“The Goldbergs” House

A couple of years ago, my good friend Lavonna got obsessed with the ABC series The Goldbergs and asked me to do some research on its locales.  She was most interested in learning the location of the Goldberg family’s Anywhere, U.S.A.-style home and I found the address – 3071 Earlmar Drive in Cheviot Hills – rather quickly thanks to Robert of Movie Locations and More, who has a page dedicated to the show on his site.  Oddly though, when I went to view the residence on Google Street View, I noticed that it looked rather different in reality than it did in the screen captures Robert had posted.  Needless to say, I became intrigued and wound up uncovering some rather interesting behind-the-scenes information as to why.  So although the pad has been covered on a few other websites, I figured it was most-definitely still worthy of a blog post.

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For those not in the know, The Goldbergs is a thirty minute television comedy based upon the real life childhood of producer Adam F. Goldberg.  Much of the storyline comes directly from videos that a young Adam took of his family while growing up in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania during the 1980s.  Though set on the East Coast, all filming takes place in Southern California.  On the series, the Goldbergs – parents Murray (Jeff Garlin) and Beverly (Wendi McLendon-Covey) and their children, Adam (Sean Giambrone), Barry (Troy Gentile) and Erica (Hayley Orrantia) – live in a traditional two-story clapboard home.  As you can see in the Street View image, which was taken in May 2011, as compared to the screen capture below, at the time the Goldberg residence looked much different in person than it did when the series began production in 2013.  Namely, it lacked dormer windows.

Seeing the Street View imagery confused me to no end.  I was not sure sure if the windows were an actual alteration made to the residence or something that production brought in for shooting purposes.  Being that dormer windows are not an architectural element that can be added to a property without doing some major renovations, my guess was the latter.  So I decided to do some digging and learned that the residence is only one story in real life, which meant that the dormers were not actual windows, but some sort of decoration – and therefore likely just an alteration done for the series.

I didn’t give the whole thing much thought after that.  Then late last year, Lavonna got back onto a Goldbergs kick and asked me to start watching, as well.  The Grim Cheaper and I viewed a few episodes shortly thereafter (it’s a great show, by the way) and as soon as I spotted those dormer windows, I got to thinking about their origins once again.  So I logged into Google Street View and was surprised to see that the dormers were present in recent images of the house.  My interest piqued more than ever, I did an internet search for “dormer windows” and “3071 Earlmar Drive” and was shocked to discover a series of exchanges on WikiLeaks that had been released during the Sony Hack of November 2014 and pertained to my query.  Thanks to the 170,000 pieces of correspondence exposed by the so-called Guardians of Peace, not only did we learn that producer Scott Rudin thinks Angelina Jolie is a “minimally talented spoiled brat,” but also the story behind those darn dormer windows.

It breaks down like this – when the Earlmar Drive house was chosen for the series, it was proposed that four dormer windows be temporarily added to the roof of the structure.  The installation caused a lot of back-and-forth between the production team and the homeowners due to the fact that when filming of The Goldbergs eventually concluded, the roof would have to be repaired to the tune of about $18,000.   The owners apparently wound up liking the look of the windows, though – or just felt it would be easier to keep them intact – and it was later requested that they be left up permanently.  This caused some more back-and-forth discussion between the production team because the roof analysis done prior to the windows being installed was based on them only being in place temporarily.  As you all well know, this stalker loves herself some behind-the-scenes information, so I was practically salivating upon reading through the emails.  (It is interesting to note that the homeowners did not want their name, address or photographs to be used in any aired footage.  Little did they know that documents containing their name and address would be leaked to the masses via the Guardians of Peace shortly thereafter.)

Per a 2007 real estate listing, in real life, The Goldbergs house boasts 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, 2,419 square feet of living space, a remodeled kitchen with granite countertops, a vaulted and beamed living room ceiling, and a 0.20-acre plot of land.

According to Redfin, the dwelling, which was originally built in 1952, last sold in October 2007 for just under $1.5 million.

You can check out some interior photographs of the home here.  Only the exterior of the property is used on the series, though.  The inside of the Goldbergs’ house is actually just a set built on a soundstage at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City.  Interestingly, that set was modeled after the dwelling that was featured as the Goldberg residence in the show’s pilot episode.

As is often the case with television shows, The Goldbergs pilot was filmed at a different home than the one used in all subsequent episodes.  Thanks to the Seeing Stars website, I learned that the pilot  residence (which is pictured below) is located at 4545 Del Moreno Drive in Woodland Hills.

While I could not find any photographs of the interior of the home that was utilized in the pilot, it is obvious from the way the episode was shot that filming did make use of the residence’s actual interior.

For the most part, the set is a pretty close re-creation of the actual home, though set designers did make some changes, which you can see in the collages that appear above and below.

Adam F. Goldberg’s real life childhood home, which is located at 405 Newbold Road in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, is actually much more extravagant than the residence chosen for the show.  The 8-bedroom, 6-bath, 6,708-square-foot Tudor-style estate, which was originally built in 1925 and sits on 0.85 acres, is absolutely massive in size and, per Zillow, features a Mahogany library, a kitchen with “multiple Sub-Zero fridges” (because one is just never enough!), a Jacuzzi room (yep, a Jacuzzi “room” – you can see a photograph of it here), a whopping 3 fireplaces, a master bedroom with his-and-her changing rooms, a billiards parlor/game room, an in-ground swimming pool and a tennis court (though when it was put on the market in 2011, the land containing the pool and tennis court were being listed separately).

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Big THANK YOU to Robert, from the Movie Locations and More website, for finding this location! 

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 

Stalk It: The Goldberg family home from The Goldbergs is located at 3071 Earlmar Drive in Cheviot Hills.