My photo of the Brady Bunch House, when I visited it a couple weeks ago. How many of you can hear that bit of music that played while they showed the front of this house, before each scene started? Me too. #steveemigphoto
Back to the Hollywood Guide post
If you grew up in the late part of the Baby Boom generation, or most of Generation X, like myself, this house is etched in your mind forever. The Brady Bunch was the background soundtrack to much of our childhood. Day after day, every afternoon, we watched Brady Bunch reruns. We watched them while we were supposed to be doing our homework. We half watched them while actually doing our homework. It was on in the background as we played with our G.I. Joe's or Barbie dolls, and as we saw how far we could get our crank up our Evel Knievel toy motorcycle to jump, and as we laid out Hot Wheel tracks across the whole family room. It was on in the background during fights with brothers and sisters, and during games of spin the bottle or truth or dare. It was on damn near every household TV nearly every day in the 1970's, there just weren't many other options.
Kids today, with millions of different media sources and shows to choose from, will never understand how a whole generation watched every episode of this TV show, 19 times each. The three TV channel, non-video game world of the late 1960's and early 1970's is as remote as the caveman days now.
Myself, I grew up moving from one small town and rural area to another, in Ohio. I was a shy, dorky Midwest kid who loved wandering around the local woods, and drawing pictures, when not laying on my stomach, three feet from the TV, watching the after school shows. Like you, many of the best known Brady Bunch moments are etched into my brain, whether I like it or not. "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia," "pork chops and applesauce," the tarantula in the suitcase in the Hawaii episode, and the jump the shark moment of the Brady Bunch, cousin Oliver (which happened years before Fonzie actually jumped the shark on Happy Days). Yep, some crusty part of my brain still holds all those files, just like yours does.
So when I heard that the Brady Bunch house was here in Studio City, where I'm now living, I thought, "I'll have to go check it out someday." That was about six months ago. Then the ideas that morphed into this Crazy California blog, about specific places in Cali, came together. One night something about the Brady Bunch popped up on You Tube, and I thought, "I could go check out the Brady Bunch house right now." It was a totally random, spur of the moment idea. I looked it up, and saw it was a few blocks from a bus stop on Ventura Boulevard. That's good, since I'm operating without a car right now. So I took a bus, walked a few blocks, and tried to find the house by memory. As a former taxi driver who never uses my phone for directions, I memorized how to get there from a quick glance on Google maps.
The Brady Bunch house is located at 11222 Dilling Street, in Studio City, CA. Google Maps puts it at 4.8 miles from the TCL (Grauman's) Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the heart of the Hollywood tourist area. For you tourists interested in getting a selfie there, Google says it's a ten minute drive away (today's a Sunday morning). I'd give it 15 to 20 minutes or so, more at rush hour. But it's just over the hills from the tourist district in Hollywood, in the San Fernando Valley.
The Brady Bunch house was up for sale in 2018, here's a local news report about it then, with several familiar views of it.
From the bus stop, I walked down Tujunga, over the L.A. River, (a big concrete ditch), and took a right on Dilling. From my quick glance at Google Maps, it looked like I needed to turn right on the 4th street, and it would be right on the corner. I didn't bother to get the address, you know, 'cause I'm a guy. I passed the third street, walked a bit more, and realized there was no 4th street to the right, and Dilling ended at a curve in the L.A. River. I saw a couple guys on the sidewalk in front 75 feet in front of me, but didn't want to ask them directions, you know, 'cause I'm a guy.
So I walked back to the previous side street. It's a really quiet, very Americana looking neighborhood, there are a couple white picket fences, and people were out walking their dogs as dusk approached. Back at the third street, none of the houses looked like the Brady Bunch House I remembered. So I walked back out to Dilling, and asked a couple walking their dog where the Brady Bunch House was. They pointed at the two guys I didn't ask earlier, "Where those two guys are, that's it." I walked up, and saw one of the guys had a black hoodie on that said "security." That was the house, and there was a security guy out front.
