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It turned out to be much more than a hunch.
However, when Discoverys HGTV cable network paid $3.5 million last year for a very famous, split-level ranch house at 11222 Dilling Street in Studio City, they didnt exactly know what they were getting into.
The property, of course, is the iconic one in establishing exterior shots of “The Brady Bunch,” the blended family sitcom that ran on ABC from 1969 to 1974 and in reruns for generations since. Now the real estate improvement-focused HGTV channels four-episode show “A Very Brady Renovation” is ready to premiere on Monday, Sept. 9.
The folks at the network werent exactly sure where to start, though, once they outbid the likes of NSYNC singer Lance Bass and others for the house. HGTV ended up paying $1.6 million above asking price.
“We bought this house more-or-less sight unseen,” HGTV executive Loren Ruch admitted in a video. “All of America knew that the inside did not match what the set was on the show. What we didnt realize was just how different it was. We took this gigantic leap of faith buying this house, and once we stepped in that first time it was like, Oh my God, what are going to do with this place?”
Make it look exactly like the home on the sitcom in every way humanly possible was the answer.
“AVBR” features all six of the now-adult actors who played the Brady kids back in the day – Barry Williams (Greg), Maureen McCormick (Marcia), Christopher Knight (Peter), Eve Plumb (Jan), Mike Lookinland (Bobby) and Susan Olsen (Cindy) – working side-by-side with such HGTV stars as “Property Brothers” Jonathan and Drew Scott, “Good Bones” Mina Starsiak Hawk and Karen E. Laine, “Restored by the Fords” siblings Leanne and Steve Ford, and “Hidden Potentials” Jasmine Roth. The reality show chronicles the effort to recreate the two-story home interior sets, made for “Bunch” on Paramount Studios Stage Five 50 years ago, at the Studio City house whose street face and front yard was all of it that was ever seen.
“They just bought it without having an idea yet of what they were going to do with it,” Knight said of the network. “And then they learned that we never worked at the house, that we werent connected to it like America was. But we could clearly see what the structure of a renovation show could be.”
With the sacred rule of not impacting the street view always in mind, design and build manager Dylan Eastman and contractor Dave Clark set to work planning a down-to-the-studs demolition and restructuring of the homes interior and a more than 2,000-square-foot build-out into the back yard (which ends at the L.A. River). The living room floor had to be dropped a foot and a new concrete slab poured.
Five weeks of preproduction on the new show also got underway around the same time – less than a year ago. Equally as imperative to the producers was that all six Brady kid actors sign on to appear; each ones schedule finally got aligned for it a mere 12 days before shooting began.
“We have been together a lot over the years,” said Lookinland, who now runs a decorative concrete business with his wife in Utah, but has appeared in various Brady spinoffs and fan events over the years. “The key to what made this one special is that they got all six of us together in the same room at the same time, to do this same project together. That hasnt happened for decades.”
After enjoying the demolition phase (mostly; “I do tend to be the accident-prone Brady,” Cindy-portrayer Olsen noted. “I thought if anybodys gonna fall off a roof or amputate her own leg with a jackhammer, its gonna be me”), the Brady actors paired-up with HGTV stars to work on different, iconic aspects.
Some of which had to be adjusted from the way they looked on the soundstage and television. The 12-step floating staircase that all the castmembers would line up on – and which led up to literally nowhere at Paramount – had to be limited to 11 steps in the actual, renovated house because, again, the second floor of the new construction could not exceed the height of the street-facing roof. McCormick and Olsen worked that one out with the Property Brothers.
Gregs groovy attic, which became primarily the project of Williams, Roth and “Flea Market Flips” Lara Spencer, was essentially put up in a basement.
“Obviously, they didnt really have to think through where that attic might have been in that two-story house,” Roth said of the original “Bunch”-makers, who simply built that interior alongside all the others on Paramounts Stage Five. “So when we set about actually creating a functioning house, there was no room for an attic; it was all we could do to get two stories up in back. So we realized that we could put the attic in the basement and sill get the same feel if we cheated a little bit with some clever lighting. We actually put a (faux) window on the wall that framed a picture of the treehouse that you would have sen outside of it on the show.”
For other rooms, though, meticulous accuracy was what mattered.
“We were in charge of the kitchen and the family room,” said Leanne Ford, who worked with her brother, Knight and Plumb on those areas. “The kitchen, obviously, is very famous in Brady circles, with the orange Formica counters and avocado appliances. The biggest thing was, since this is a working, whole house, we had to find appliances that actually worked that looked exactly like what was on the show – which was a great mission, I would say.”
Indeed, to get many of the vintage items needed, the production exhausted eBay, Etsy and other such sites, so it eventually sent out a crowdsourcing call.
“Somebody who was a major Brady fan had the exact refrigerator sitting in their garage,” Leanne Ford marveled, “waiting, just waiting, for the right opportunity to shine.”
Mother/daughter team Laine and Starsiak Hawk hauled that fridge from their Midwest base, which its owner lived nearby, to the San Fernando Valley. The “Good Bones” hosts, who worked with Lookinland and Olsen on the boys and girls bedrooms, Jack-and-Jill bathroom, and backyard, also noted that many items, such as the living room couch, bedroom drapes and wallpaper, could not be sourced, so had to be made from scratch.
Paramount had long ago tossed whatever furniture and props it had from the show. But the studio supplied what it could.
“We did get lucky on the furniture in the boys and girls rooms because Paramount made a movie,” Laine said, referring to the satirical 1995 “The Brady Bunch Movie” and its “A Very Brady Sequel” a year later, which featured an entirely different cast as the Bradys and some of the TV shows actors in different, cameo roles. “Some of the items from the movie worked for those rooms with slight modifications. The girls dressers, the beds, the boys headboard. The chairs had to be found, it was a mixed bag, but Paramount was very generous.”
In all, HGTV recreated 15 individual Brady spaces, including what McCormick reportedly dubbed the miniature golf course version of the backyard (which, for the sitcom, was also built inside Stage Five against a painted sky backdrop).
The HGTV participants usually focus on fixing up existing properties, so Read More – Source
