I designed this famous house from The Brady Bunch (1969-74) on commission. Before beginning work, I hadn’t even listened to the show’s catchy theme! However, I very quickly came to realize that merely speaking the first few lyrics of that song will send many people into paroxysms of nostalgia. The Brady Bunch is a landmark show beloved by millions, and the Bradys’ iconic house now a tourist attraction that is the second-most photographed house in the United States. It was a real treat for me to replicate and recreate a truly meaningful piece of American pop culture.
I love tackling the challenges unique to replicating architecture in brick form, and this home posed more than just those delicious run-of-the-mill puzzles. You see, I was set to model a house that technically never had, and never will, exist. My model of the Bradys’ house—the combination of an amalgam of sources—required a good deal of compromise, research, and imagination to reach its finished form.
The famous street views of the house on The Brady Bunch were shot using a real home in Studio City, California. Back then, the home was doctored a bit for these shots; the protruding front window on the left side, for instance, was actually a fake one hung on a featureless wall by set dressers!
The Studio City home was recently acquired by HGTV, and renovated to resemble the Bradys’ house, inside and out. While the front was restored accurately to its appearance on the show, the back of the house had to be expanded to accommodate extra rooms.
My client wanted the backyard of his model to best resemble that which was seen on The Brady Bunch, rather than to emulate the backyard designed in the HGTV renovation. Here is where I had to improvise a bit, as the TV show never showed a full rear view of the Bradys’ home.
Features like the angled sliding doors to the left are pulled straight from the show’s sound stage backyard, while the little staircase and balcony to the right are based on the pre-renovation Studio City house.
With its tan walls, mixed stone colors, dark blue door, and verdant lawn, I think the Bradys’ house is a particularly inviting home based on color palate alone. It has a signature ‘70s architecture that really encapsulated the period during which it aired.
I purposefully threw a few studded areas into the surface of the roof’s shingles to take attention away from the inevitably studded 4x4 wedge plates needed for the angled vertices between the two roof sections.
As on another of my home designs in this scale, North Shore Chattanooga, the roof of the Bradys’ house just sits on top of it, held in place like a puzzle piece but technically unattached. It comes apart in two sections, which meet at the v-shaped line. Managing and minimizing the seam between the two sections took a good deal of finagling and fine-tuning.
Also tricky was ensuring that every visible edge of the roof was lined with tan. It was essential for accuracy that the gable ends matched the “paint job” on the rest of the house.
I enjoyed making the “stonework” for this build. The motley combination of light grey, dark tan, and nougat I’ve used approximates a purposefully asymmetrical/slapdash pattern of rock signature to portions of the Bradys’ home.
Technically speaking, the front door and lattice of beams around it is the most complex portion of this build. The angled windows and skinny lines are often anchored far from where you might expect.
I had to rely on SNOT technique for several other sections of the walls. Notice, at the corner of the longer window, I have employed sideways tiles to add a border to a window that otherwise would have been—inaccurately—flush with the wall’s corner.
One of my favorite aspects of the front of the house is all the plants. Palm trees, bushes, ferns, mosses, and a few other types of vegetation pepper the flowerbeds at the base of the walls.
For me, the starkest dichotomy between the front and rear of the house lies in the vegetation. While the plants on the street side of the home replicate organic, real-life trees and bushes, those on the back side are built to resemble the picture-perfect (and probably fake) gardened plants from the studio set. Everything comes in a pot or planter, neat as a button.
My client and I were in close conversation when it came to replicating the nine main characters from The Brady Bunch in brick form. He was far more familiar with the show than I, and provided invaluable insights into the types of hairstyles, outfits, and personalities I had to capture for each of the members of the Brady family.
I tried to make the black lines of the “frames” thinner than a brick early in my design process, but found them flimsy and complex, and so opted for a more robust design.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions or thoughts about this model, feel free to leave them in the comments below. And, if you’re interested in getting a model like this yourself, reach out to me about commissioning one of your own!