There are many essential elements necessary for a good Bond film. 007 himself. A girl. A villain. And, somewhere in the mix, a lair. Bond villains operate out of grandiose, secretive, gadget filled hideaways, concealed from the world, filled with minions and weaponry. The phrase "like a Bond villain's lair" has entered architectural lexicon; it's a building that impresses and intimidates, sleek and modern, unflinching.
What makes a good lair? It's got to be grandiose and ridiculous. You've got an ultra evil project on the go - it needs to be in a base roughly the size of the Swedish Parliament. It needs to be secret. It needs to have places to hold errant spies prisoner, a torture space, dozens of willing servants running around in monochromatic outfits ready to die for your cause. And it needs to get blown up. That's a must.
There are twenty-five James Bond films, and twenty-five lairs; they're on islands, on top of mountains, underwater, on land, sea and air. But whose is best? There's only one way to find out: a highly opinionated listicle spewed directly from my brain. Let's start at the bottom, shall we?
It's a lovely building, I'll give you that. The way it sits in the desert, the orange tones, the luxurious interiors. I'd absolutely stay there. However, it's not a proper base. General Meldrano talks of it being "occupied" - that's right, Dominic Greene doesn't even own it, he's simply taken it over for his business deal. Some poor hotelier got his entire livelihood blasted to pieces because Greene couldn't be bothered buying his own house.
You could say, well, if it's not his property, how is it his lair? And you'd be right. But it's the closest we've got. What else is there? That ruin in La Paz where he holds his party? His private jet? The only place we see that actually seems to belong to him is that manky old warehouse in Port-au-Prince.
Either way, it's absolutely rubbish, and belongs at the bottom of the list.
24. Barge, Casino Royale
Le Chiffre is very much a nomad, wandering around the planet over the course of Casino Royale. He's got a yacht, but it's tiny by Bond movie standards, and he's got a nice suite at the Hotel Splendide, but that's about it. His actual villainy takes place on board a rusty boat. It's a bit crap. (Le Chiffre in the book has a lovely villa, by the way, but I guess that's not very grim and Daniel Craig).
23. Whitaker's villa, The Living Daylights
This is where we are forced to say, quite simply, "it's only a house". Yes, the villa is beautiful, and large, and has a pool and a view and everything. But it's just a house, not a proper lair. If we start counting the homes of single men with entire rooms devoted to their figurine collection then an awful lot of bog-standard semis are suddenly villainous HQs.
22. Auric Stud, Goldfinger
There's a very jaunty tune playing when we arrive at Auric Stud (one which is, regrettably, not on the soundtrack) and that's about as exciting as it gets. It's a sort of poor man's Tara from Gone With The Wind, a little bit boring, and I can't help thinking that with the race track right outside there must be a constant smell of manure.
21. The Monsoon Palace, Octopussy
Kamal's mountaintop retreat is suitably grand and impressive. It has the secretive features we'd expect from a Bond villain - concealed workshop, hidden doors, a helipad. Where it falls down is it's comprehensively overshadowed by Octopussy's Floating Palace. It's all very well having a massive staircase Bond can slide down in an extremely cool fashion, but Octopussy's lair is in the middle of a crocodile-infested lake and staffed entirely by girls in chiffon. That wins.
It should also be noted that, with the exception of Perla de las Dunas, none of these lairs are blown up. Absolutely criminal. A good villain's hideout should be engulfed in flame at the end. It's extremely satisfying.
20. Blofeld's yacht, From Russia With Love
The head of SPECTRE is first encountered in the stateroom of his quite impressive boat off the coast of Venice. He's got a handy little console of buttons to open doors and summon plebs and it's all rather impressive.
Kristatos's HQ is a truly impressive building from a distance. It looks absolutely impregnable, it's remote and isolated, it has history. James Bond has to scale a virtually sheer cliff to reach it.
Inside, it's not so great. It's all very old-fashioned, not the gleaming steel and concrete we expect from a Bond movie, and a bit run-down. It also suffers from quite clearly all being a set at Pinewood. That's true of most of the structures on this list, but the courtyards of St Cyril's are lit in a way that makes them look even more artificial. They're meant to be outside but you never actually feel that. Shame.
18. The Maiden's Tower, The World Is Not Enough
Congratulations to Elektra King for managing to get this historic landmark in the very centre of the Bosphorus and turning it into her own private residence. There's a big bedroom and a big lounge, plus a handy cell for elderly British spymistresses and, obviously, a submarine pen.
Its muted scale is what does for it. Where are the dozens of boiler-suited henchmen? Where is the defensive laser gun? No ambition.
17. Airships, A View To A Kill
Max Zorin actually has two different airships as his HQs in this film. At the end, he has the smaller one that folds out of a portakabin, but halfway through we get his much larger craft with its double-decker cabin and stainless-steel delicatessen boardroom.
