The “Our House” House

Two weeks ago, fellow stalker Cait posted a comment on my site challenging me to find the home where the Witherspoon family – Gus (aka Wilford Brimley), Jessie (aka Deidre Hall), David (aka Chad Allen), Molly (aka Keri Houlihan), and Kris (aka my girl Shannen Doherty) – lived in the 1980’s television series Our House.  Surprisingly enough, despite the fact that I am such a humongous Shannen Doherty fan, I had never actually seen an episode of Our House and was unsure of where the property might be located.  Thankfully though, I had a couple of clues to help me out in the hunt.  In her comment, Cait had informed me that she had spotted a “159” address number on the dwelling located across the street from the Witherspoon house and she also included a link to the Season 1 episode of the show titled “First Impressions”, in which quite a bit of the property was shown.  So, I immediately started scanning through it.

While watching the episode, I noticed that there were large sidewalks on the street in front of the Witherspoon residence and my first instinct was that the property was located somewhere in or around the Hancock Park area.

That instinct was only strengthened when I saw the ginormous house (pictured behind Wilford Brimley in the screen capture above) located next door to the Witherspoon residence.  So, I immediately started searching through all of the blocks in Hancock Park that were in the 100 range, but I could just not seem to find the Our House residence anywhere.

As it ended up, my hunch was off by quite a bit.  Not that it mattered, though.  😉 Just three days after posting her challenge to me, Cait published another comment on my site saying that she had found the Our House house!  Apparently, while looking for an unrelated location, Cait came across an address on Cahuenga Boulevard that was in the 100 range.  So, she started searching through online maps for all streets parallel to Cahuenga that also had 100 blocks.  She had a hunch that the house had to be east of Western Avenue and, after scouring online maps to find what she believed was the right area, got in her car and proceeded to drive up and down each and every street in that neighborhood.  She eventually found the property exactly where she thought it would be – at 158 South Kingsley Drive!  YAY!  After finding the house, Cait said, “I can understand now why you enjoy ‘stalking’ so much – it’s like a treasure hunt in a great big city and it’s fun to succeed at it!”   That is SO very true, Cait!  I honestly could not have said it better myself!    So, after Cait gave me the address, I dragged the GC right on out to stalk the place.  Unfortunately though, as you can see above, because the sun was directly in front of the house when I showed up to stalk it, my photographs did not come out very well.

You can see a much better view of the house on Google Street View (pictured above) by clicking here.

While there have been quite a few changes made to the property during the past twenty-three years that the show has been off the air, it is, thankfully, still very recognizable as the Witherspoon residence.

Before writing today’s post, I sat down to watch the “First Impressions” episode in full and was shocked to see a fake address number of “14” posted on the front of the Witherspoon home.  Being that a two-digit house number is very rare – in fact, I don’t think I have ever seen one in my entire life – it seems strange to me that set decorators would choose to use one on the show, rather than a vastly more common three-, four-, or five-digit address number.  It is times like these that I so wish I could get inside a producer’s head to figure out what their reasoning behind such an odd decision was!

On an Our House side note – As you can see above, Shannen Doherty was absolutely ADORABLE on the series!  So darn cute!

You can watch the Our House opening credits, in which the Witherspoon residence is shown, by clicking above.

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Cait for finding this location!

Stalk It: The Our House house is located at 158 South Kingsley Drive, just north of Koreatown, in Los Angeles.