But the house looked wrong. I thought of the iconic staircase in the living room, going up to the right, to the second floor, as you walked in the door, but this house rose up to the left. Yes, I've worked in TV, and I know the outside and inside of a TV house don't have to match, and I know the show was shot in a sound stage at one of the studios. But I figured that they would have designed the inside of the house to look somewhat like it should fit into the outside view of the house. I thought maybe they flipped the shot, so the house going up to the left looked like it went up to the right. But as I got closer, it looked familiar. I asked the guys if I could take a photo, and the security guy was totally cool. He pointed at an orange cone on the sidewalk up to the front door and said, "Just don't walk past that cone." Fair enough. So I snapped the photo above, and took a selfie in front of the house I'd seen literally hundreds of times on TV, in those quick shots, on the Brady Bunch TV episodes 40-some years ago.
I walked back to the bus stop with a weird smile on my face. It shouldn't be that big of a deal to snap a photo in front of a house I'd seen on TV as a kid. But it just felt like I'd ticked off a bucket list item that I didn't know was on my bucket list. I laughed, "I just took a selfie in front of the fucking Brady Bunch house." As a kid growing up in Ohio, I never even imagined ever seeing that house in real life, it just never occurred to me as a possibility. The TV show world was a totally different dimension from my world as a kid. In the many years since, I wound up living in California, and working on a bunch of TV shows, including four seasons on the stage crew of American Gladiators. I don't get star struck much at all these days. I knew that they didn't shoot much, if any, of the actual show at the house, the scenes were shot in a sound stage somewhere nearby. But walking over and snapping a couple photos in front of the Brady Bunch house just gave me a funny, goofy, cool feeling. That show it just so embedded in the consciousness of people around my age.
I first heard of burritos on the The Brady bunch, as weird as that sounds. We had tacos in Ohio, but I never heard of a burrito until Greg Brady ordered one at a taco truck at the beach in one episode. I first heard the term "caveat emptor," Latin for "let the buyer beware," on the show where Greg bought his first car. Then there are the classic lines and scenes we all remember:
Marcia hit in the nose by the football
For 40-some years, I thought Marcia Brady was spelled Marsha Brady. I had to look it up on IMDB while writing this blog post, since I saw it spelled both ways on YouTube. Kids in my era thought the Brady Bunch was goofy and unrealistic, like all of TV was back then, you know. Let's face it, no one in the 1970's on TV ever went to the bathroom. I don't think any of them even farted until the 80's. But still, The Brady Bunch was on in the background of our lives to such an extent, along with actually sitting there watching so many episodes, that no matter how weird, punk, odd, creative or cynical we may have become in the many years since, there's some Bradyness ingrained in each of us. That was the power of hit TV shows in the three channel era. Damn you Sherwood Schwartz! It's like that damn Nippersinkers McDonald's commercial from 1975 (or so), you can just never get it totally out of your head. I guess that's why it felt weirdly cool to just stand there in front of the Brady Bunch house for a few minutes, and snap a couple of photos. I put the selfie on Facebook, and much to my surprise, it got over 85 likes in 24 hours. And my Facebook friends are mainly crusty, Old School BMX guys. We weren't the cool kids in school, we're a weird bunch. Seriously, the Brady Bunch is in us all.
As this blog began to evolve over the last month, I knew I'd write a post about the house, after all, it's an iconic TV location, even if the show was rarely, if ever shot there. Then someone clued me in on the more recent history of the Brady Bunch house itself. The Property Brothers remodeled the house in 2019 to have all the same sets as those shown in the TV show (shot on a sound stage). What?
So there it is. The Brady Bunch house, that few seconds of that outdoor shot of this house, which made the segway with"nah nah naaah naaaaaah,,, nuh nuh nah naaah naaaaaaaah" that we can all hear in our heads when seeing this house.
Here's the A Very Brady Remodel finale clip, and I just learned that HGTV bought the house when it was up for sale. This clip just informed my that HGTV bought the house when it was for sale, and then did a 7 months, multi-team, multi-show remodel on it, and the three "Brady girls" all helped in that process. This clip shows the kids rooms, and rooms not shown in the clip right above. I'm not sure who owns the house now, only that there's a cool security guy out front.
So there it is, the Brady Bunch House is a real house, and now the inside actually looks like that set we all remember from the TV show growing up. And now you know where it is, if you want to take your own selfies there some day. Just be cool and respectful to the neighbors.
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