16. The Disco Volante, Thunderball
Another yacht, this one is practically a character in Thunderball. Bond swims underneath it, gets onboard, clings to the side of it. Largo and Domino have fraught conversations and a little bit of torture aboard. The final fight is entirely set on its bridge. It has its secrets: not just a hatch underneath to allow for effective loading of nuclear missiles, but also a separation procedure that allows a whizzy hydrofoil to shoot out the front for a quick getaway.
The Disco also explodes in an extremely satisfying fashion, its rear end bombed by the US Navy, its front rammed into a rockface and creating an enormous fireball. Lovely.
Building an oil rig for a film is obviously a big ask, so the producers borrowed an existing one to film the climax. And it shows. The rig feels like it's an actual working platform, which would be fine if we weren't in one of the campest, most over-the-top Bond movies. Every other set for the film literally sparkles but this one is dull and industrial.
Ken Adam has a stab at some interesting interiors but even they are boringly ordinary. Where are the crazy angles, Ken, the shocking rooflights?
We're approaching the halfway mark and we've got a real "will this do?" at number 14. It has all the right elements - monorail, shark pool, groovy inflatable furniture, big metal doors that slide open at the push of a button - but it feels perfunctory. It's a contractually obligated villain's HQ, Syd Cain having a stab at Ken Adam but without much conviction.
This is a case of reality outclassing fiction so comprehensively it makes the whole place suffer. The island itself, with its two steep rocks, the beach inbetween, and the mushroom-shaped piece in between, is stunning. Whenever the film is outdoors - during the duel, for example, or when Bond arrives on the island - it's fantastic. Scaramanga's dining room is similarly impressive for its exterior view acting as the best backdrop possible.
12. Atlantis, The Spy Who Loved Me
I've never been able to fully appreciate Atlantis because I have a hard time believing it. It comes down to scale. It is, undeniably, a fantastic model, and Derek Meddings should be rightly lauded for it. The problem is I can never really get an idea of how big it is, or how it fits together. It doesn't feel like a real place, which I know is an odd thing to say about a giant lair run by a man with webbed fingers which rises up out of the sea, but there you go.
There's a helicopter there, and the concrete block sticking out the side is meant to be Stromberg's dining room I think, but I don't buy into it as a construction. As for how the boat dock and the shark pool and the corridor that goes on a slope fit into it - I have no clue. I think it's the lack of human beings to give me a sense of reality that takes me out of it. When you compare it with the Liparus, for example:
That feels like a real, epic space, because there are features I can identify with to give me a sense of how large it is. Atlantis misses that. It's a beautiful design, and it sinks nicely at the end, but it's not quite there for me.
11. The Ice Palace, Die Another Day
It's a fantastic design. The first time that pinnacle of frosty nonsense looms up on the screen it's a real oh this is a BOND FILM moment. And if that had been it it would've been great. Unfortunately, like so much in Die Another Day, they can't leave a good thing alone. It's not only an ice palace suitable for holding a glamorous reception in, it's also got a biodome full of plants and hot ice, and there's a mine there somewhere as well?
It's not only going to be hit by a laser, it's going to melt, and there's going to be a car chase in it, and it's all too much. Concentrate on the good bits though and it's a classic.
10. The crater base, Spectre
There's a real Push-Me-Pull-You going on at the end of Spectre. On the one hand, they want to be a proper Bond film, with Blofeld and a secret base housed in the desert. On the other hand, they want to make it boringly realistic as well. The idea of a base inside a meteor crater is great, and so much of the design is brilliant: luxurious bedrooms for the prisoners, strange domes with mysterious purposes, the obligatory heliport.
It's all underused though. The ending should've been a rollicking, free-for-all battle between two armies; Bill Tanner turning up with some helicopter gunships and a load of SAS paratroopers dropping in for an all holds barred battle. (The other advantage of that would've been Spectre would end twenty minutes earlier). Instead Bond wanders around shooting exactly one bullet at each henchman before it all explodes - a satisfying detonation, to be sure, but it could've been so much more.
9. The Olimpatec Meditation Institute, Licence To Kill
This shows Spectre how it should be done. In the climax of this serious, grim film about revenge and cocaine smuggling, there's a cone-based religious centre with a secret drug base. It has a hidden underground heliport, private chambers for sexually abusing acolytes, and a conveyor belt suitable for torturing a trapped 007. Realistic? No. Fun? Yes.
When it all inevitably starts to explode, it does so gradually, bits of it collapsing, windows blowing out, balls of flame erupting everywhere, and Our Hero And His Girl getting trapped in amongst the mayhem. We get time to revel in its demise. And the sequence that follows its final incineration is even more exciting and climactic and not a load of running around the back streets of London. Well done everyone.
