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The most unrealistic apartments in film and television, a deep dive
First, let us state the obvious: there is a huge difference between life depicted on the silver screen and of that actually lived in the real world, and as viewers, we accept (or, at least, choose to ignore) many of these contradictions to uphold the magic of movies and television. However, there are some differences between the screen and real life so egregious that they come to stick out like a sore thumb – especially the how can they afford this?! element behind the apartments, houses and lofts the world's most beloved television and film characters call home.
When you really think about it, how exactly could Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw afford a $3,000-per-month apartment in New York on a freelance writer's salary (let alone sustain her shopping habit)? Maybe Notting Hill's lovable bookshop owner William Thacker invested heavily in Google stock during the Dot Com boom of the late 1990s; otherwise, how else could he explain his near-million pound house and afford rent for his delightful shop on the brink of insolvency?
We've done some snooping into the facts and figures behind the most unrealistic abodes in film and television to answer questions just like these, peeking behind the velvet curtain of movie magic.
The most unrealistic apartments and houses in film and television
1/12Bridget Jones's Diary, 2001
An the film adaptation of a literary adaptation, Bridget Jones' Diary is perhaps one of Britain's most beloved romantic comedies, whose titular character is perhaps one of the country's most beloved hopeless romantics. Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) is a 32-year-old single woman who, to some, is a “verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and dresses like her mother”, and to others, a fun-loving woman whose attempts to get her life together are as endearing as she is. Bridget is a publicity assistant at a fairly successful book publishing house (a job infamous for its below-average salary) and lives in Southwark, SE1, in a flat at 8 Bedale Street. The average price for an apartment in Southwark was approximately £155,000 in 2001 (and whilst this figure seems relatively manageable by today's standards, this price was still 80% above the national average house price at the time, which was £85,000). How Bridget managed to afford such a great flat and maintain her fun social life full of restaurants, bars and weekends away, we don't quite know, but we love her anyway, just as she is.
beta.film.ai2/12Notting Hill, 1999
One of the greats in the pantheon of romantic comedies, Richard Curtis' Notting Hill tells the love story of a bumbling British bookseller, William Thacker (Hugh Grant) and a famous American movie star, Anna Scott (Julia Roberts). William owns a struggling travel bookshop in London's Notting Hill neighbourhood and lives around the corner from his shop in a large townhouse with a blue door. In 1999, the average price for a terraced house in Notting Hill was £842,416, and the average rent per square foot for a commercial business in the area was about £23, which begs the question: aside from travel books, what else was William selling? (Of course, these figures pale in comparison to the neighbourhood's average real estate prices today, respectively £3,315,610 and £45-£75 per square foot.)
AirBnB3/12Sex and the City (television), 1998-2004
Sex and the City is many things: an iconic series, beloved by millions of devoted fans, as well as a bonafide televised bible for hopeless romantics everywhere. It is also perhaps one of the biggest culprits of unrealistic housing situations in both television and cinema. The six season series follows a tight-knit group of female friends as they navigate their 30s, showing the ups and downs of “real life”, from jobs to babies to romance to real estate.
Sex and the City excels in its ability to idealise life in New York City, effectively hoodwinking entire generations into believing that they, like the show's quirky, curly-haired protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, can afford a one-bedroom apartment, $40,000 worth of shoes, a designer wardrobe and hundreds of Cosmopolitan cocktails and eggs Benedict brunch platters on a newspaper columnist's salary (and remain debt-free, no less). Of course, part of the enduring charm of Sex and the City is its romanticisation of womanhood and life in New York City, which smoothes over the less-appealing realities of real life, from roommates to loan defaults to less-than-fabulous outfits borne not out of a lack of style, but simply a lack of funds.
