The “Lady Bird” House

I know I am in the minority when I say I did not like Lady Bird.  Besides confusion over the name (up until I actually popped in the DVD and started watching, I thought the movie was a biopic about Lady Bird Johnson) and a storyline that seemed lacking, I found the main character, Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), utterly bratty.  She complains constantly about her hometown and claims she will do anything to go to college far away, yet she doesn’t take action to improve her grades, she cheats (on both a test and by lying to her teacher), lets her recently-out-of-work dad mortgage the family home (behind her mom’s back) in order to pay her out-of-state tuition, and throws tantrums on the reg.  I honestly could not find one redeemable thing about her.  Without a protagonist to root for or at least to sympathize with on some level, my investment in the movie felt like a waste of time.  I was intrigued by the locations, though.  While set and partially shot in Sacramento, I knew upon watching and recognizing the café where Lady Bird worked as Kaldi Coffee and Tea in South Pasadena that some filming took place in Los Angeles, as well.  I was fairly certain that the house where Lady Bird lived with her family – parents Marion (Laurie Metcalf) and Larry (Tracy Letts), brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues), and his girlfriend Shelly Yuhan (Marielle Scott) – could also be found in L.A.  So I set out to find it.

One quick stroke of the keypad led me to an Architectural Digest article that stated the McPherson family home was located in Van Nuys.  An address number of “6701” was also visible behind Lady Bird in a scene, so I began searching blocks numbered 6700 in Van Nuys and came across the right spot within minutes.  Said to be on “the wrong side of the tracks” in SacTown in the movie, Lady Bird’s home can actually be found at 6701 Orion Avenue, just east of the 405.

According to the AD article, Lady Bird’s production team scouted no less than fifty different properties before settling on the traditional 2-bedroom, 2-bath, 1952 ranch-style pad pictured below.

Not much of the residence was altered for the shoot, as you can see below.

Even the interior, which was utilized extensively, was a perfect fit for the production.  As director/writer Greta Gerwig said to The Sacramento Bee, “I was looking for very specific things and it’s so hard to find a home that’s not been renovated.  I had this vision of the kind of California home I wanted, like specific wide colorful tiles in the bathroom and kitchen.”

Prior to securing locales, Gerwig took the production team to her childhood home to give them an idea of the look she was going for.  In a lucky and rather eerie twist, the Van Nuys house boasted that aesthetic naturally – and in spades.  As production designer Chris Jones explained to Architectural Digest, “It was really bizarre because the kitchen looks almost exactly like Greta’s kitchen growing up.   It’s an almost exact match, down to the yellow tiles on the wall.”  The space actually reminds me quite a bit of the Arnolds’ kitchen from the pilot episode of The Wonder Years.

Per AD, while most of the furniture seen onscreen was brought in for the shoot, the faux wood paneling was another of the home’s authentic features.

Jones calls the house “a great find” saying it became a “character in the movie.”

The 1,607 square feet of living space did prove rather cramped for cast and crew, though.  Jones told Deadline, “Working in the house was tight.  Everyone was crammed in this small, square footage house.  Fortunately, that house had a back area, which actually ended up being the dorm rooms for when she goes to New York.  The whole yard was taken over by the film shoot for a week and a half.”  Lady Bird’s dorm is pictured below.  From Jones’ words, I am unclear if an actual room in the Van Nuys residence was utilized for the segment (with a New York cityscape splayed across the window) or if the space was a set constructed in the backyard or some other rear portion of the property.

The Lady Bird house also popped up in the Season 6 episode of Californication titled “Blind Faith” as the residence belonging to Faith’s (Maggie Grace) parents.

Quite a bit of the interior was also shown in the episode . . .

. . . including Faith’s childhood bedroom, which was the same room utilized as Lady Bird’s.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The McPherson family home from Lady Bird is located at 6701 Orion Avenue in Van Nuys.

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