Houses from Famous TV Shows and Films

Famous houses from some of our favorite films and television shows.

It's not uncommon for film and television productions to build elaborate sets depicting living rooms, the fronts of houses and even entire streets. Take Desperate Housewives, not one of those houses is real. Behind the perfectly maintained facades of Wisteria Lane are, well, nothing.

But, sometimes, real houses are used in films and television shows, mainly for the exterior shooting. If the show or the film becomes a big hit, those very real homes that house fake television families often achieve an iconic, almost mythic status that turns them into tourist attractions.


Happy Days
The middle class and white bread Cunningham family from the iconic 1970s and 80s sitcom Happy Days lived in a large but utilitarian looking colonial in Milwaukee, WI. The actual house used for the exterior shots, however, is located in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park, home to a large number of film and television celebrities.

The current owners of the house bought it in 1995 for $422,000 and according to property records the house has six bedrooms and only two bathrooms. What it does not have is an apartment over the garage like the one where The Fonz entertained Pinky Tuscadero and all his lady other friends.


Brothers & Sisters
The sappy and successful nighttime soap opera Brothers & Sisters centers on the wealthy Walker family who live in the Los Angeles area. The meddlesome but well meaning matriarch Nora Walker, played by the legendary Sally Field, lives in an imposing and dignified Mediterranean style mansion where much of the family drama that borders on histrionics takes place.

The real house used for the exterior shots is located on a leafy street in a particularly posh part of Pasadena, CA. The current owners, a financier and his wife, bought the now famous house in June of 1990 for $2,500,000. According to the taxman, the residence measures 6,548 sq. ft. and includes four bedrooms and five bathrooms.




The Beverly Hillbillies
In the 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, common sense-ical dirt farmer Jed Clampett–played by Buddy Ebsen–strikes gold on his land in the Ozarks, becomes wildly rich and moves his sensationally unsophisticated kinfolk to a behemoth mansion in Beverly Hills, CA.

The actual mansion used for filming the show is located not in Beverly Hills, but in the adjacent enclave of Bel Air. The hulking 21,523 sq. ft. house, built in the style of a baronial French chateau, has an interesting history. As the story goes, a wealthy developer built the house in the 1930s as a surprise gift for his wife. When the lavish manor house was completed, the developer brought his wife to see it. Upon entering the gargantuan residence his wife vehemently declared that she could never live is such a grand house. The developer, it is rumored, never told his wife he built the house for her and eventually sold it to hotel magnate Arnold Kirkeby in the mid-1940s.

The Kirkeby family owned and occupied the palatial pile until 1986 when entertainment mogul Jerry Perenchio purchased the property for $13.5 million. Perenchio proceeded to spend years and many millions renovating the house and extensive grounds. Records show the properties main house includes 10 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms. Over the years Perenchio has bought up several of the adjacent properties, on which he built lavish luxuries like a helipad and an underground garage capable of parking 30 or more cars.




Dallas

The 1980s family drama Dallas followed the trials and tribulations of the oil rich Ewings whose family life centered around their Southfork Ranch and its sprawling white colonial style mansion.

As it turns out, Southfork Ranch was, and is, an actual place called Southfork Ranch and is located about 40 minutes north of downtown Dallas. When filming for the hit series began, the then owners actually occupied the mansion. By 1985, the property had become a major tourist attraction and the family moved out converting the property to an event and conference facility.

The property changed hands in 1992 but continues to operate as as a commercial enterprise. Much of the interior of the big white house been preserved and maintained as they were when the show filmed there on location. Today, tours that take visitors throughout the mansion including the plush bedroom suite of the diabolical J.R. Ewing, portrayed by Larry Hagman.




Dynasty
One can't think of Dallas without thinking of Dynasty, another 1980s family drama that revolved around the Carringtons who, like the Ewings, were a wildly wealthy oil family full of connivers and schemers. The only difference was the Carringtons were even more glamorous and their lives orbited around a mammoth mansion in Denver, CO.

The exterior shots of Blake and Krystle Carringtion's 48-room mega-manse were of Filoli, an historic estate located about 30 miles south of San Francisco in the very rich and sleepy northern California community of Woodside. The interior of Filoli was not used for Dynasty but they were used in the Warren Beatty film Heaven Can Wait.