The magic of SATC is slightly lost when financial reality creeps in, or at least, is disproven by maths. If we take Carrie at face value regarding her purported journalist salary (in season 4, Carrie tells Charlotte that fashion magazine Vogue paid her the now-unheard of rate of $4 per word; for context, freelancers typically make between 20¢ to 50¢ per word – and that is likely what Carrie was earning pre- book deal and pre-Vogue column), we soon learn that Carrie could never have afforded her Upper East Side apartment at neither its market rate of $3,000 per month (equivalent to $5,520 today), nor at its rent-controlled rate of $700 (equivalent to $1,228 today). The majority of her closet, too, is fully out of reach: Carrie's Manolo Blahnik shoes, for instance, cost minimum $485 a pair (equivalent to $892 today). For those calculating at home, this means that Carrie (writing at the humble, but normal, 20¢-per-word rate) would have to write columns in excess of 1,200 words per shoe and 3,500 words to just make rent (this article you're reading now is roughly 1,900 words, or, in Carrie's world, about three quarters of a pair of Manolos).
beta.film.ai4/12You've Got Mail, 1998
You've Got Mail is a classic romantic comedy co-written and directed by the queen of the genre, Nora Ephron. The film tells the story of a children's bookshop owner, Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), who strikes up an online romance via her AOL email account with the mysterious man behind the screen name NY152. Of course, her e-boyfriend turns out to be Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), the owner of the big, bad corporate bookseller chain setting up shop in Kathleen's neighbourhood, causing trouble for the area's mom-and-pop shops, including her own.
Kathleen lives and works on the Upper West Side of New York, one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in Manhattan, in a truly gorgeous brownstone. Though she worries about finances and the future of her shop, we can't help but wonder: how in the hell can you afford to keep such a beautifully furnished place a stone's throw from Central Park? However, it seems as if Kathleen was savvy enough to buy her ‘classic six’ flat before the real mushrooming NYC real estate market began: according to a 2000 article in the New York Times, prewar apartments on the UWS sold for a median of $298,080 in 1998, ballooning in price by over 31% in just 3 years.
Photo: Gary Null/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images5/12Friends (1994-2004)
How affordable was Monica's iconic purple apartment, really? The two-bedroom West Village flat where Monica lived with Rachel, and later Chandler has an open kitchen, balcony and very spacious living area in what appears to be a prewar building. In New York City, this is a hot commodity. “If that apartment were available today, it could easily rent for anywhere between $8,000 to $10,000 per month, depending on its condition,” Mike Fabbri, a West Village specialist with The Agency told AD. In 2000 though, the median rent in New York City was $747.
On the show, it was revealed that Monica illegally sublet a rent-controlled apartment from her grandmother who had retired to Florida. Fans estimate her rent at a mere $200/month.
- CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images6/12
How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014)
Ted and Marshall might have ended the series with high-flying jobs, but they moved into their spacious two-bedroom Upper West Side flat in 2005 as two broke college graduates. So how did they exactly afford such a Manhattan gem right from their humble beginnings? We turn to the HIMYM Reddit community for the maths. According to the subreddit, the average price of a two-bedroom UWS apartment in 2000 was $3,774 per month. So if Ted, Marshall, and Lily were splitting rent equally, they were each paying about $1,260 before utilities. That is a lot of money for early 2000s graduates!
Flash forward to 2022 and the iconic apartment above MacLaren's pub came back for How I Met Your Father. It's referenced in the pilot episode, where Jesse explains that the unit once belonged to “this old married couple who posted it on the Wesleyan alumni group. We even got them to leave their swords.”
Cinematic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo7/12Gossip Girl, 2007-2012
Whilst the luxurious penthouses, townhouses and hotel suites belonging to the privileged characters on the television drama Gossip Girl are realistic abodes for the Upper East Sider teens, the Brooklyn loft belonging to the Humphrey family is certainly not. Self-proclaimed outsider Dan, his rebellious sister, Jenny and their formerly famous musician-turned-art gallerist father, Rufus, live together in the three-bedroom loft at 455 Water Street in the Dumbo neighbourhood which, according to real estate records, would likely have cost well over $1.8 million in 2012. Throughout the series, Dan asserted he came from humble beginnings and that his family was often unable to make ends meet; if we take Lonely Boy at face value, then the Humphrey loft is perhaps one of the most unrealistic family homes on television.
