For many TV fans around the world, Wisteria Lane is synonymous with Desperate Housewives — the suburban street where secrets hid behind manicured lawns. Yet the real location isn’t a residential cul-de-sac; it’s Colonial Street, an iconic backlot set at Universal Studios Hollywood that has appeared in decades of film and television productions.
Long before Desperate Housewives premiered in 2004, the houses on Colonial Street were repurposed and reused across Hollywood. The barn-style home of Susan Mayer, for instance, was originally constructed for the 1955 film All That Heaven Allows, then seen in series like The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and The New Lassie.
Credit: Rob Young/Wikimedia Commons
Similarly, the house that became Gabrielle Solis’s home was first featured in the 1950 film Harvey, and later appeared in Adam-12, The Rockford Files and even the short-run sitcom Delta House. Bree Van de Kamp’s residence on the street was destroyed in the 1989 Tom Hanks movie The ’Burbs, rebuilt for the ’90s TV show Providence, and eventually became her iconic home in Desperate Housewives.
Credit: Ksjoberg/Wikimedia Commons
Colonial Street isn’t a small collection of façades either. Today it has roughly 16 main buildings, each with its own filming history, and continues to be modified, repainted and refurbished for new uses on set.
Across the decades, Colonial Street has been featured in productions ranging from classic sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver, through suspense films like Psycho, to supernatural series like Ghost Whisperer — and even music videos like Smash Mouth’s “All Star” and Nelly’s “Dilemma”.
Unlike static film locations, some interior and backyard scenes from Desperate Housewives were also filmed off-site in actual homes around the San Fernando Valley region of California.
Today, Colonial Street remains a working set and a highlight of the Universal Studios Hollywood Studio Tour, where visitors can see many of these historic facades in person. Despite the end of Desperate Housewives, the legacy of Wisteria Lane lives on — both on screen and in the long cinematic history of Hollywood’s backlot.
