Half the world recognizes the apartment that Carrie Bradshaw lives in, or the New Jersey mansion where Tony Soprano ate, slept, and obsessed over the ducks in his swimming pool. In the 1990s, if you asked a good chunk of the global population where Will Smith lived, they would instantly picture a huge, white abode in Bel Air. For the real people who call those places home, this can be a significant issue, transforming private sanctuaries into public spectacles.
“We had loads of problems with people just walking in during Covid,” says Kate Fox, who lives in a house that featured in the British soap Emmerdale for the years it was filmed entirely in her West Yorkshire village of Esholt. “Somebody actually came and just stuck their head through our front door.” Fox recalls that Leah Bracknell, who played the character Zoe Tate, even contacted the press to highlight the intrusion. Esholt has since attracted superfans who have moved there specifically for the Emmerdale connection, and in the past, Fox would charge 50p to let people have a look around.
Public intrusion is a common experience for the residents of TV-famous homes. In 2015, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, had to urge fans to stop paying homage to his show – because they were recreating a scene where an entire pizza is thrown on to the roof of the house whose exterior was featured as Walter White’s bungalow. Eventually, the owners of the Breaking Bad house followed suit, erecting a 6ft iron fence – not that it stopped fans. “They still try to throw pizzas even though she’s got a gate, she’s got signage,” said Frank Sandoval, who runs Breaking Bad tours to the house in an RV. “They even try to climb the gate.” When the owners of the home eventually tired of the attention, they sold it for $1.3m, significantly higher than the $350,000 to $400,000 neighboring homes are valued at.
But not everyone treats the arrival of hordes of fans as a bad thing. “At first, I was confused why they would want to come in,” says Glenda Kenyon, whose place in Barry, south Wales, features in the BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey as the home of Stacey’s mum, Gwen. “I just said, no, sorry, I can’t do it.” Eventually, Glenda turned her home into a walk-in tribute to the show, housing a collection of memorabilia including fridge magnets, key rings, tea towels, and nearly every T-shirt you can buy. She even partnered on tours with a coach firm, whose “Dave’s Coaches” bus appeared in the show, and another run by Knock-off Nessa, who impersonates Ruth Jones’s character.
“I was lonely before, so lonely,” says Glenda, who lives alone and has experienced depression. “It has changed my life, because before I was so quiet, and now I can open up. I’m a hell of a lot better than I used to be. When you’re meeting people, you’re not thinking about the depression.” Last year, she welcomed 168 busloads of people to her home, and it has given her a renewed purpose. Similarly, two of the houses featured in Gavin and Stacey have been bought by superfans recently, with one sold specifically because the buyers valued the original furniture as the cherry on top of the cake.
Having a home that is famous for being on TV can also change an entire neighborhood, as a pocket of London’s Richmond found out after Ted Lasso was set there. The high-end boutiques that line the area now cater to a different crowd. “I didn’t realize it would be such a big deal,” says Reece Kent, who lives above and manages The Prince’s Head pub, which served as Lasso’s regular. “Before I started working here, I was like, OK, we might get a few tourists. But I get 150 to 200 a day.”
Over the road from the pub, an Italian restaurant attracts customers with a £5 “Eat like Ted” offer that entitles you to a box of Ted’s favourite shortbread biscuits. According to Kent, the cast would often pop in on days they weren’t filming for lunch or a drink, although Lasso himself wasn’t the main culprit for the crowds. “A couple of weeks after I started, this tourist came in who’d seen my name on the website and had made all these connections that Roy Kent was based on me,” laughs Kent. “Luckily, after a while, they believed that it was actually based on Roy Keane.”
Richmond is far from the only place this has happened to. Over 37 years, a suburb of Melbourne was thronged by more than a quarter of a million soap opera fans on bus tours, desperate to see the real-life cul-de-sac that moonlighted as the set of Neighbours’ Ramsay Street. This resulted in a security guard being employed to manage the flow of visitors. The phenomenon of the “TV home” remains a complex intersection of private property rights and public cultural obsession.
Being confused with a star of the show isn’t the only strange side-effect of having a TV show filmed in your home. Residents often find their personal history overwritten by the fictional narratives filmed within their walls. Whether it is the vet’s waiting room that once occupied a living room or the kitchen where a famous omelette was cooked, the line between the domestic reality and the televised fiction remains permanently blurred for those who live in these iconic, yet often intrusive, spaces.