movie-screencaps.com8/12Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961
A cinematic classic based on Truman Capote's eponymous 1958 novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's tells the love story between Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), a café society girl and Paul Varjack (George Peppard), a struggling writer. Holly funds her lifestyle in unconventional ways, including weekly visits to incarcerated mobster Sally Tomato at Sing Sing jail, where she delivers “the weather report” for $100 (equivalent to $996 today, accounting for inflation). We know that Holly gets out ahead of her skis financially, especially as she spends the majority of the film scheming ways of marrying into wealth in order to cover her lavish life. Indeed, there was a 233% increase in average rents across New York City between the 1950 and 1960, with rents going from an average $60 to $200 per month (the rents in Holly's neighbourhood of the Upper East Side were even higher than the city's general average, sometimes going beyond $600 per month).
For those keen on knowing the real estate history of Holly and Paul's apartment house on 169 East 71st Street: the townhouse was owned by the illustrious Cremin family before being split into apartments in the 60s. The house reconfigured back into a single-family home sometime after and then was sold for $1.88 million to broker Peter E. Bacanovic, who was associated with Martha Stewart's tax evasion crimes. The home hit the market again in 2015, selling for $8 million (£6.2m).
film-grab.com9/12(500) Days of Summer, 2009
Darling of the 25th Sundance Film Festival, (500) Days of Summer is an indie romcom whose protagonist, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), explains his 500 days-long relationship with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) in a nonlinear narrative. Tom lives in Los Angeles and works as a writer for a greeting card company, though he aspires to be an architect. Despite his low-paying job, Tom lives in an expansive loft in Downtown LA, one of the city's most expensive neighbourhoods (the average monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in DTLA was $2,570, or £2,021, in 2009). Just how he can afford the loft the viewer will never know (however, some disbelief is mitigated when we discover he shops at inexpensive furniture giant IKEA).
movie-screencaps.com10/12The Princess Diaries, 2001
One of the early aughts' most popular coming-of-age films, The Princess Diaries follows the life of Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway), a frizzy-haired teenager who learns she is the heir-apparent to the throne of a small European country and must choose to either become a princess or renounce the crown. Before her royal transformation, however, Mia and her artist mother struggled to make ends meet and live in a converted firehouse in San Francisco's Excelsior district. According to real estate history of the neighbourhood, houses in Excelsior sold for an average $550,000 in 2001, and whilst we might be willing to go out on a limb and say that a wealthy princess could afford it, we aren't too sure how exactly her mother was able to splash over half a million dollars on prime Bay Area real estate.
kissthemgoodbye.net11/12New Girl, 2011-2018
New Girl is an American sitcom revolving around the hijinks of an eclectic elementary school teacher, Jessica Day (Zooey Dechanel) and her three male roommates, a bartender, marketing associate and former basketball player who played professionally in Latvia. The foursome share a massive loft in Los Angeles' Arts District which, even with their combined salaries, would be wholly out of reach. In 2015, the average price for a 4-bedroom rental was between $8,000 and $10,000, meaning each roommate paid between $2,000 and $2,500 per month. The average salary for an accredited schoolteacher in Los Angeles County in 2015 was $48,412, meaning that Jess would have to spend more than half her monthly salary on rent.
80scandles.tumblr.com12/1213 Going on 30, 2004
13 Going on 30 is a sleepover classic, following the life of a 13-year-old girl Jenna Rink (Jennifer Garner) who wishes she'd skip the difficult parts of growing up and wake up “thirty, flirty and thriving.” Jenna learns that her birthday wish has been magically granted, waking up to discover she is an editor at a fashion magazine and lives in a truly palatial apartment in one of the most coveted co-op buildings on 5th Avenue, one of Manhattan's most expensive thoroughfares. According to the building's real estate records, Jenna's apartment would have cost approximately $800,000 in 2004, a price nearly impossible to have been paid with just an editor's salary (though we can all wish).
