Where Do Samantha and Darrin Stephens from ‘Bewitched’ Live? Take a Magical Tour of Their Home

If you’re a fan of Classic TV, you’ve probably always imagined what it would be like to take a tour of some your favorite television families’ homes. We’ve been able to do so with The Brady Bunch thanks to HGTV’s A Very Brady Renovation, but what about the Petries of The Dick Van Dyke Show, the Ricardos of I Love Lucy, the Taylors of The Andy Griffith Show or the Munsters from the show of the same name? Well, now you’ve got your chance to take a virtual guided tour through all of those homes and more, including — pertinent in this particular case — Samantha and Darrin Stephens’ of Bewitched.

All of it is the brainchild of MockingbirdLane.design’s Marina Coates, who decided to go back to school when her kids were grown and earn a degree in architecture. From that point forward, she freelanced from home, which, by its nature, meant that there would be some periods slower than others. Her first impulse was to send out samples of her work to developers in an effort to try and get more work — but then she elected to go with impulse number two.

“For whatever reason,” she explains in an exclusive interview, “I thought to myself, ‘You know, I’d rather spend this free time walking through The Dick Van Dyke Show house.’ It’s something I’d always wanted to do and now I had the skills, so I built — virtually — that house and walked through it. And then I was just hooked and kept doing one after the other. That was about two years ago.”

Between then and now, she’s showcased her work on a pair of YouTube shows: Cinematically Inspired Design, which takes design secrets from the cinema and brings them into your living room; and Behind the Scenes, giving computer-generated tours of TV and movie homes.

Which is all fine, but it’s one thing to say, “Hey, I want to walk through The Dick Van Dyke Show house,” and another thing to actually make it happen. “It is a process,” she laughs. “I start by obsessively watching the episodes, looking at details of the house and seeing views that I need to see in order to draw it up. Generally, I start on paper and then go to the computer. And when I’m done, and if all four walls connect, I know I must be close. And there are things you can go by, like a main door is usually three-feet wide, bathtubs are five-feet long — things like that help you get the measurements pretty dang close.”

Not to be all cliched about it, but practice is certainly making all the difference. “I keep trying to improve in accuracy, too, so more and more of the items in the homes are exactly what they were on the show,” Marina details. “Which means I have to build them rather than just importing a component. I almost hate to admit this, but The Parent Trap house took about 200 hours, but that included the research and then actually making the program, which takes a while, too. I guess the house itself was maybe 120 hours for that one. But I did I Love Lucy, which is a thousand square foot apartment, in a week.”

The home from Bewitched (the show is currently airing on the Antenna TV network), the focus in this case, was a set that actually showed the audience all four walls, which, she points out, isn’t common. “They did that on Leave It to Beaver and Andy Griffith, too, so they’re all from around the same period. By doing so, it makes it feel more like an actual house. Whereas I Love Lucy and most of the others are missing a fourth wall that you never get to see. But that’s kind of fun, too, because then I get to put in my own take of what might’ve been there. At the same time, even though they have all four walls, in any given episode we never get to walk through the whole thing, looking right and left. That’s what makes it different when you take these tours.”

Please scroll down as we visit 1164 Morning Glory Circle and make our way through the home of Samantha and Darrin Stephens.