Everyone is talking about Saltburn, or at least that bathtub scene.

The decadent and eccentric Emerald Fennell psychological black comedy stars The Banshees of Inisherin‘s Barry Keoghan and Euphoria‘s Jacob Elordi as Oliver, a working-class Oxford university student, and Felix, his filthy rich, disgustingly attractive classmate, respectively. When Oliver’s dad dies, Felix invites him over to his estate, Saltburn, for the summer, and depravity ensues.

Does the “Saltburn estate” really exist?

Yes! The palace-like house featured in the film Saltburn is called the Drayton House in real life and you can find it in Northamptonshire, in the East Midlands of England. Unfortunately, it cannot be visited. It’s a private estate, belonging to the Stopford-Sackville family, and dating all the way back to the 12th century.

Speaking to MovieMaker Magazine, Fennell wanted to name the house, and subsequently, the film, Saltburn, because she visited the seaside English town with that same name when she was younger and got stuck on the name. “It always just struck me as such an evocative place name — and also sexy,” she said, adding that “it has the kind of pleasure-pain feeling of a kind of post-coital sweat burn that is kind of thrilling.”

Fennell was the first filmmaker to film at Drayton, wanting a setting that wasn’t recognizable to the audience. According to production designer Suzie Davies, they had the freedom to redesign the house as they pleased to fit the script. For one, the infamous bathroom was actually a bedroom, but its placement fit the need for it to overlook the gardens. And, speaking of the gardens, while most of it was real, it turns out that that haunting hedge maze was designed specifically for the film by maze designer Adrian Fisher and augmented in post-production.

Where were the Oxford scenes in Saltburn filmed?

Although Fennell and the rest of the team considered using a stand-in town to shoot all the scenes of Oliver and Felix attending university in Oxford due to budget concerns, they ended up going for the real deal. “We decided to shoot in Oxford and budget accordingly because we wanted the audience to recognize some of the locations we were shooting in,” the director told The Face.

The film is set in 2006, around the same time Fennell herself was studying at Oxford University. She drew from her own student life experiences to write Saltburn, telling NME that the process helped her exorcise and come to terms with all the “embarrassments” of that time in her life. “I mean, I was throwing up in my sink a lot like Oliver and just felt a lot of shame,” she said.

Apart from shooting in and around the unmistakable Radcliffe Square, and inside the King’s Arms pub (or at least on a set that looks identical to the detail), Fennell also chose to use real Oxford University dorms for the film. According to NME, “as many scenes as possible were shot in the same college that we first see an awestruck Oliver walking into.”

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