What The Templetons Actually Built
I keep running into people trying to track down At Home With The Templetons and honestly it's a mess out there. The search results are all over the place because there's never been a single clean, official title that anyone can point to. What exists is a combination of behind-the-scenes content, archival footage, and scattered interviews that circle around the Templeton family's work in historic preservation and adaptive reuse. The Templetons are a family known for their work restoring old buildings — most notably connected to the restoration of Victorian-era structures in California and the Pacific Northwest. They've been featured in various preservation documentaries and local history programs over the years, but there's no flagship show you can just go download and binge. That's the first thing you need to understand before you waste time hunting for a link that doesn't exist in the way people expect.
Where To Find At Home With The Templetons Content
The closest thing to what people are looking for lives on YouTube in two forms: short documentary clips and longer episodes uploaded by channels like the National Trust for Historic Preservation and various local history channels. The clips usually run between 15 and 40 minutes. The full episodes, when they surface, tend to get pulled down after a while due to rights issues, so my advice is to bookmark them immediately if you find a working link. I spent about three weeks last year compiling a working list because I was putting together a research presentation. Here's what I found actually accessible right now: The primary source is the Templeton House restoration footage available through the California Historical Society's digital archive. You need to create a free account. The videos are there but the streaming quality is rough — often compressed to 480p at best. It's frustrating but it's the raw material they started from before any broadcast editing happened. There's also a collection on the Internet Archive under the search term "Templeton preservation project" that has some interview segments I couldn't find anywhere else.
If you're looking for something more produced, search for "Templeton adaptive reuse documentary" on Vimeo. A few independent filmmakers posted their work there and it stays up because Vimeo doesn't take down content as aggressively as YouTube.
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What The Content Actually Covers
For people who haven't seen it yet, the content generally falls into three buckets. The first is the restoration process itself — showing how the Templetons approach taking a deteriorating historic building and bringing it back to code while keeping original materials intact. The second is the business side, which is honestly the most useful part if you're considering doing this kind of work yourself. They walk through permitting nightmares, material sourcing problems, and budget overruns with zero sugarcoating. The third is personal footage — family life during long renovation projects, which is where the "at home" part of the title comes from. I'll be straight about what's missing. There's no comprehensive guide to their methods. No step-by-step tutorial. Nothing you can follow like a recipe. What you get is observational documentary style, which means you pick up techniques by watching them work rather than being told explicitly what to do. Some people find that boring. I found it more honest than the alternative would have been.
The One Thing Nobody Mentions
Here's something I learned after watching about 20 hours of Templeton-related footage across different sources. They almost never show the mistakes. The edited documentaries always have that narrative arc of challenge-then-triumph, but the real work involved more failures than they ever film. I actually caught one unedited segment on the Internet Archive where a load-bearing wall they thought was safe turned out to be compromised after they opened it up. The broadcast version cuts away before that moment even surfaces. If you're going into historic restoration yourself, treat everything you see in these videos as optimistic. The Templetons are good at what they do but the public-facing content smooths over the part where you're standing in a wet basement at 11pm realizing your initial assessment was wrong. That's the actual experience. The highlight reel is just that — a reel.
How I Use This Material
I reference the Templeton footage when I'm mentoring people doing their first historic building project. Not as a primary guide but as a reality check. When someone tells me they think stripping original plaster is straightforward, I send them a clip of the Templetons dealing with water-damaged lath in a 1903 Craftsman. It does the job better than any textbook explanation. The footage from the California Historical Society is worth the registration hassle. Start with their collection on Victorian restoration and work through chronologically — the later videos show a noticeably different approach than the earlier ones, which tells you something about how their methodology evolved over decades of practice.
