Brady Bunch house sells for MUCH less than asking

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mattl

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They should have known...

 

 

<blockquote>

Wanna bet someone’s gonna try to pin this on Jan?

TVLine has confirmed that the iconic and massively renovated Brady Bunch house — which HGTV put on the market last May — ended up selling for $3.2 million. Not only is that $2.3 million less than the $5.5 million listing price, but it’s $300K shy of the $3.5 million HGTV paid for it in 2018.

HGTV poured a staggering $1.9 million into the North Hollywood, Calif., property in an effort to recreate some of the series’ iconic interiors, including the floating staircase, the burnt orange-and-avocado green kitchen and the kids’ Jack-and-Jill bathroom. (Remember, the 1970s-style home was used only for the exteriors of the classic sitcom.)

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tvline.com

Shocker: HGTV Sells Iconic Brady Bunch House at Huge Loss

You won't believe what HGTV's refurbished 'Brady Bunch' house finally sold for
tvline.com tvline.com
 
I have zero sympathy for HGTV or the twins, who most certainly as mini-moguls negotiated a contract that guaranteed full payment regardless of how much the house sold for. 

 

I grew weary of the formulaic programming on both HGTV and the Food Network, along with their habit of over-exposing certain personalities through both new material and relentless reruns, such as godawful Guy Fieri and the prolific Property Brothers.  I stopped watching both channels a few years ago and a couple of years later cut the cord entirely.  Now I pick and choose what I want to watch and when, via streaming content from sources that produce original content of infinitely higher quality.

 

Back in 1961 when FCC Chairman Newton Minow referred to commercial television in the U.S. as a "vast wasteland," he had no idea how vast the scope of that wasteland would become.
 
This Old Brady House

Watching the renovation of the house to the Brady house was much fun, and quite a challenge for the crew to make it work, since the original house was not designed to be the Brady home. It reminded me of "This Old House" with a twist.

Many people would love to live there, but in today's poor economy and massive inflation, who can afford an extra million or two.

I, personally, would love to have it (not that it's an even remote possibly, ha) but the biggest drawback would be people coming day and night wanting a tour of it. A problem with the previous owners.

Anyone who lives there should be prepared to loose their privacy. A wise owner would not attempt to live there, but make it into The Brady Museum, much as the Dallas "Ewing" house in Texas was.

[this post was last edited: 9/12/2023-17:05]
 
I would surely take the Clampett's mansion on the Beverly Hillbillies or even Batman's Wayne Manor over the Brady's flea bag any day...

Consider how:

The boys and girls shared a bathroom, when a separate unit for each could have nbeen built up there and the parents would still probably have their own and there was even a guest room though added fictionally according to demands by the plot, as in where there would be any actual guest who didn't just lay on a couch in the foyer or the den...

The laundry room had a dryer with the door swinging into the washer instead of if it couldn't be one with a drop-down door (these were Whirlpool laundry appliances) at least put on the other side of the washer as I'd seen many other laundry rooms built... And Mike Brady did build this place from the very ground up...

I knew a family with five, almost six offspring who made the family truck-ster a full-sized VAN! Not squeezed an actual nine people in a mid-sized Plymouth Sattelite... They should have bought a Sport Suburban Fury, or the Caprice convertible should have been a wagon though it would have that cumbersome clamshell tailgate... Amazing how on that family trip out west (though to get to that part of the west they were in probably had to go a bit east) no luggage or a suitcase flew off that roof rack....

And why NO DISHWASHER?! Nine places at the table though hardly anywhere piles of dirty tableware or the predictable squabbling over whose turn to wash what would be 'all that'...!

More?! Let's post...

-- Dave
 
reality

I would say, Dave, that set designers keep storylines in mind when creating sets. If the Brady kids didn't share a bathroom that would eliminate some family drama options to put into the stories. Such as the Brady boys pounding on the door of the bath waiting for the Brady girls to finish.

If they had a dishwasher, Alice couldn't be standing at the sink full of dirty dishes so she could be listening to the children's life problems.

When you turn on a sitcom you leave reality and live in the writers' world...forget such things as logic!

BTW: Maybe Mr. Brady put the money he saved, by not installing a dishwasher, into the built-in indoor barbecue grill in the kitchen wall. 😊 (Or, more likely Sherwood Swartz, the creator/producer, didn't get enough plug money from General Electric to justify putting in one of their dishwashers.)

[this post was last edited: 9/12/2023-18:34]
 
REACTOR: yes, “storyline” or plot I was trying to use—I remember the pile of one of the girls’ health and beauty aids and cosmetics next to her and poor Greg kvetching over how he couldn’t find his toothbrush there in all that mess, something that Lucy and Ricky Ricardo could easily solve…

The indoor barbecue could have made an interesting episode there, maybe have a guest appearance by Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Teigh from Emergency One putting out a fire there and an ever frantic Alice be the main center of attention or star character convincing the family that barbecue is man’s cooking and should have been left to Mike, though the gaffe there is it cited gave been easily outdoors, but in a less dramatic way thereby not much to pitch a story line…

As for the plug by General Electric, the Americana fridge is done well enough in all
its avocado splendor…

— Dave
 
 
A dishwasher may have been in the island beside the sink.  I don't recall that the working / backside of it was shown in any episodes?

It's not unusual that households never use their mechanical dishwasher, perhaps the Bradys were portrayed as "usual" in that respect.   :-)

Samantha had a dishwasher but was she ever seen loading or unloading it?
 
