The tricks and trades of television are meant to be oblivious to the viewing audience. Whether the trick is to make a character seem taller than the actor is in real life, or make a house look much bigger than it really is, creative tactics can take place during any given scene on television.

Often times, the setting of a house, apartment or street isn't an acutal location in real life. That isn't the case in Full House. The iconic Victorian home of the Tanners is located at 1709 Broderick Street in San Francisco.

Of course, the inside of the actual home in San Francisco was never used for the show, as scenes were shot nearly 400 miles south in Culver City, home to Sony Pictures Studios, where the first six seasons of Full House were filmed according to Dirt. 

Comparing the outside shots of the physical house in San Francisco, to the studio shots and main set in SoCal, it seems like the set really could be the inside to the Bay Area home. That's what show creator Jeff Franklin wanted: to find a house that's really in San Francisco that looks big enough to actually accomodate the huge family.

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Well, according to a 1994 interview with Entertainment Tonight, Bob Saget, who played the corner-stone character of Danny Tanner, says there is no way the Tanner household could be real. 

"This house is architecturally impossible. It can't happen and I can explain why." 

Saget was giving a behind-the-scenes look of the Full House set in Southern California, describing all the TV stunts used to make it seem like the fake family was in the real San Francisco home. 

The actual house in San Francisco is just over 3,700 square feet according to Business Insider. Franklin purchased the house in 2016, planning to "turn it into a replica of the TV show set and even allow fans to visit and walk through the place." On account of high foot-traffic and upset neighbors, Franklin decided to totally renovate the home and list it instead. In 2020, the house was on the market for a whopping $5.5 million.

While the real home may seem like it could possibly fit the Tanner family from an outside perspective, Saget said the house would have to have a rather unique shape if were to actually represent what fans saw on the show.

"The architecturally impossible part of this house is when you come up [the] steps. It supposedly takes you to all the bedrooms you would see on the show. The only way that could happen is if the house went straight up and went out like a mushroom. So, it would be about a 12,000 square-foot house," Saget joked in the interview. 

As we know from the opening credits and scene-setting shots of the real house, there's no mushroom shape, rather a flat rooftop. Though we see the actual house with the memorable red door in parts of the opening credits, it's not pictured in the famous row of Painted Ladies, seen while the family is picnicking according to dirt.com. That's because the real house located on Broderick Street is about a mile away from the famed row of homes.

We know the Tanners never lived in a real house together and that the concept of the series was carried out on a TV set. But for fans that have wondered how realistic it was for that many people to live under one roof of a San Francisco Victorian home for eight years, it's fun to know, according to Saget, that the house is about 8,000 square feet too small.