You’ve probably seen the exterior of 1709 Broderick Street a thousand times. That iconic Painted Lady in San Francisco with the red door—though the real house actually has a different colored door now because the owners got tired of the tourists. But once you step inside the TV version of that house, things get weird. If you've ever tried to map out the Tanner Full House floor plan in your head, you’ve likely realized that the math just isn’t mathing. It’s a spatial nightmare wrapped in 1980s wallpaper and wholesome family values.
TV sets are notorious for being "bigger on the inside," but the Tanner residence takes this to an extreme. We’re talking about a house that somehow fits nine people, a golden retriever, and a recording studio into a Victorian footprint that should realistically be half that size.
The Impossible Geometry of the First Floor
When you walk through that front door, you’re greeted by the living room. It's cozy. There’s the alcove with the piano where Joey probably annoyed everyone with Popeye impressions. To the left, you see the stairs going up. To the right, the kitchen. This seems normal until you start looking at the back of the house.
The kitchen is huge. It has a massive island, a dining nook, and that famous back staircase. Here is the first glitch in the Matrix: those back stairs. In a real San Francisco Victorian, those would lead to a small landing or a service entrance. In the Tanner Full House floor plan, they lead to a hallway that somehow connects to the same upstairs area as the front stairs, but the angles are physically impossible. If you followed the trajectory of the back stairs, Joey’s room in the basement would have to be located somewhere in the neighbor's yard.
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Then there’s the "alcove." In the early seasons, there’s a door in the living room that supposedly leads to a guest room or office. Later, this area seems to fluctuate in size depending on whether the plot needs a place for Jesse to brood or for Danny to obsessively clean.
The Basement: Joey’s Underground Lair vs. The Smash Club
Let's talk about the basement. Initially, it was just a dark, unfinished space where Danny kept his cleaning supplies and shame. Then, Joey Gladstone moved in. To make it livable, they supposedly "renovated" it, but the scale expanded overnight.
Suddenly, Joey has a bedroom, a workspace, and enough room to house a puppet collection that would terrify a normal person. When the show transitioned into Fuller House, the basement evolved again. We see it transformed into a high-tech recording studio and a laundry room. The problem? The entrance to the basement is a tiny door under the main stairs. Based on the Tanner Full House floor plan, that basement would need to be about 4,000 square feet to accommodate everything we see on screen. It’s a TARDIS. There is no other explanation.
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The Second Floor: A Game of Musical Chairs
Upstairs is where the architectural chaos really peaks. We have Danny’s master suite, the girls' rooms, and eventually, the attic apartment.
- The Girls' Room: DJ and Stephanie start here. It’s a decent-sized room with a window overlooking the street.
- The Nursery: Michelle’s room. Small, pink, and later occupied by Stephanie when DJ gets her own space.
- The Master Bedroom: Danny’s room is oddly far away from the others, suggesting a hallway that stretches into infinity.
The real head-scratcher is the bathroom situation. For a house with nine people, we almost never see anyone fighting for the shower. There is one main bathroom at the top of the stairs, yet somehow everyone stays clean. In reality, a Victorian of this era would have one, maybe two bathrooms. The Tanner Full House floor plan implies a hidden plumbing network that rivals a Hilton hotel.
The Attic: Jesse and Becky’s Impossible Apartment
In Season 4, Jesse and Becky get married. Instead of moving out like normal adults, they move into the attic. This is where the show’s production designers stopped caring about physics entirely.
To get to the attic, you take a small flight of stairs near the girls' rooms. Once you’re up there, you find a full-blown apartment. It has a kitchen, a living area, a nursery for the twins (Nicky and Alex), and a master bedroom. Look at the roofline of the real house on Broderick Street. It’s a peaked, narrow Victorian roof. There is no world where a 3-bedroom apartment fits under those rafters without the ceiling being six inches high.
Even more confusing? The windows. In the attic scenes, the windows show a view of the city that doesn't align with the house's orientation. They have a balcony! A balcony that, if it existed on the exterior of the house, would be hanging over the sidewalk in a way that would definitely violate San Francisco building codes.
Why the Layout Keeps Changing
Why does the Tanner Full House floor plan shift so much? Because it was filmed on a soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios (Stage 24, specifically).
The sets were "swing sets," meaning they could be moved or reconfigured to accommodate different camera angles. If the writers needed a new room for a "very special episode" about privacy, they simply built a wall and told the audience it had always been there. It’s a classic sitcom trope. We, the audience, accept it because we love the characters, but if an architect tried to blueprint this house, they’d have a stroke.
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- The "Hole in the Wall": In the episode where Joey and Jesse accidentally put a hole in Danny’s bedroom wall, the layout of the adjacent room makes no sense.
- The Garage: Occasionally we see a garage. In a real San Francisco row house, the garage is on the ground floor (street level), meaning Joey’s basement room would actually be a driveway.
- The Backyard: They have a backyard with a play area. In that neighborhood, a backyard of that size is worth about $4 million on its own.
Making Sense of the Chaos
If you're trying to build a LEGO version or a Sims replica of the Tanner Full House floor plan, you have to make a choice: do you follow the exterior logic or the interior sets?
If you go by the sets, you’re looking at a house that is roughly 60 feet wide. If you go by the real house, it’s about 25 feet wide. The only way to reconcile the two is to assume the Tanners lived in a magical pocket dimension where the rules of space and time were suspended by the power of a group hug.
The closest "accurate" layout would put the kitchen at the back of the house, the living room at the front, and the basement strictly underneath the kitchen area. The attic would be a crawl space at best, and the twins would probably have had to sleep in a closet.
Actionable Steps for Superfans
If you're obsessed with the architecture of 1990s sitcoms, don't just take my word for it. You can actually find 3D renderings online created by fans who have spent hundreds of hours pausing episodes to measure the distance between the couch and the refrigerator.
- Check out floor plan artists: Look up the work of Brandi Roberts. She specializes in hand-drawn floor plans of famous TV homes and has one for the Tanner residence that tries to make sense of the madness.
- Visit the real house: If you're in San Francisco, go to 1709 Broderick St. Just remember to be respectful. It’s a private residence. Don't sit on the porch to recreate the opening credits; the owners have cameras and probably a very high stress level.
- Compare with Fuller House: Watch the Netflix reboot and see how they updated the set. They kept the "impossible" layout but added modern touches, making the spatial inconsistencies even more glaring now that we have 4K resolution to see where the hallways end in black curtains.
The Tanner home isn't just a house; it's a character in itself. It’s messy, illogical, and way too big for its own good—just like the family that lived there. Trying to map it out is a fun exercise in futility, reminding us that in the world of sitcoms, heart always matters more than square footage.