Florence Henderson House: Her Real Home, and Why It Wasn’t the Brady One

The house almost everyone pictures when they think of Florence Henderson is a split-level in Studio City with a distinctive A-frame window. She never lived in it, never owned it, and never filmed a single scene inside it. It was an exterior only. Every interior of The Brady Bunch, including the famous staircase, was a set on a studio stage.

Her real home was in Marina del Rey, in a small gated enclave near the water, and she lived there until she died in November 2016.

This guide covers that house, the separate and much more famous Studio City property, what HGTV did to it and what it eventually sold for, and why the two keep being confused.

The two houses, side by side

Who was Florence Henderson?

Florence Henderson was an American actress and singer, born in Indiana in 1934, the youngest of ten children in a family of modest means. She built a substantial Broadway career before television, appearing in productions including Oklahoma!, Fanny, and The Sound of Music.

She became internationally known as Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 to 1974 and has been in near-continuous rerun ever since. She continued working across television for decades afterwards, including a run on Dancing with the Stars. She was married twice: to the theatre producer Ira Bernstein from 1956 until their divorce in 1985, with whom she had four children, and from 1987 to the hypnotherapist John Kappas, who died in 2002. She died on 24 November 2016, aged 82, of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

The Marina del Rey house

Henderson lived in Marina del Rey, the harbour community on the western edge of Los Angeles, in a gated enclave of roughly a dozen houses. She was there until the end of her life.

The property, which came onto the market after her death, runs about 3,585 square feet with four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a den or loft space. Listing material described it as an entertainer’s home, and noted its position within walking distance of the marina’s shops and restaurants.

What she paid for it, and when, has not been published in any source reviewed here, and no sale price following her death has been reported either. That is unremarkable: she was a much-loved television actress rather than a subject of property journalism, and a four-bedroom house in Marina del Rey does not generate the coverage that a hillside estate does.

It is worth noting how modest a house it is relative to her fame. Fifty years of continuous rerun income and a Broadway career did not produce a compound. Classic-television performers frequently lived in ordinary houses, a point also made by the record on Frances Bavier’s home in North Carolina and on Johnny Crawford’s house.

The Studio City house that was never hers

The property used for the Brady family’s exterior shots is a real split-level house in Studio City, built in 1959. It appeared in establishing shots throughout the series. Nothing else about the show happened there.

The interiors that viewers remember, including the orange kitchen and the open staircase, were built as sets on a soundstage. The real house does not have that layout and never did. That single fact is the source of essentially all the confusion around this subject.

What HGTV did to it, and what it sold for

The Studio City house came onto the market in July 2018 at $1.885 million. That August, HGTV bought it for $3.5 million, nearly double the asking price, after a bidding war in which the singer Lance Bass believed for a day that he had won.

The network then did something unusual: it gutted the interior and added a storey in order to recreate the studio sets inside the real building, so that the house would match what audiences had seen on television for fifty years. The project became the 2019 series A Very Brady Renovation, with Drew and Jonathan Scott of Property Brothers among the HGTV hosts and all six actors who played the Brady children taking part.

It was listed in May 2023 at $5.5 million and sold that September for $3.2 million, roughly nine per cent below what HGTV had paid five years earlier, and about $2.3 million below the asking price. The buyer was Tina Trahan, described as a historic-home enthusiast and married to the former HBO chief executive Chris Albrecht, who said she intended to use the house for fundraising and charitable events rather than as a residence.

The loss is the interesting part. HGTV spent a great deal converting a normal Studio City house into a full-scale replica of a television set, and the market valued the result below the plain house it started as. A property renovated to match a fictional interior appeals to almost nobody looking for somewhere to live, which is precisely why it ended up with a buyer who wanted it for events.

Where her homes stand now

Because Henderson died in 2016, the question of where she lives does not apply. Her Marina del Rey house went to market after her death and is now in private hands unconnected to her; no sale figure has been publicly reported.

The Studio City house remains standing, in its post-renovation state, owned by a private buyer who has said she plans to open it for charitable purposes.

If you take one thing from this article, the Brady Bunch house is a real building with a real history and a documented sale price, and it has nothing to do with where Florence Henderson lived.

Sources

• Patch Marina del Rey on her Marina del Rey home, its size, and its listing after her death.
• The Real Deal and NPR on HGTV’s 2018 purchase at $3.5 million, the renovation, and the 2023 listing.
• NPR and GBH on the August 2018 bidding war with Lance Bass.
• ABC7 Los Angeles and Fortune on the September 2023 sale at $3.2 million and the buyer’s plans.
• Wikipedia for her biography and career, cross-checked against contemporaneous obituaries.