The ‘Addams Family’ House Was a Maximalist’s Dream in Color
When you think of the Addams family, you don’t usually think “pink.” In fact, Barbie’s Dreamhouse was downright antithetical to the Addams house’s color scheme, which can be best described as shades of black. That was certainly true for the Addams Family sitcom that ran from 1964 to 1966, which was filmed in black and white despite the standardization of color television by that time to emphasize the vintage vibe of the house and its inhabitants’ creepiness and kookiness.
There was one more advantage, though: It meant set decorators weren’t limited to a goth palette. Since the film stock would remove it anyway, they could select home goods of any color as long as it was sufficiently weird. In fact, to get just the right shade of gray on camera, they had to paint the walls (and also the actors’ faces) in some surprisingly outlandish colors. As a result, the Addams family living room, as photographed in color for TV Guide in 1964, is awash in shades of pink and teal, with rich patterned rugs, blond (!) wood trim and outright Trumpian gold accents. Peg Bundy would be right at home here.
Not being constrained to the Antichrist Superstar look was also a huge budgetary benefit because it meant MGM could just scavenge its old sets for, you know, scavengers. All that taxidermy and antique furniture was the result of “plundering their own prop warehouses looking for something — for anything — that would be considered remotely ‘haunted.’” Morticia’s iconic wicker chair appeared 10 years earlier in From Here to Eternity, and the set itself was mostly cobbled together from the recently wrapped Titanic odyssey The Unsinkable Molly Brown. What a crossover that would have been.
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Of course, the Addams family house wasn’t a real house; the exterior shots depicted a Los Angeles mansion that few involved with the production ever touched before it was demolished in 1967. In a grave insult to the Addams kids, that land is now a high school track and field.
The set was also demolished, though not before cast and crew pillaged so many souvenirs that there wasn’t much left to scrap. If you have any relatives in the TV industry and you’ve ever wondered about that weird old stuffed tortoise in their otherwise gleaming glass dome, now you know what it is.
