Perhaps “totes cray” would be a better description. There are, presumably, a lot of people on the screen, because it required 9,000 hours of work to transform the two-bedroom, split-level house in Studio City into the four-bedroom, two-story house with a den familiar to viewers of the show.Īs Plumb states, with some bewilderment, in the first episode: “It seems like a huge challenge to take an existing house and make it into something that came out of the mind of a set designer.” Laine from “Good Bones” and Jasmine Roth from “Hidden Potential.” To keep things extra, “A Very Brady Renovation” is led not by one but a gaggle of eight perky HGTV hosts: Drew and Jonathan Scott of “Property Brothers,” Lara Spencer from ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “Flea Market Flip,” Leanne and Steve Ford from “Restored by the Fords,” Mina Starsiak Hawk and Kare E. (Why have a large, single-family house on a big lot when you can have a ginormous single-family house on a big lot?) It is a slow-motion replay of some of midcentury design’s most far-out trends (avocado-colored appliances!) and biggest mistakes. It is an obsessive exercise in nostalgia: If the house is a Hollywood star, HGTV occupies the role of deranged stan. This has meant pretty much remodeling the place top to bottom, re-creating the floating staircase and the orange Formica kitchen counters, and even tracking down a version of the dowdy terracotta vase that Peter (played by Christopher Knight, the actor, not the art critic) smashed with a basketball in Season 2. Its entire conceit rests on transforming the house on Dilling Street - whose interiors in no way match the interiors that Paramount designed on its soundstage - into the home that viewers know from the show. 3, 1969), and decades before the phrase “‘Brady Bunch’ house” became shorthand for crafty late Modernism redolent of Formica and chunky ceramic lamps.īut the show is much weirder than a simple throwback to corner groups and macramé.
He died in 1960, only a year after it was built and a full nine years before its debut in the series’ second episode (which first aired on Oct. Londelius, in fact, would never know the fate of the house. In his wildest dreams, Londelius couldn’t have imagined that this suburban home would become a television star: the principal exterior for ABC’s “The Brady Bunch,” its pitched roof and beige wood paneling pummeled into the national consciousness over the blended-family sitcom’s five-year run from 1969 to 1974, followed by decades of syndication.
in Studio City that featured all the latest Modern trappings: two bedrooms and three bathrooms arranged over a generous 2,500-square-foot split-level structure with a shake roof, cathedral ceilings and generous helpings of Palos Verde stone. Londelius built a spacious house at 11222 Dilling St.
In 1959, an architect by the name of Harry M.