Samantha and Darrin Steven's House

If you are like me in any way, you grew up watching shows like Bewitched, the Brady Bunch and I Dream of Jeannie.  It has always been a delight for me to see an episode which takes place in a never-before-seen part of their homes.  In one of the Christmas specials for the Brady Bunch, a guest is directed to an unseen restroom, back toward the laundry room and Alice's bedroom.  In Bewitched we are treated to Darrin shaving in a tiny restroom off his Den, or Samantha choosing clothes from the walk-in closet/vanity/restroom behind their bed's headboard & wall.  I believe this is what led me to want to become an architect.  I sketched and drew these plans as a child, in order to fully understand where everything was located.  I was perplexed if a character opened a door that I knew led to a closet from a previous episode, only to discover they were now looking down into a basement.

My favorite house of all was the Steven's house at 1164 Morning Glory Circle, (listed as Paterson, New York sometimes and Westport, Connecticut at others, although their license plates usually read NY).

Bewitched, for the most part, always stayed true to the architecture.  Although the house was used in the original movie "Brian's Song" where the door to the Den led to a basement/workout room, for the most part the characters in Bewitched used the set as if it were a real house.  In most scenes the front wall (looking out onto the street) was a "fly wall" which usually stayed hidden in the rafters of the sound stage or wheeled off to the side somewhere.  The upstairs and downstairs were of course separate sets as the living room had no ceiling, to make way for light rigs.  It is unfortunate that many times they showed Endora perched along the inexcusably high ceiling in the living room, since there was supposed to be a pitched roof with the Steven's bedroom up there.

By the age of 15 I had drawn dozens of floor plans for my favorite show's homes.  If I had the foresight and perhaps pushy parents, I may have ended up getting them into galleries and eventually published as this plan was by Mark Bennett back in the late nineties.  I was sooooo jealous.  However, my plans differed from his on several points.

A minor point is really just an opinion: the fireplace in the Steven's bedroom.  In the old black and white episodes this was merely a seating area, it wasn't until the show went color that suddenly the fireplace appeared.  It could be argued that the fireplace was a dummy one that Samantha or Darrin had installed for aesthetics since it was never shown operating and there was nothing below it in the living room to support it and there is only the one chimney attached to the main wall of the living room.  This living room fireplace with the room-wide hearth had little built-in art/book nooks (on the left hand side) and was painted white in the older episodes (also seen in some Gidget episodes), but later had the paint stripped and had larger bookshelves installed on the left.

The actual house sits on the Warner Brothers Ranch lot and was built in 1964.  It was partially destroyed during an episode of "Home Improvement" and rebuilt in 2000.  It has most recently appeared as the next door neighbor's house in "the Middle".  The interiors were filmed at Sunset Gower Studios.