Hej.
I have the theory, that the interior house boat scenes have not been shot inside of the real house boat, but the whole interior has been rebuild in a studio. As proofs for this theory I will post two screen shots. On the first picture one can see a white wall with a painting in the backround. There has never been a white wall in the house boat. Only wooden walls.
On the second picture one can see kind of a kitchen bar or a big cupboard in the backround. Actually there should have been seen the couch table or the desk of MacGyver.
That would mean, that the interior as it is today on Land's End allways has been that way. With the Kitchen on the other side.
What do you say to my theory?
I would be glad, if someone could disprove it!!!

Maybe it's just the way light falls on that wall. Because though we've thought as well that the inside of the houseboat was a studio, this appeared not to be true. It was shot in the actual houseboat. There are some galleries about the houseboat around here on how it looked than and now. It appears the houseboat has a lot of secrets, we didn't know about in the show.

One can see the outlines of the painting that well, that I'm sure that the profiles of the wooden slats would also be seen.
Why is everybody so sure, that the inside scenes have been shot in the real house boat? I'm working on movie sets as well and I know that it is actually much more efficient to build something like this in a studio. Especially for a TV show with 20 Episodes a year.
So I'm not convinced.

Because the owners of the houseboat told us.

Up until I was contacted by the owners a few months back, I thought it was filmed on a sound stage as well. But the owner said that they used the houseboat.

I'm assuming they have some sort of documentation about how the house was used for filming, but I'll contact them and ask.

I've just watched the 2 scenes those shots are from and in the second one as Pete walks away from the door you can see there's no kitchen bench. And you can see the corner of the roof is cut away from the bay window which would mean the upstairs shots we see in High Control are wrong also.

I'll be interested to hear back from the owners on this one.

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Something else I just noticed.

Look at an external shot of the Houseboat in the show and take note of where the chimney is compared to what's shown inside the house. Apparently MacGyver's fridge had a chimney?

Maybe they shot in the interior of the houseboat and also maybe they built the interior of the houseboat in the Bridge studio and shot there too.

I remember I found some pics in the internet from The Bridge studios. One of them was this one.

I think is not a problem to shot in both places (real and built set). They can imitate with detail the place and shoot in both.

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It's proven: The interior houseboat scenes have been shot in a studio. I talked to someone who was involved in the shooting of the 4 seasons in Vancouver. He confirmed me this.

So...some of us has to build the original houseboat

hear is Bridge Studios offical website.

Bridge Stdois

This is great stuff! I had never paid close enough attention to catch any of this, nice observations! And I agree, we need to have a MOL meet and construct a Mac houseboat

I did email the owners some time ago about this but didn't hear back, I'll send off another email in the next couple of days, but I think we have some pretty good evidence showing that the interior scenes (for the most part) weren't filmed on the boat itself, so I'll go ahead and update the page to reflect that information in the next few days.

I've just updated the houseboat page to confirm that internal scenes where shot on a sound stage.

The owner hasn't been able to find definite answers for us yet, but I believe that with Nordmarks colleague giving confirmation as well as the various bits of evidence and scenes we have which all show the interior of MacGyver's house being somewhat different to the real house, we have the evidence to back up this idea.

Evidence supporting idea of internal set rather than actual house

• Chimney seen coming out of corner roof beside the door where MacGyver's fridge is.
• Scene in Legend of the Holy Rose shows kitchen bench through the french doors.
• Scene at beginning of Serenity shows empty lounge room where MacGyver's kitchen should be.
• Photos of both Petes office and the Houseboat interior sets from Bridge Studios

Sound stage or not to me it was real, but this kind of trivia is indeed interesting to know.