Despite the fact that homecomings should be happy occasions, Amy Adams' Camille Preaker is tormented when she returns to her mother's house in Sharp Objects. The HBO miniseries takes place in the fictional town of Wind Gap, Missouri, but Adora's home from Sharp Objects is located far from the Midwest landscape that inspired Gillian Flynn's novel.
Heavy reported that Patricia Clarkson's character's gorgeous gothic home is actually located in Redwood Valley, California. And while the Golden State town has a more uplifting vibe than Wind Gap, Redwood Valley has a dark mark from its past too, befitting Sharp Objects.
Adora Crellin has a strikingly beautiful home, but it is full of menacing secrets. Camille's withholding yet overbearing mother keeps the room of her deceased daughter Marian as a shrine. Although Marian died more than a decade ago, the bedroom is completely intact with clothes even laid out on the bed. The gated mansion also shows the class divide in the small town. The Crellins have a servant, notably a woman of color in the predominately white town. And their large home is in stark contrast to say, the home of James — the little boy in "Dirt" who claimed to see Natalie being taken away by the Women in White. Camille describes her family to her editor Frank as "trash from old money." And her lavish childhood home that upon sight causes Camille to drink more vodka than usual clearly sets her family apart from the rest of the town.
Barnesville, Georgia, stood in for the town center of Wind Gap. But Adora's home is in Mendocino County, California, located north of San Fransisco. While Redwood Valley is inland, Mendocino County also contains coastal towns, so Sharp Objects director Jean-Marc Vallée was close to the California coast that he so beautifully captured in Big Little Lies.
The Victorian-style Redwood Valley house was featured on the website Homes of the Rich in 2015 with a yellow exterior versus the turquoise color seen in Sharp Objects. Homes of the Rich also allows you to see photos of the interior that features five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a foyer with a staircase, formal living and dining rooms, a gourmet kitchen, a breakfast room, a family room, and a home office. This 1,700-acre ranch also boasts its own nature preserve and 24 miles of road.
Upon looking at the photos of the inside of the house, you may realize that it doesn't quite look like the interior shown in Sharp Objects. It seems the Mendocino County home was chosen more for its exterior with its striking wraparound porch than the inside since Heavy claimed that many of the interior shots were filmed at Occidental Studios in Los Angeles. (An Instagram post from the Sharp Objects lighting console programmer shows work being done at Occidental.)
While you may be disappointed to hear that Adora's chilling Wind Gap house was cobbled together with Hollywood magic rather than it really existing in Missouri, Redwood Valley does have a dark chapter in its history. The Press Democrat from the Mendocino's neighboring county Sonoma reported that Jim Jones moved his cult from Indiana to Redwood Valley in 1965. Jim Jones' Peoples Temple eventually had a devastating end in 1978 when he forced a mass suicide with poisoned punch at his Jonestown compound in Guyana.
Redwood Valley should not be defined by what Jones did, but it's bizarre that the town does have a tainted past since that's a huge theme in Sharp Objects. But the place where Adora's house was filmed is literally and figuratively miles away from the fictional Wind Gap and doesn't contain the deadly secrets that Camille's childhood home does.
