Regarded as one of the most adored pop cultural touchstones in TV history, HGTV is cordially inviting audiences on Monday night into The Brady Bunch family’s newly renovated North Hollywood home. With an unprecedented transformation of its original TV set design with the highly anticipated, A Very Brady Renovation, the original cast team up with some of the network’s hottest stars to replicate a huge piece of Americana.
One of the HGTV personalities helping breathe life into the monumental and bold renovation is the network’s own Hidden Potential star, Jasmine Roth, who is teaming up alongside twins, Drew and Jonathan Scott of Property Brothers; mother-daughter duo, Mina Starsiak and Karen Laine of Good Bones; Flea Market Flip‘s Lara Spencer; and siblings Leanne and Steve Ford of Restored by the Fords, to execute one of the boldest home restorations the world has ever seen.
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In an exclusive with PopCulture.com ahead of the four-part series premiere kicking off Sept. 9, Roth revealed that while she had so much fun with the project and enjoyed every aspect, there was “a lot of pressure” felt while constructing the iconic home, which came with its fair share of challenges.
“It was one of those things that was a great opportunity, but it was a lot โ and I think a lot of people would have kind of buckled under the pressure because we had to get it right,” Roth told PopCulture.com. “There was no margin of error. People have not only grown up with The Brady Bunch, but they have these mega fans, where they know every single thing in every room; and they know which season the couch color changed. So, those were all things that we had a bit of a learning curve to catch up with, to make sure that from a design perspective that we got it spot on.”
HGTV took on the cutting-edge project last year after purchasing the Brady home for a whopping $3.5 million โ way above the $1.89 million asking price and ultimately, outbidding Lance Bass of NSYNC. Fully aware that the interior of the famous home looked nothing like the set on the Paramount lot where the show was shot, the network undertook the massive project in an attempt to recreate the home audiences have grown to know and love, and return it to its 1970s glory.
Roth admits getting the call to take part in the renovation, which had a budget of $350,000, was not only a humbling honor, but an incredibly surreal experience.
“So this is one of those things that you just say yes to,” she laughed. “I mean, it’s a once in a lifetime type of thing and HGTV reached out and they’re like, ‘Hey, we bought the Brady Bunch house and we don’t know exactly what we’re going to do with it yet, but do you want to help?’ And I’m like, ‘Absolutely. There’s no question of course, what are we going to do?’”
Roth admits that because she got the call in the “early” stages of “What the heck are we going to do with this house?,” that was one of the first challenges she and the network faced together.
“[But] then once we decided what we were going to do with the house, it was all hands on deck and we went for it,” she said.
As one of the biggest renovations Roth has done to date in comparison to other projects on her own series, Hidden Potential, she discloses the absolute biggest test was trying to make a home built for the ’70s, especially one that is up to today’s “standards and codes.”
However, she admits the most inventive aspect came to the addition of toilets, which were often disregarded from TV during that era because they were incredibly taboo.
“On the TV set, there were no toilets because it was not allowed โ you weren’t allowed to show toilets on TV then,” she laughed. “And so why would there be a toilet โ and if there was a toilet, it wouldn’t have been a working toilet. The master bedroom, for example, should have a bathroom off of it. And that bathroom in order for this house to be a real house needs to have a toilet, and it needs to be a working toilet.”
She adds that there was “a lot of behind-the-scenes, kind of figuring out” when it came to making it a “functional house that would pass inspection at the end of the day.”
With the home renovation now ready for everyone to see, Roth adds one of the most rewarding parts in undertaking this project was in how creative the whole development really was and the reception it received by fans watching nuggets of progress since last November via social media.
“It’s one of those things where, to anybody pretty much, you can say ‘The Brady Bunch’ and people are like, ‘Oh yeah,’” Roth said. “Everybody knows [them], but now because this has been something that’s been so big in the media and everybody’s been following it, I feel kind of like it’s the project that everybody has been involved in.”
In addition to friends and fans being in awe of her part in the home’s restoration, Roth admits it’s an experience she is excited to share with everyone.
“It’s just really fun to be able to share this project and now finally let everybody see how it went โ and not just the finished product, but the actual process of what we went through to get there.”
A Very Brady Renovation premieres Monday, Sept. 9 on HGTV at 9 p.m. ET.