The modern living room that most Americans saw in the 1960s was on a soundstage. Set decorators often furnished it from ordinary stores, which is why so much of what appeared on screen can still be identified, and why some of it now sits in museums.

Here is where a few famous sets came from, and where they went.

The Enterprise shopped in Dallas

Star Trek ran on NBC from 1966 to 1969, with Walter "Matt" Jefferies as its designer. The pedestal chairs on the bridge and in the briefing room are often taken for Eero Saarinen's Tulip chair, which Knoll introduced in 1957. They are not. The design site Film and Furniture identifies them as chairs by Burke, a Dallas company, and the difference is in the base: Saarinen's is a smooth circle, and Burke's ends in a four-pointed star.

Other props were bought off the shelf as well. Dwell reports that Dr. McCoy's medical instruments were Danish stainless-steel salt and pepper shakers by Stelton. The captain's chair is usually said to have been built around a lounge chair designed by Arthur Umanoff, though Designboom notes that some people believe it was made from scratch.

John M. Dwyer, the set decorator who joined in the second season, shared an Emmy nomination with Jefferies in 1969. They lost to Mission: Impossible.

Where it went. The studio model of the Enterprise, just over eleven feet long, was given to the Smithsonian by Paramount in 1974. A two-year restoration was finished in 2016, and the National Air and Space Museum lists it on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall. Captain Kirk's chair sold at auction in 2002 for $304,750, according to the Hollywood Reporter. It later came to the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle from the estate of Paul Allen, and the museum listed it on view in 2024.

A house that was only ever a front

The Brady Bunch house is real: 11222 Dilling Street in Studio City, built in 1959 and designed by Harry Londelius Jr., according to the Los Angeles Conservancy. But the show used only the outside. The living room and its open staircase were a set at Paramount.

In 2018 the cable channel HGTV bought the house for $3.5 million and spent about $1.9 million more rebuilding the inside to match the set, NPR reported. It sold in 2023 for $3.2 million. In March 2026 the Los Angeles City Council made it a Historic-Cultural Monument, and public tours began in May, with tickets just under $300 and the proceeds going to the dog rescue Wags and Walks. Check that tours are still running before you plan a visit.

The street that is gone

Samantha and Darrin Stephens lived on Blondie Street, a row of house fronts at the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, later the Warner Bros. Ranch. By most accounts their house was copied, in reverse, from a real one in Santa Monica that had appeared in the 1959 film Gidget. The same street served I Dream of Jeannie and The Partridge Family.

Warner Bros. agreed to sell the Ranch in 2019. The Bewitched house was demolished on October 13, 2023, the local press reported, and the rest of the street followed. A new complex of 16 soundstages opened on the site in 2026. We found no report that any of the house fronts were saved.

The future, copied from a coffee shop

The Jetsons ran for one season on ABC, from 1962 to 1963. Writing for Smithsonian Magazine, Matt Novak argued that its artists did not invent the look of the future so much as copy what was around them in Los Angeles: the Googie coffee shops, and the Theme Building at the Los Angeles airport, finished in 1961.

One chair, one village

In Britain, The Prisoner seated its Number Two in a Ball Chair, the sphere that the Finnish designer Eero Aarnio sketched in 1963 and first showed at the Cologne furniture fair in 1966. Fans of the series say the one on screen was partly a studio copy. The Victoria and Albert Museum has an original. The series was filmed in 1966 and 1967 at Portmeirion, the village on the Welsh coast that the architect Clough Williams-Ellis spent about fifty years building.

The room nobody kept

The Dick Van Dyke Show was filmed before an audience at the Desilu-Cahuenga studio in Hollywood. It won 15 Emmys, by the Television Academy's count, and none was for its sets.

When CBS rebuilt the Petrie living room for a tribute to Van Dyke, the decorators could not simply pull the furniture from storage. According to the Set Decorators Society, the sofa had to be built new, and one original lamp turned up in a studio's stock of old fixtures.

What to look for

The lesson for a collector is that television furniture was ordinary furniture. A Burke chair with a star base is still a Burke chair, whether or not it flew on the Enterprise, and a claim that a piece was used on a show needs paperwork to mean anything.

If you have a pedestal chair and cannot tell which kind it is, turn it over and look at the base, or show it to the Photo Identifier.