What the Floor Plans for Famous Sitcom Homes Might’ve Looked Like IRL
The new book, "Behind the Screens," recreates the detailed blueprints of the iconic TV residences you know and love.
The new book, "Behind the Screens," recreates the detailed blueprints of the iconic TV residences you know and love.
We love TV. We love TV so much that we designed a special reclining chair made for the sole purpose of comfortably watching as much TV as humanly possible. We’ve gone from three-inch screens to 100-inch screens, manual to remote control, wide-screen to flat-screen, SD to 3-D to 4K, and beyond. We’ve added new words to the Oxford English Dictionary like binge-watch because of how much TV we consume. It helps raise us, teaches us, comforts us, and becomes part of our everyday conversation. It is also responsible for a piece of our cultural canon unlike any other: the sitcom. Born in part from the vaudevillian radio shows of the 1950s and earlier, no other medium gives viewers the opportunity to immerse themselves visually in a story half-hour after half-hour, week after week, and year after year. As we learn to love the characters and storytelling on-screen, there is one character that doesn’t make the top billing but is ever present—the set.
TV show sets are the places where characters and plotlines converge to create worlds. They give characters a tangible space for their stories to exist; they are the homes that welcome viewers into their favorite fictional worlds, and the playgrounds where actors create on-screen magic. They are the "sixth man" of any TV show and, in some cases, become even more iconic than the shows themselves. Behind the Screens imagines what famous TV apartments, houses, and offices would look like if they were to exist beyond the studio lots and soundstages where they were filmed.
The Brady Bunch
Artist Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde studied the interiors and exteriors of famous sitcom homes, offices, and meeting places and imagined what the real-life floor plans might’ve looked like for Behind the Screens. Each of the architectural illustrations were hand-drawn. Seen here, Lizarralde’s floor plan for the ground level of the iconic midcentury home from The Brady Bunch includes the recognizable orange kitchen countertops and floating staircase that connects to the upper level.
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Premiering in 1969 on ABC, The Brady Bunch was created by Sherwood Schwartz (Gilligan’s Island) after he read an article in the Los Angeles Times that said 30 percent of marriages have a child or children from a previous marriage. The show’s premise was simple: Mike, a widower with three boys, marries Carol, a mother with three girls.
Lizarralde’s detailed floor plan for the upper level of The Brady Bunch home includes the Jack-and-Jill bathroom that connected the boys’ and girls’ rooms, as well as the attic.
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The Brady Bunch was not the first but is perhaps the most famous show about a blended family from two different worlds coming together to live under one roof. The bread and butter of the show was seeing the Brady kids playfully fighting and causing mischief before eventually hugging it out after learning a lesson from Mom and Dad in their iconic midcentury-modern home.
The Simpsons
The Simpsons home’s ground-level floor plan, pieced together by Lizarralde, depicts the rarely seen rumpus room to the right of the kitchen, which has signature yellow-checkered floor tiles.
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See the full story on Dwell.com: What the Floor Plans for Famous Sitcom Homes Might’ve Looked Like IRL
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