According to season five Carrie Bradshaw, in New York, “you’re always looking for a job, a boyfriend, or an apartment.” Her own apartment—a spacious studio that doubled as an ashtray—was a mythical find, a rent-controlled place near Barneys (RIP) in a brownstone building with a walk-in closet, for which she paid a mere $750 per month. The apartment was where Carrie ate oranges in bed, threw on hard-won Cavalli outfits, screened calls from ex-boyfriends, had regrettable sex with Bon Jovi, watched her soon-to-be-ex fiancée shove KFC down his gullet, and made Samantha Jones ruin a manicure when a diaphragm got lost inside her body. She sat at her famous desk, smoking cigarettes and repeatedly typing “I couldn’t help but wonder,” presumably ignoring most emails sent to shoegal@aol.com.
Since its protagonist is a writer who (barely) works from home, much of Sex and the City takes place in Carrie’s Manhattan apartment. And over the course of the series, viewers become intimately acquainted with all the main four’s apartments. There’s the second version of Carrie’s place (in the show’s pilot, directed by downtown auteur Susan Siedelman, it felt grimier and more lifelike, with Chinese takeout boxes on the bed and a warm bottle of champagne next to the laptop). There’s Miranda’s West Elm-y Upper West Side home, where she panics about dying alone, her face devoured by her cat. There’s the plaid and mallard-ridden classic six on the Upper East Side that Charlotte tastefully renovates, and Samantha’s Bliss Spa-esque Y2K space in the Meatpacking District, where her lesbian lover destroys all her plates.
But one of the highlights of the SATC viewing experience is the window you get into tertiary characters’ apartments, where the set dressing fleshes out our understanding of their class, taste, and sexual proclivities (Samantha dates a lot of guys who I’d assume contract out the construction of their sex swings and BDSM closets). It’s the television equivalent of walking down the street and peering into people’s windows to see what kind of furniture they have—a crucial New York pastime. Production designer Jeremy Conway was nominated for three Emmy Awards for his careful work, but lost out to designers from The West Wing, Boston Public, and Without a Trace. Clearly, he was robbed.
Besides the four main residences, shot on a soundstage at Silvercup Studios in Queens, the New York City apartments seen on Sex and the City tend to fall into two categories: they serve as the location for a party, or they’re occupied by a date or long-term romantic partner. (There are, of course, exceptions, such as Stanford’s Chanel-clad grandmother’s well-appointed penthouse, or Susan Sharon’s house of horrors.) Over the course of 47 hours of television, there are numerous highlights; many with floor-to-ceiling windows.
On the party front: commitment-phobe Mr. Big buys Carrie a Judith Lieber swan purse and then drags her to a stiff Park Avenue cocktail where the hostess doesn’t allow any brown food or drinks on her gaudy, Trump-gold furniture; Carrie responds appropriately by flirting with a waiter-slash-poet on the wraparound terrace. Charlotte brunches with “power lesbians” in Prada loafers in an insane Gilded Age mansion with a 15-foot-tall statue of Diana the Huntress in the atrium. There are multiple humiliating engagement parties in spaces that feel somewhat realistically cramped, and a party in an NYU dorm room that does not. Carrie flees a bisexual gathering in an unfinished six floor walk-up (the episode is famously offensive, but aesthetically, it makes for a nice change). In season six’s seminal episode “A Woman’s Right to Shoes,” Carrie’s Manolos are stolen from a snotty Tatum O’Neal’s gorgeous downtown loft, all exposed brick and wide unfinished columns. Nine episodes later, Kristen Johnston declares she’s “so bored I could die” and falls out the window of Candace Bergen’s extremely turn-of-the-millenium apartment, taking a sumptuous brown satin curtain down with her.
When it comes to the men, Mr. Big’s extremely ’90s abode, with its CD tower and beige, minimalist furniture, feels very Calvin Klein. I like the controversial red wall, and the kitchen where he prepared politically-incorrect meat (veal) and red sauce. The best kitchen on the entire show, however, came courtesy of Charlotte’s brief romance with the “gay-straight man” pastry chef (happy Pride!), all gorgeous blue marble and endless counter space. And both Charlotte and Samantha are partial to Richie Rich types with luxurious bachelor pads. These range from the genuinely luxurious (the André Balazs knockoffs the show created for Richard Wright, the place with the Ross Bleckner, the apartment filled with modern art and Murano glass owned by the creepy guy with the servant) to the patently ridiculous (Harry Goldenblatt’s sublet with the zebra rugs, surround sound, and elevated bed).
These are occasionally (at least in early seasons) contrasted with actual hellholes, like Steve’s extremely depressing tenement; the “twenty-something” apartment, where a young Timothy Olyphant is incapable of buying toilet paper; and the waking nightmare with all the dolls. Carrie also twice dates guys with fancy-but-warm family homes, such as the stoner comic store owner living in his parent’s penthouse with a huge terrace facing Central Park, the perfect spot for taking bong hits and dropping fried chicken on to innocent pedestrians below. Or, the prematurely ejaculating short story writer played by Justin Theroux, whose family lives in a well-appointed Jewish liberal paradise.
And then there’s the ultimate home in the SATC universe at large, far better than anything ever shown in the movies: Alexandr Petrovsky’s live-work space. Frankly, it is comic that I do not reside there. My friend Tara McCauley, a New York interior designer, says this one is her favorite, waxing rhapsodically about his “silk Fortuny pendant light and massive stone fireplace”—but with a caveat. “Carrie looked so out of place in that Old World interior that it was clear she was just playing house,” she says, “trying a new lifestyle on like a shoe that ultimately was never going to feel right.” How Carrie-like.
That lifestyle is so widely aped that adherents to it are widely held responsible for ruining New York City (I can’t talk, I have both curly hair and a laptop). But it also serves as a point of contention for the Bradshaw haters. She only writes one column a week!, the killjoys cry. Her lifestyle is unrealistic!
Of course it is, but it wasn’t always. Candace Bushnell, Carrie’s creator, depicted something rather different in the collection of columns that would later be adapted into SATC, the tv show (Kim Cattrall once said that she threw the book version across the room because she found it so depressing). In a 1996 piece for the New York Observer, Bushnell wrote that “Carrie,” her alter-ego, had lived in a shabby studio; the previous tenant, an old lady, died inside it. She used a loaned piece of foam for a bed, and owned nothing but a mink coat and a Louis Vuitton suitcase, both of which would eventually get stolen. She was lonely, broke, and cold, but still went out every night, hoping for something glamorous.
The Carrie in Bushnell’s acerbic columns doesn’t bear much resemblance to the Carrie of the show. There are no puns, and the real estate is both better (Aspen) and worse (dead old lady studio). It is objectively cooler than the show. But I love Sex and the City, Home Box Office version. I want to lean into the cringe.
To celebrate SATC’s 25th anniversary, you can even go to SoHo and visit a replica of Carrie’s apartment at a pop-up called “And Just Like That…It’s Been 25 Years: A Sex and the City Experience” (sadly no sign of Che Diaz). There’s a pack of Marlboro Lights and a silver ashtray on the shelf behind Carrie’s bed, just how she liked it. 25! Fuck, I’m old.