Here Comes Ozzie & Harriet’s House

While there are many houses in the Hollywood Hills that can lay claim to having once been home to motion picture and television stars, few can be said to have been stars themselves. One notable exception is the charming Colonial-styled residence at 1822 Camino Palmero Street in western Hollywood currently for sale for $4,995,000.

For nearly 40 years, this house was  home to classic television’s foremost family – The Nelsons – Ozzie and Harriet and their sons, David and Ricky and it was during their long tenure here that they made television history with The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which today still holds the record as television’s longest running (1952-1966) live-action comedy series.

The Nelsons were the quintessential All-American family of the 1950’s and their home fit this image so well that when the series began transitioning from radio to television it was incorporated into the show with exterior establishing shots of the Nelson’s “television” home being their actual home on Camino Palmero. Furthering the blurred line between reality and fantasy, the interior sets for the series, which was filmed on the Hollywood General Studios lot, were modeled after the interiors of the real Nelson home. In 1973, some seven years after the cancellation of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, the home was again featured on television on the short-lived Ozzie’s Girls, which was something of a sequel to the original show, with Ozzie & Harriet renting out David and Ricky’s rooms to a pair of college girls.

The Nelson Home today (via listing)

1822 Camino Palmero, the longtime Nelson family base, had been built in 1916 for prominent Los Angeles businessman Harold G. Feraud on a sloping half-acre parcel in the exclusive Las Colinas Heights subdivision. The 10-room two-story residence was designed by Frank T. Kegley & H. Scott Gerity in the Colonial-revival style with a traditional clapboard exterior set off by dark green shutters. A rather nontraditional, but charming addition by the architects was a handsome pedimented entry portico framed by columns and sidelights on either side of the paneled front door. The home’s interior, which features a carved oak staircase, includes a number of original elements with a generous use of wood paneling throughout. There are a total of five bedrooms and five baths including a separate guest house on the property. The master bedroom suite on the second floor has a fireplace (one of three in the home) and a separate study with built-in bookshelves. The downstairs includes a family room/den with carved mahogany ceiling and a brick fireplace and a separate pub room with French doors leading out to the expansive brick patio. There is also a large swimming pool on the grounds.

The Nelsons watching their favorite show in their Hollywood den. Or is it the set? It's so confusing!

With the home’s longtime clean-cut image, it is a real irony that in recent years it has gained a rather unusual reputation as one of Hollywood’s most haunted houses. Ozzie Nelson died of cancer of the liver at age 69 in 1975 and a few years later, Harriet sold the house, where the family had lived since purchasing it back in 1941. Sometime thereafter, a subsequent owner began reporting mysterious happenings at the former Nelson home including doors opening and closing, lights turning off and on, phantom footsteps and, most bizarrely, as reported in Laurie Jacobson and Marc Wanamaker’s fun little book, Hollywood Haunted (Angel City Press. 1994), some postmortem hanky panky. According to Jacobson and Wanamaker, a female resident of the house reported that on occasion she would awaken in the night to find her covers pulled back and an unseen force kissing her neck and breasts. It seems that the adventures of Ozzie at least are continuing in the hereafter.

So, if a famous and historic house in a great Hollywood neighborhood with some unusual “amenities” is of interest to you, here is the realtor.com listing.