I don't have the official numbers...

 

 

But, despite overpaying for it initially, and putting so much into it after, I don't think HGTV/Discovery really lost any money in the deal just because it sold lower.

 

The Very Brady Renovation series was a gigantic ratings boom for the network, It was the most watched premiere of any HGTV show to that point, and was one of the top 20 watched shows aired that night across all networks in general 

 

Not only were the 7 or so episodes of the show watched by millions of people both in the original airing and it's many re-airings on the network (and streaming on Discovery+) so were the tie in 'crossover' episodes on other series that featured the Brady Bunch cast with Brady infused content like Pioneer Woman and Fast N' Loud.

 

The marketing for this series (and the crossovers) was massive, it was nearly a year of anticipation in the making because the press about the house coming up for sale after so many decades, the bidding war with the guy from N*SYNC, and then HGTV's plans for it had people talking and speculating for months, and was sponsored by many companies wanting to get in on the nostalgia.

 

All things considered, the purchase price and renovation expenses were easily a wash with all the money they had to have made on this, beyond what they got back in what the house resold for.

 

One thing not mentioned yet, that I find very cool is that the house was bought by a very wealthy superfan who plans to keep it as is, kind of like a museum rather than use it as an air-bnb the way people speculated HGTV originally had plans for it.

 

 
 
I believe that the reason you never saw TV sitcom families using dishwashers in the 60’s and 70’s is because at that time many, if not the majority of American viewers didn’t have DW’s. By showing these sitcom families washing their dishes at the sink it made them more relatable to the viewing public.

Making these families relatable to the viewers helped to make these shows popular. Even if these TV families lived in homes that were filled with the newest and most up to date furnishings and appliances seeing them more or less living like Joe and Jane America made them appear to be just like you or me.

The same thing still happens today in TV commercials for various dishwashing detergents. They all show kitchens that are the last word in modern appointments, yet the actors in these commercials are happily washing their dishes by hand with Dawn, Palmolive or whatever.

This gives the message that even the well off among us still have to wash dishes and if I use this product I’ll be as glamorous and well off as the folks in the commercial. Psychology is a big part of being successful at selling anything.

Eddie
 
Dishwashers

My neighbor Marilyn had a dishwasher when they moved into the house, but didn't use it. It had been installed by the previous owners, and was an awkward installation, as it replaced a 21" cabinet. Therefore it stuck out 3" past the end of the countertop, requiring a piece of stainless steel trim to cover the gap. This made access to the back door inconvenient. When the kitchen was renovated about 20 years ago, it was removed, and an 18" cabinet installed.

While we got a dishwasher at Christmas, 1957 (gift to my mom from my grandfather who was living with us), several other houses in this neighborhood lack them to this day.

As for TV, I know there was one on "Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet", a Hotpoint of course. I think I also saw a dishwasher on some later episodes of "George Burns & Gracie Allen Show"
 
More Dishwasher’s

Tom,
The only time my Mom ever had a dishwasher other than moi, was for a month before my Dad died in June of ‘62. We moved into a new to us home in May of ‘62. This house was built in ‘56 and had a Westinghouse AEK with a dishwasher! Well, the DW started to leak right after my Dad passed away and there were many more important things to deal with than having the DW repaired, so it was never fixed and we just went back to doing the dishes by hand. We only lived in this home for a year and then moved to the Northern California coast.

Coincidentally, in ‘58 the gift that Mom most coveted for Christmas was a portable DW like the ones she was seeing on TV commercials. When she opened her Christmas gift from Dad that year she was so disappointed that it was a Mink Stole instead of the portable DW that she’d wanted. Most other women would have preferred the Mink!

I didn’t get a DW until we bought our first home, a condo in ‘87 and it was a new builders grade GE. Since 2018 when our 11 mo old Whirlpool DW stopped working I’ve been washing the dishes by hand, even after the warranty repair work was completed. I strangely find doing the dishes by hand to be gratifying and calming and I actually enjoy doing it, go figure?

Eddie[this post was last edited: 9/14/2023-17:06]
 
Reply 8, Reply 11

There was one episode of "Bewitched (1964)" during the color years and after the more upscale Frigidaire DW appeared in which Sam is having the sort of bad day housewives have. We are shown the machine running and in typical Hollywood style, bubbles are frothing out from the bottom while she ponders getting a repair tech to come out.

I also made the surmise that the Bradys had a dishwasher installed in the back of the island. In one edition of the Brady Bunch comic books Carol and Alice have some dialogue that refers to "the dishwasher," although it is not shown.

Shirley Partridge was regularly shown loading and unloading the Magic Chef roto rack. That show was the exception. I've noticed that the door latch on Maude's dishwasher would be filmed in both locked and unlocked position from scene to scene indicating that it was being used.

What I found even more curious is those TV sets with a refrigerator costing four figures but no DW (i.e "Two and a Half Men (2003)").
 
update: None of the appliances work

...

 

<blockquote>
And even though the property isn't exactly functional as a real home, she's still satisfied with her purchase. "None of the appliances work," she revealed. "The range doesn't work, the stove doesn't work, the oven doesn't work. There's literally nothing [that works]... Nothing is functioning. It's all decorative. So I think that's pretty funny. You couldn't make anything if you wanted to."

</blockquote>

ew.com

New 'Brady Bunch' house owner says 'none of the appliances work'

Tina Trahan, the new owner of the 'Brady Bunch' house, says she bought it as 'art' and that 'none of the appliances work.'
ew.com ew.com
 

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