“The Unicorn” House

The Fall 2019 television season is chock full of fabulous new series! The Grim Cheaper says the deluge brings him right back to the Must-See TV days of the ‘90s. A few of our favorites include The Morning Show (as mentioned here), All Rise, Bluff City Law, Prodigal Son, and The Unicorn. The latter, based on a true story, centers around widower Wade Felton (Walton Goggins) and his attempts to move on with life a year after his wife’s death via a little help from his friends. While it doesn’t sound like it’d be a great premise for a comedy, I find myself laughing throughout each episode. And bonus – though set in Raleigh, North Carolina, it’s shot in Los Angeles! So I, of course, set out to find the home where Wade lives with his two young daughters, Grace (Ruby Jay) and Natalie (Makenzie Moss), on the show. (Pardon the selfie above – I stalked the house while by myself on a quick visit to L.A. last week.)

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I had seen the trailer for The Unicorn months before the series’ debut in September and immediately recognized the residence that appeared in it as the Partridge House, located at Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank. The picturesque Colonial, a practical set situated on the backlot’s Blondie Street, has appeared in countless productions over the years, as I detailed in this 2016 post for Mike the Fanboy. So named thanks to its regular appearance as the Partridge residence on The Partridge Family, it also portrayed the Thatcher home on Life Goes On and the Kravitz pad on Bewitched and is currently where MeeMaw (Annie Potts) lives on Young Sheldon.

By the time the pilot of The Unicorn aired, though, a different property had been selected to portray the home of the Felton family. When I first laid eyes on the Craftsman-style pad, I was convinced it was located in Pasadena, but searching around Crown City and its environs yielded nothing that matched.

Episode 2, titled “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” thankfully provided additional clarity via an address number of “138” visible on the house next door to the Felton’s. That number gibed more with the Hancock Park area than Pasadena, so I started searching there and found the Felton home within minutes at 132 Wilton Drive in Windsor Square.

The exterior of the handsome home appears regularly in establishing shots of the Felton residence, as well as in some on location filming of outdoor scenes.

Only the exterior of the property is featured on The Unicorn. The interior of the Felton pad – described by Wade’s friend Delia (Michaela Watkins) as being “like the Disney Channel version of Grey Gardens” in the first episode – is just a set that exists inside of a soundstage at Paramount Studios where the series is lensed. It looks nothing like the actual inside of 132 Wilton Drive, which you can check out some photos of here. Interiors for the pilot episode (pictured below), though, were shot at the Partridge House at Warner Ranch, which, as I mentioned above, is a practical set meaning that both the inside and outside of it can be utilized for filming.

I’ve been fortunate enough to tour the Partridge House a few times, which is where the photos above and below come from. Unfortunately, my angles are just slightly off from what was shown in The Unicorn’s pilot.

The inside of the Partridge House is basically just an empty shell that productions can come in and change or outfit as needed. As you can see below, the kitchen area does not even have cabinets when not being used for a shoot.

Again, my angle is a bit off, but pictured below is the kitchen nook that served as the Felton’s dining area in the pilot. You can just see the Partridge House’s living room fireplace through the opening in the wall in my photo.

A full view of the living room is below. The kitchen stands just behind the “built-in bookcases,” which were removed for The Unicorn pilot in order to make the space more open.

Though I did not snap a photo of the living room area looking out toward the staircase, I did capture the stairs themselves during my visits to the Partridge House.

The Partridge House also boasts a functional backyard and The Unicorn producers made use of it in the pilot.

The alcove where Wade keeps his freezer – a focal point of the episode – is an actual element of the house, situated between the rear door and the detached garage, as you can see below.

When The Unicorn got picked up, filming moved to Paramount Studios, where the Felton residence interior set was then built from scratch. It looks virtually nothing like the interior from the pilot, though Wade’s freezer alcove was a holdover. You can just see it outside of the door to the left of the stairs in the lower screen capture below.

While I initially assumed that the show made use of 132 Wilton Drive’s backyard for all episodes beyond the pilot, that turns out to be incorrect. The Feltons’ backyard is actually part of the Paramount set, situated inside of a soundstage on the lot.

In real life, the Wilton Drive house, which was built in 1917, boasts 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2,200 square feet of living space, and a 0.13-acre lot.

The property last sold in 2011 and looked quite different at the time, with a rounded Colonial-inspired portico attached to its façade, as you can see below. In recent years, the new owners widened the steps leading down to the sidewalk, swapped out the lower-level windows and front door, and removed the portico, adding a large porch in its place. The result is a home that is much more Craftsman in style.