If you ever find yourself in the San Fernando Valley after a visit to Universal Studios, and you want to make a quick stop at another L.A. tourist destination, you can stroll down a nearby residential street and view the exterior of one of the most famous houses in America.
This is “The Brady Bunch” house in Studio City, which the Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to designate as a historic-culture monument, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Viewed from the street, the house actually is pretty unremarkable — a mid-size, split-level, midcentury ranch house, built in a style that became pretty ubiquitous in the California suburbs in the post-World War II era. But to supporters of the home’s historic status, it “helped shape America’s vision of family life in late 1960s and early 1970s — especially the idea of a blended family,” Adrian Scott Fine, president of the L.A. Conservancy, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.
“We’re thrilled to see it now designated as a Historic-Cultural Monument, ensuring the Brady Bunch — and their iconic home — remain part of Los Angeles’ story,” Fine said.
Of course, there’s long been an issue with the Brady Bunch house, which in no way detracts from its landmark status. But it’s something that fans of the show began to notice when it originally aired from 1969 to 1974. They always found a strange disconnect between images of the front of the real-life house, which were flashed on screen during every episode, and how the fictional interiors were laid out.
More than anything else, it was always hard to image how Mike and Carol Brady’s massive living room, two stories high and with that floating staircase and cathedral ceiling, could fit beneath that lower-slung roofline you see from the street.
And where, under what looked like a one-story wing of the house, did the Bradys fit in a second story? That’s where fans were led to believe that Mike and Carol had their master bedroom, along with the two bedrooms occupied by their combined six children.
Also, the Brady house is supposed to have an attic. Fans learned this in a later season when the two oldest kids, Greg and Marcia, battled for the space, hoping to convert it into a bedroom. The teenagers each craved a room of their own, away from their pesky younger siblings.
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What does the interior of the 3-bedroom home by the Los Angeles River look like? It’s a time capsule. (Composite by Marilyn Kalfus, Orange County Register/SCNG; Inset: File photo; House: Photo by Anthony Barcelo)
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What does the interior of the 3-bedroom home by the Los Angeles River look like? It’s a time capsule. (Composite by Marilyn Kalfus, Orange County Register/SCNG; Inset: File photo; House: Photo by Anthony Barcelo)
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Over the years, Brady Bunch fans, who have a talent for creating architectural renderings, have tried to reconcile this exterior-vs-interior disconnect. You can find imagined floor plans of the Brady house posted online, with these artists all trying to figure out a way to arrange the different rooms seen in the show, so that they can conceivably fit within the exterior framework of the real-life Studio City house.
Of course, like pretty much every TV show ever made, the interior scenes of “The Brady Bunch” were shot on studio sound stages, such as any scenes that took place in Mike’s home office or in the kitchen with its groovy, burnt-orange cabinetry. The Bradys back yard and driveway also were clearly filmed on soundstages. Meanwhile, images of the real-life Studio City house were simply used for establishing shots.
The house, by the way, was built in 1959 by architect Harry M. Londelius, the Los Angeles Times reported. The exterior featured wood siding and stacks of Palos Verdes stone. For decades, it was owned by a couple who paid $61,000 for it in 1973.
When the couple died, their children sold it in 2018 for $3.5 million, twice the original asking price, the Times reported. The buyer was HGTV, which created a four-part cable-TV special, “A Very Brady Renovation,” around trying to transform its interiors into the “1970s masterpiece we all know and love.”
With the help of the actors who played the Brady kids — Barry Williams (Greg), Maureen McCormick (Marcia), Christopher Knight (Peter), Eve Plumb (Jan), Mike Lookinland (Bobby) and Susan Olsen (Cindy) — the real-life interiors were gutted in an attempt to match them to the show’s make-believe interiors. HGTV also added a whole new wing and second floor, a front window and a new set of stairs. The renovation nearly doubled the home’s square footage to more than 5,000 square feet, but it was very careful about never drastically altering the street view of the home, which is well known to discerning Brady fans.
After the home-renovation series aired, HGTV sold the home to historic-home enthusiast Tina Trahan and her husband Chris Elbrecht, a former chief executive of HBO, the Times reported. They opened the home to the public in November, for a limited run of tours over three days.
Two months later, on Jan. 15, the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission unanimously voted to recommend the house as a landmark. The Planning and Land Use Commission approved the designation a month later, with the council giving its final approval this week. Now, with this landmark status, fans will have even more reason to continue to flock to the neighborhood and take photos.
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