Eloise’s Garden from “Love Happens”

Another location that I was dying to stalk while in Canada last weekend was the storefront which stood in for Eloise’s Garden, the flower shop owned by Eloise Chandler (aka Jennifer Aniston), in the 2009 romantic dramedy Love Happens.  I found this location thanks to fellow stalker Owen, who has amassed quite an extensive collection of Pacific Northwest stalking sites over the past few years.  And, even though I didn’t particularly love Love Happens, a largely depressing flick which centers around a young widower/self help guru named Burke Ryan (aka Aaron Eckhart) who finds a second chance at love while hosting a grief seminar in Seattle, because it starred my girl Jen, I just had to stalk all of the locations featured in it.  And, again, I really have to apologize for the photographs which appear in this post – apparently I had my new camera on the wrong setting during my entire Canadian vacation, which caused all of the photographs I took to come out slightly blurry.  Ugh!

Even though Love Happens is set in Seattle, Washington, the vast majority of the movie was actually filmed about 150 miles north of the Emerald City in Vancouver, British Columbia.  As a matter of fact, only one week out of the entire nine week production schedule was spent in Seattle.  The remaining eight weeks were spent on location in Canada.  And, amazingly enough, Jennifer Aniston never actually set foot in the State of Washington during the entire filming – all of her scenes were lensed north of the border in Vancouver.  Producers ended up finding the perfect space to house Eloise’s Garden, the supposed Pioneer Square-area flower shop that served as one of the movie’s central locations, at a lingerie store named Tabu Boutique in the Gastown section of Downtown Vancouver.  Both the interior and the exterior of Tabu were used in the filming of Love Happens and producers even went so far as to completely dismantle the inside of the lingerie store in order to create Eloise’s colorful floral shop.

Sadly, though, Tabu Boutique closed its doors in May of this year and the space it once occupied is currently vacant, so we were unable to stalk the interior.  I took the above photographs through the store’s front window, but, oh, how I would have loved to have actually gone inside to take a closer look at the premises and to speak to the Tabu employees about the filming.  Fellow stalker Kerry and I both agreed that this was one of the more disappointing stalks of our trip.  🙁  Especially since, according to some information that I found online, there were several photographs of the filming of Love Happens and its leading lady Jennifer Aniston featured on display when the store was still open.

As you can see in the above screen captures, the interior of Eloise’s Garden appears to be much larger than the size of the actual former Tabu space.  So much larger, in fact, that I was convinced a set had been used for the filming of the interior scenes.  But we spoke to some employees of a neighboring store who told us that the inside of Tabu did indeed stand in for the interior of Eloise’s Garden.  The movie’s production notes further corroborate that fact.  You can see photographs of what the interior of Tabu used to look like here and you can see some photographs of the shop as it was dressed for the filming here.  Of the florist set, Love Happens producer Scott Stuber said, it was the “best-smelling set on which we’ve all worked”.  🙂

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Owen for finding this location!  🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The former Tabu Boutique, aka Eloise’s Garden from Love Happens, is located at 51 Powell Street in the Gastown area of Vancouver, Canada.