The exterior shots of Sam’s home were filmed on location at an actual houseboat in the area. It’s literally on water and moves a little bit with the tide.' Of course, the eccentric residence also lent the film a sense of whimsy, offering a cinematic spot for a number of shots of Sam gazing wistfully off his deck at the horizon.

'I don’t think Jeff Arch would be horrified for me to suggest that there’s something transient-feeling about a floating home. (Townsend notes the houseboat was part of the original screenwriter Jeff Arch’s vision.) 'The trajectory was that you have an ostensibly successful architect in Chicago-big market, big skyscrapers, big windows-whose dreams shrink from grief,' Townsend says. Illustration by Roger Shankįor Jeffrey Townsend, the film’s production designer, a Seattle floating home was the perfect visual representation of Sam’s unmoored state in the start of the film as a grief-stricken widow fleeing the bustle of Chicago. While the number and size of Seattle’s houseboat colonies has since dwindled, real estate brokerage Prevu estimates that communities on Lake Union and other Seattle waterfronts still have around 500 floating homes and 250 houseboats, some with coveted real estate priced in the millions. By the late 1930s, Seattle’s houseboat population was said to be around 2,000. In the 1920s, some of Seattle’s wealthy population built houseboats on Lake Washington as fancy summer homes.

Tracing back to the late 1880s, sailors, fishermen, loggers, and dockworkers built low-cost floating shacks on the shores of the city’s various bays, lakes, and rivers using rafts and scrap boards. In real life, floating homes are deeply embedded in Seattle’s seaport history. Most of the film’s Seattle scenes take place at Sam and Jonah’s new place of living, a homey, wood-clad houseboat on Lake Union. When Annie hears Sam reluctantly discussing his grief on a radio show, she feels a profound connection and, against her better judgment, asks him to meet her on top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. The story follows Annie (Ryan), a newly engaged reporter from Baltimore, and Sam (Hanks), a recently widowed architect who moves from Chicago to Seattle with his son Jonah (Ross Malinger) after his wife’s death. Rom-com legends Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks star in the 1993 classic, Sleepless in Seattle, directed by Nora Ephron.

Sleepless in seattle houseboat interior