This past weekend, I dragged my fiancé out to Long Beach – or as Snoop Dogg calls it “The LBC” – to do some stalking. My original plan was to book a room at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa – the spot currently standing in for the Beverly Hills Beach Club on 90210 – and spend the whole weekend down in the South Bay, but being that I could not find a room for under $270, the Grim Cheaper was having none of that. 🙁 So, I had to settle for spending only a single day in Long Beach, which actually worked out just fine as I managed to cram quite a bit of stalking into that 12 hour period. 🙂 And the first location I stalked? Dexter and Rita Morgan’s new home from the fourth season of fave television series, Dexter.
In the premiere episode of Season 4, which was entitled “Living The Dream”, Dexter (aka Michael C. Hall) and Rita (aka Julie Benz) move into a new home together after tying the knot in the previous season’s finale. Ironically enough, though, until making screen captures for this post earlier today, I had never actually seen their new house onscreen. Because my fiancé and I only just recently became Dexter fans, we have yet to see any of the series’ fourth season episodes. In fact, we are just now beginning to dive into Season 3. But even though we have yet to see the episodes in which the new home appears, I was still absolutely dying to stalk the place as I have a (very) small personal connection to it. As it turns out, some good friends of mine who live in the Long Beach area happen to know the people who live directly across the street from the new Morgan residence, in the home pictured above which was actually featured very briefly in Dexter’s Season 4 opener. So cool!!! Because my friends know my penchant for filming locations, as soon as they learned this information they passed it on to me, but sadly this was long after the filming of Season 4 had already wrapped. I so wish I had found out about this location earlier in the year, as I would have LOVED to have stalked the place and seen Michael C. Hall in person. I do love me some MCH! 🙂 Anyway, since we were in the area on Saturday, I just had to drag my fiancé out to stalk the home.
And I am very happy to report that the Dexter house looks EXACTLY the same in person as it did onscreen in Season 4. Even the address plaque and the mailbox are the same! In fact, the only difference I noticed, besides the fact that the house appears a bit more pinkish onscreen, is the front gate. On Dexter, the house’s front gate is made of polished wood, while in real life it is constructed of wrought iron. The Dexter house is extremely cute in person and it’s not very hard to see why producers chose it to stand in for the Miami area residence of the series’ main star – the place definitely gives off a Florida vibe.
I did notice something quite interesting while stalking the place, though. At first glance it would appear that Dexter’s home is a typical single-family residence, but while there I noticed that the curb out front had two address numbers – 3319 and 3321 – painted on it, as you can see in the above photograph.
So, when I got home I did some cyber-stalking and, thanks to Zillow, discovered that the property is actually a multi-family dwelling with one house located in the front and a second house situated out back. You can see both houses in the above aerial images. The front house, which is the one shown on Dexter, was built in 1922 and is a 3 bedroom, 1 bath dwelling measuring 2,219 square feet.
Let’s all keep our fingers crossed that this same house is used on Dexter next season, as well, and that I’ll be able to make it out there to watch the show being taped live!!! How incredibly cool would that be? 🙂
Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂
Stalk It: Dexter and Rita’s new house from Season 4 of Dexter is located at 3319 East 1st Street in the Bluff Park neighborhood of Long Beach.