The gorgeous Georgian style pile was built in 1917 for mining magnate William Bower Bourn, Jr. who created the name of the estate by taking the first two letters of the words 'fight,' 'love' and 'live.' The main level of the massive mansion and its 650+ acre grounds are now part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and are open to the public.





Beverly Hills 90210
In the original high-school melodrama Beverly Hills 90210, twin siblings Brenda and Brandon Walsh moved with their family from Minneapolis, MN to Beverly Hills where to lived in a two-story Mediterranean style house in an area of hoity-toity community commonly referred to as The Flats.

The actual house is not in Beverly Hills, but rather it is located due north of downtown Los Angeles in the lovely but far less fancy city of Alta Dena, CA. According to property records the house measures 3,262 sq. ft. and includes four bedrooms and four bathrooms. The property is still owned by the same former schoolteacher owner who retired on the fat proceeds earned from regularly renting the property for the filming of the super successful show.




Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Part of the plot in the iconic film Ferris Bueller's Day Off revolves around Ferris' bff Cameron "borrowing" his father's vintage Ferrari and tooling around town. At the end of the movie, the two lovable nimrods bring the Ferrari back to Cameron's father's very contemporary house where they try to run the odometer back so that Cameron's father won't know they "borrowed" the car. Disaster strikes and the car goes flying through the plate glass window of the uber-modern garage and flies into the ravine below.

That house, located in the upscale Chicago suburb of Highland Park, is currently for sale with an asking price of $1,800,000. The in need of a sprucing up mid-century modern measures 5,300 sq. ft. and includes four bedrooms and four bathrooms.





The Brady Bunch
One of the most famous and easily recognized television houses is The Brady Bunch home that housed the most famous blended family in television history. The show took place in Los Angeles but writers and producers were careful about not identifying any specific location.

In actually, the Brady Bunch house sits on a quite street in Studio City, CA, just a mile or two from many of the Hollywood studios. Because the interior sets for the Brady's abode depicted a house with two full stories and the actual house is a split-level ranch, a faux, removable window had to be added to the roof in order to achieve the illusion that the exterior of the actual house matched the interior sets.

The current owners bought the house in 1973 for just $61,000 and property records show that the house contains 2,477 sq. ft. and includes two bedrooms and three bathrooms. The interior spaces of the house were not used in filming nor were they re-created so the inside bears no resemblance to what is seen on the show.





Californication
The Showtime program Californication, David Duchovny's character plays a tortured and sex-crazed writer who relocates with his young family from New York City to Venice, CA. The writer gets divorced and his ex-wife remarries and lives in a modern house that is also supposed to be in Venice.

In this case, the house actually is located in Venice. Known as the McKinley House and designed by architect David Hertz as his private residence, the house is comprised of four structures connected by enclosed bridges that surround an interior courtyard. Altogether there are five bedrooms and six full and two half bathrooms throughout the residential complex. The open plan, U-shaped main living area comprises the lower floor of one structure, and a rec room and pool house with a full kitchen and studio space above are contained in two others. The fourth contains the garage. All the structures open to the central courtyard and its lap pool through massive glass walls that slide open and disappear into the walls making for quintessential California indoor/outdoor living.





Nights in Rodanthe
In the 2008 romantic comedy Nights in Rodanthe, Diane Lane goes for the weekend to a bed-and-breakfast in the actual town of Rodanthe, NC. The B&B is located in a rustic and quirky shingled and many gabled house sitting right on the beach -- in fact it's sitting partially in the water. The house was not a set but a real house that had become a bit of a nuisance for the public government after the 2003 Hurricane Isabel and subsequent storms eroded the homes beachfront and washed the septic system out to sea.

After seeing the film, a local man became smitten with the structure. He bought the house in late 2009 and moved it in its entirely to a vacant lot less than a mile away but well out of the ocean. He plans to renovate the house and make it available as a vacation rental.

Note: Readers should keep in mind that each of these houses is a private residence. While it's okay to pass by and look, disturbing or trespassing on any of the properties is not only annoying to the homeowner it's against the law.