Timberline Lodge

The hotel provides the public with little information about its history. Our team researches the hotel's past, from the very beginning, verifying its exact opening date and providing an overview of its history up to the present day.?If you have any useful information and would like to share it, please send it to archives@famoushotels.org.?Thank you This is what we know so far (attention: unverified history!): The Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood in Oregon was used for the exteriors of the movie Shining, but all the interiors were specially built on a soundstage in London, England. The management of the Timberline Lodge requested that Kubrick not use room 217 (as specified in the book), fearing that nobody would want to stay in that room ever again. Kubrick changed the script to use the nonexistent room number 237.

In the opening of The Shining, as Jack Nicholson’s character drives to Timberline Lodge (called the Overlook in the movie), there’s an aerial shot of the hotel perched 6,000 feet on Mount Hood. “You get a sense of the hotel in a remote location, which sets the stage for the film,” says Jon Tulles, director of public affairs for the resort. While just a few exterior shots were actually filmed there, Kubrick fashioned its exterior very accurately from an architectural standpoint (most of the movie was shot in London). In fact, the hotel’s interior is completely different than the film. Room 227 doesn’t exist, nor does the ballroom. “People ask where it is, and the answer is, well, that’s Hollywood. It’s not here,” explains Tullis. “The movie is very scary and not how I think of Timberline, which is a very nice warm place.”