway and got stuck. I thought, Well, no worry, I’m home. I got out of the car and traipsed across the lawn to the front door and walked in. And the whole crew was there. Columbus looks at me and says, ‘I can’t believe this is happening. We’ve been waiting for this snow.’…They took great pains to angle the camera around my car and around the tracks I had made.”

In May, more than four months after arriving at the doorstep of 671 Lincoln Avenue, the crew finally packed up their festive wallpaper and klieg lights. Home Alone opened six months later—modestly, in just 1,202 theaters nationwide—but word of mouth quickly spread…and as it did, the Abendshiens began to notice an influx of cars parking outside their home and strangers lingering on their sidewalk, all angling for a glimpse of their newly famous house.

Even in those pre–Google Maps days, it wasn’t hard to figure out the home’s location, thanks in part to a throwaway line from the film. Just before the movie’s stunt-filled climax, Kevin pays a visit to Santa’s workshop, telling a chain-smoking Kris Kringle stand-in that he lives at 671 Lincoln Boulevard. His dialogue intentionally misstated the home’s actual address—but this wasn’t enough to fool eager fans.

When Chicago Sun-Times writer Richard Roeper stopped by the house in the winter of 1991, he reported that some 400 vehicles had lined up outside on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and that about 35 cars an hour were still making their way down the quiet Winnetka street.

Unfortunately for the Abendshiens, not all the lookie-loos were content to keep a polite distance. Some would knock on the door. The more brazen would actually wander into the backyard, ostensibly in search of the treehouse.

Others went further—particularly on Halloween. The house has been pelted with toilet paper, eggs, even baked goods. One year, Lauren said, “they went to the grocery store and bought a premade birthday cake, and [smashed] the cake on our door. It was a pain to clean up—there was icing in the screen door.”

Mostly, though, the Abendshiens took the home’s popularity in stride, politely asking backyard trespassers to leave and, on many occasions, introducing themselves to the more respectful visitors—a foreign ambassador, a Japanese bank chairman, numerous Make-a-Wish recipients.

“We had the privilege of meeting so many wonderful people along the way,” said John.

In 1991, Home Alone’s filmmakers returned with another offer: They wanted to come back to Lincoln Avenue to shoot a few scenes for Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The Abendshiens were game, for the right price. Though, according to John, the studio initially turned down their request for a higher rate, it eventually relented. The family donated their fee to a Chicago homeless shelter; true to their word, the filmmakers kept to a much tighter production timeline this time around.

The Abendshiens stayed on Lincoln Avenue until 2011, when, as empty nesters, they decided to put the property up for sale. This was no average home, of course, so realtor Marissa Hopkins devised a splashy marketing strategy that included faux movie posters, a national media rollout, and restrictive open house policies.

“Everybody who toured the house was represented by a broker, who had to demonstrate that they had the ability to purchase this home,” said Hopkins. “That weeds out a lot of people.”

The house sold in 2012 for a reported $1.585 million, ending the Abendshiens’ nearly 25-year residency.

“I really miss it,” said Lauren, who is now an attorney in Chicago. “The house was special not because it held almost all of my childhood memories, but because it held the Home Alone memories as well.”

The home’s current owners, who declined an interview request for this piece, have made a few exterior alterations—most notably, the addition of a fence around the property. Thirty years on, it would seem privacy is still a concern as the home continues to draw fans. (Full disclosure: This writer made her own pilgrimage while studying at nearby Northwestern University.)

“There were plenty of people who did—and still do—contact me to try and go in the house,” said Hopkins.

But as much trouble as it invited, John’s never regretted the decision to hand over the keys to John Hughes and Chris Columbus for four months in 1990.

“It was just one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that you would never dream would happen to you,” he said. “If faced with that decision back then, knowing what I know now, I would certainly do it, absolutely.”

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