‘Desperate Housewives’ Is 20: ‘Matlock,’ ‘The Munsters’ & More Shows Filmed on Wisteria Lane
Two decades ago, TV viewers tuned into Desperate Housewives for the first time and met the residents of Wisteria Lane, a suburban street where lawns couldn’t be tidier and lives couldn’t be messier.
But the fictional Wisteria Lane is the real-life Colonial Street, one of the outdoor sets on Universal Studios’ backlot in Los Angeles. And many of the houses had been in use in films and the TV shows for decades by the time of Desperate Housewives’ debut on ABC on October 3, 2004.
“It wasn’t, ‘Hey, let’s build a big neighborhood set and construct all of these houses at the same time,’” Jeff Pirtle, former director of archives and collections for NBCUniversal, told Los Angeles Magazine in 2019. “It was a product of smart studio use of recycling sets and then realizing that you have all of these great facades around the studio and bringing them all together to make a neighborhood.”
With information from Los Angeles Magazine and TheStudioTour.com, here are details on the Hollywood productions that also filmed on the street we now call Wisteria Lane.
The Meyer House
The barn-style home where Susan (Teri Hatcher) lived was originally built — elsewhere on the Universal backlot — for the 1955 Rock Hudson film All That Heaven Allows. It was also used in the TV shows The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and The New Lassie, and more recently, it was the Vishwakumar residence in Never Have I Ever.
The Solis House
Known for its prominence in the 1950 James Stewart movie Harvey, the house Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) occupied on Desperate Housewives can be seen in the TV shows Adam-12, The Rockford Files, and the short-lived Animal House sitcom spinoff Delta House.
The Van de Kamp House
Though it was destroyed in the 1989 Tom Hanks film The ’Burbs, this house was rebuilt for the ‘90s TV show Providence, for which it stood in as the Hansen family home. After that, the house only stood vacant for a couple of years before Bree (Marcia Cross) and her Desperate Housewives family moved in.
The Scavo House
Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and her brood lived in a house originally built for the 1941 Deanna Durbin movie Nice Girl? and later used in the 1951 Ronald Reagan film Bedtime for Bonzo and the 1963 Doris Day/James Garner flick The Thrill of It All. The same house also appears in a 1985 episode of Murder, She Wrote.
The Young House
The house where Mary Alice (Brenda Strong) died by suicide in Desperate Housewives looks just like the Cleaver house from Leave It to Beaver— and, for that matter, the Welby house from Marcus Welby, M.D. In actuality, though, it’s a replica of the Cleaver house built for the 1997 film Leave It to Beaver.
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The Applewhite House
The house Betty (Alfred Woodard) moved into on Wisteria Lane — a property that later passed on to Alma Hodge (Valerie Mahaffey) and then to Bob Hunter (Tuc Watkins) and Lee Dermott (Kevin Rahm) — is best known for being the Munsters’ mansion in the TV show The Munsters. But the facade was actually built for the 1946 film So Goes My Love.
The Clarke House
Neighborhood gossip Mona (Maria Cominis) lived in the same house that Andy Griffith’s defense attorney lived in on the original TV series Matlock. The same property was also featured in the 1937 film One Hundred Men and a Girl, which, like the aforementioned Nice Girl?, starred Deanna Durbin.
From TV Guide Magazine
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