Inside the This Is 40 Dream House

Publish date: 2024-06-08

Inside the ‘This Is 40’ Dream House

Exterior
The six-bedroom, 6,500-square-foot Zuriff residence. (Houses on the Brentwood street sell for anywhere from $8 million to $20 million.) Director Judd Apatow shot a good portion of the movie — about a record exec and his wife, a clothing boutique owner (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, Apatow’s real wife), turning 40 and facing financial struggles — in a Brentwood house owned by producer Bryan Zuriff and his wife, Monica.
STORY: Inside the Brentwood Dream House of Judd Apatow's 'This Is 40'
Interior
Oscar-nominated set decorator Leslie Pope and production designer Jefferson Sage accessorized the ample kitchen but left the main elements untouched. “The kitchen is totally white, which can look sterile, so we sprinkled in warm woods and added things like colorful plates,” says Pope.
This is 40
A scene from This Is 40 featuring (from left) Maude and Iris Apatow (Apatow and Mann’s children, who star as the fictional couple’s kids), Rudd and Mann.
Knocked up
Knocked Up stars Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl in the same kitchen.
Interior
How Apatow first found the house is a Hollywood small-town story. “My sister-in-law is Giuliana Rancic, and in Knocked Up, Katherine Heigl played a character like her, and they went to E! to scout. The producers couldn’t find a house, and Giuliana was like, ‘You should call my brother-in-law,’ ” recalls Zuriff, a former spec builder who had just completed the house for himself.
Interior
The Zuriffs’ color scheme “was absolutely gorgeous, white and black and pale blue, but it didn’t speak to the family in the film,” says Pope, who redid the living room’s “white white” walls in a creamy shade. The print by the fireplace is by Margaret Kilgallen. “Judd really likes that artist and brought her to my attention,” says Pope.
Interior
The arrangement with the Zuriffs did not allow for filming upstairs, so producers re-created those rooms on the Sony lot. A large photo fakes the view from this room’s balcony.
Exterior
The comfortable white-shingled residence in Universal’s This Is 40 is inspiring the type of real estate lust normally given to the houses in all those Nancy Meyers movies.
Pool
Apatow lives just up the street (“Our kids are friends,” says Zuriff), and the director had used their pad as the home of Rudd and Mann’s characters in 2007’s Knocked Up. In This Is 40, the couple must put their house up for sale. Apatow personally called the Zuriffs to ask about shooting there again. “We negotiated a deal,” says Zuriff, an executive producer on Showtime’s upcoming drama Ray Donovan. (He declined comment on how much the production paid.)