After six years away from the screen (remember when that was seen to be a ridiculously long time between Bond films? Sigh) GoldenEye needed to give you everything you loved about a Bond film and so a secret base was inevitably high on the list. Housed under a massive satellite dish, it's got everything you need - minions, computer terminals, a really massive huge TV with a countdown clock on it.
7. Silva's Island, Skyfall
It's an incredibly arresting design, famously based on a similarly abandoned island off Japan, and makes a change from a tropical paradise. I don't quite believe the backstory - Silva faked an accident that made everyone evacuate and, what, nobody came back to check? - but it's gloriously insane and over the top. The way it's also a wreck is interesting too, rubble and wires everywhere, a mess of industry and technology.
Of course, the room where Javier Bardem makes his entrance in a single shot is magnificent, drawing you in and telling you both about the character and his ambitions. Once again though: no explosions to wreck it. Shame.
6. The stealth boat, Tomorrow Never Dies
There is a little bit of the same problem as Atlantis here, I'll admit; the proportions of the model never seem to really match the sets at Frogmore. You can locate that massive central hall as the place where the missiles and the Sea-Vac hang out, but where is the engine room? In those arms? Nonetheless, everything about it is pleasing, from the distinctive shape of the boat to the interior - all metal and neon.
When the boat starts falling apart under the British attack, it does so satisfyingly, explosions puncturing the skin, bits of it falling apart. The glass wall of the helm reflects the lights so pleasingly, and when the Sea-Vac comes crashing through it's a real horror movie moment. Plus, Carver goes down with the ship.
5. Crab Key, Dr No
The OG. Everything you need from a Bond movie lair was established here. Apparently innocent building with a secret evil underneath? Check. Grim industry concealing ridiculous luxury? Check. Excessive quantities of staff? Ken Adam losing his mind? Check and check. It should be noted that most of this is taken directly from the novel - if they'd actually gone ahead and adapted Thunderball first we might have missed out on a piece of archetypal brilliance in every other Bond movie.
It also has a lovely dated quality to it. Dr No's control room is filled with marble and shiny floors like a mid-century municipal library. The quarters Honey and Bond are put in have thick carpets and corrugated plastic dividers. It's post-war modernism with a hint of supervillainy.
From the first supervillain base to the last, showing that over sixty years nothing really much changes in the world of 007. Safin's home is wonderfully brutalist, concrete everywhere, but starkly done. The Poison Garden (another Fleming concept) is the only hint of nature in the complex; everywhere else it's cold but huge.
It's filled with lovely surreal touches too - the glowing light sticks in the factory, the wall of poisonous samples in the lab, the way the Poison Garden is built on top of the blast doors so when they come back together, the water features start refilling themselves. I'd happily wander round the island for hours having a good look. Plus, of course, it gets absolutely blown to smithereens.
3. The volcano base, You Only Live Twice
I recently rewatched You Only Live Twice and that first shot of the volcano interior really is incredible. You look at it and your brain whispers "well, that can't be real" - and then you see the tiny people running around in the foreground and you realise, oh it is real, and it's huge. A bit of cinema that you just wouldn't get these days, the volcano's ridiculousness is part of the point. It's daring you to enjoy it, to revel in its insanity, in the sheer chutzpah.
There's a a genuine bona-fide electrified one-car monorail that actually works. A rocket that actually lifts off. And let's not forget the other bits of the complex - Blofeld's luxurious apartment with a piranha pool, the control room with its shutters to make it impregnable, the secret tunnel filled with poison gas. It's epic. Plus, when it explodes, it does so in an incredibly satisfying fashion.
2. Drax's space station, Moonraker
What I love about the space station is how intriguing it is. Every shot of it is different; every angle gives you something new to see. Look at the docking stations for the shuttles - they could've been in a plain circle around the core, but no, they're on islands, all facing in different directions, so some Moonrakers are end on and others are upside down. There are corridors poking across the vast emptiness of space to the core satellite.
Inside, it continues, with bits of space station interrupting the shot everywhere. Everything is that little bit odd and quirky and fascinating. Plus, it's absolutely rammed with loyal unto death astronauts who'll get their guts obliterated by laser guns, and even though it's the cold vacuum of space, the station gets a satisfyingly booming explosive end.
1. Piz Gloria, On Her Majesty's Secret Service
The only one on this list to be based on an actual supervillain's lair (Hitler's Eagle's Nest), Piz Gloria has everything you need if you're a sadistic weirdo threatening the world with bioweapons. An isolated location hidden closed to the public. Masses of concrete. Caves and laboratories tucked into the mountain. A gaggle of saucy nymphettes up top. Artwork that doubles as lethal weaponry. A heliport.
The ending comes with guns and explosions and an epic battle between two armies and then, of course, Piz Gloria itself goes up, taking a good chunk of the mountain with it. It's the perfect ending to a perfect villain's lair in a perfect Bond film.
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