I put this in FQ as I believe there is a factual answer.
I am aware I am one on the older Dopers here (65 this October) but perhaps someone can answer this.
In the episode “Beaver Takes a Walk” @ approximately 21:57 it shows an odd set of of what appears to be 2 ovens build into the wall.
I recall ovens built into the wall in the 60’s and 70’s (not a lot of them but a few) but they were built into brick walls, not drywall. And there weren’t two of them, just one.
The lower one might be a dishwasher but it’s still in an odd location. and the apparent oven is still odd being in a drywall wall and not brick.
Or am I totally wrong here and it’s something else?
Because of the position of the door handles I doubt it’s a washer and dryer, which still wouldn’t be built into a drywalled wall. Or would they?
Until my remodel a couple of years ago, I had an oven built into the wall. It was a plaster wall, not drywall but the same deal. The oven unit was very well insulated.
The top part was an oven. The bottom one was a broiler.
Electric double ovens over/under were bog standard stuff in larger houses in the 1960s & 1970s. Both very close to the same size/height. Sometimes both had a broiler feature, sometimes only one. The one that was a broiler was not exclusively a broiler as you might find in a gas oven. It was a full ordinary baking oven that also had the extra broiling heat rod at the top.
I suspect the brick or drywall surround is entirely down to what sort of construction was commonplace where each of us grew up. In SoCal for me, the nearest brick in any house was probably 1000 miles away. Brick simply was not a building material locally. IME / IMO Wisconsin was much bigger on building houses with bricks.
I had a gas double oven in a previous home. They were regular ovens.
The broiler was in the bottom one.
They had separate controls.
It was cool if you were finishing a casserole and needed to put bread in at a different temp.
The top one made a fine warming oven when the bottom one was on.
I couldn’t see the Leave it to Beaver pix.
I loved their refrigerator, tho’.
It was huge.
My friends had one that looked exactly like that at their house. I believe both were gas (I could ask), and both were just regular ol’ ovens. My memory is both were about the same size
Gas over/under oven/broilers were common. We discussed this in a thread on older stoves recently. A single gas burner is located between the parts providing heat from underneath for the oven and overhead for the broiler. In a gas stove this saves a lot of cost that would be needed for separate oven and broiler burners. The cost of the heating elements and wire in an electric oven is negligible in comparison so one chamber can have both underneath and overhead heat economically.
This is exactly what I grew up with. Ours was all-electric, not gas. The house was built in 1959. Behind the ovens was the living room. The stove was against a different wall.
My mother also had an electric freestanding broiler next to the stove because 1. it was too easy to overcook steaks in the wall-oven broiler, and 2. The exhaust fan was over by the stove, nowhere near the ovens.