The most unrealistic apartments and houses 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 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 on earth can they afford this?!’ question prompted by the apartments and houses that some of 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? And don’t even get us started on the flats occupied by the members of The Thursday Murder Club in Netflix’s recent adaptation. Yes, we know that luxury retirement villages do exist, but we struggle to believe that each apartment could be quite that palatial (how would there be room in the building?!) and with such drastically different interiors.
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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 on-screen magic.
The most unrealistic apartments and houses in film and television
Giles Keyte/Netflix1/15The Thursday Murder Club, 2025
When the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s beloved novel was released on Netflix in August, we must admit that we struggled to focus on the storyline. Why? Because we were too busy examining the interiors. Set in the fictional retirement community Coopers Chase, the film follows four retirees – Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), Joyce (Celia Imrie), Ibrahim (Ben Kinglsey) and Ron (Pierce Brosnan) – as they investigate murders and bring the perpetrators to justice. A fair bit of the action takes place in the four flats belonging to the four members of the club – and they were not at all what we expected.
Granted, this is a very luxurious (and presumably very expensive) retirement community, so we imagined the apartments to be comfortable and spacious. However, these homes – particularly Elizabeth’s, pictured here – are pretty palatial and each one is decorated in an incredibly distinctive style. In fact, they look as if they have been reimagined by four different interior designers. Elizabeth’s has book-lined walls painted in a rich blue, with a huge open-plan living area; Joyce’s is chintzy and traditional, with lots of pastel hues; Ibrahim’s is less elaborate but by no means modest; and Ron’s place on the top floor resembles an artist’s loft, with limewashed walls and distressed vintage furniture.
We find it hard to believe that such extensive redecoration would be permitted, and we struggle to see how apartments of this size would be feasible. Englefield House in Berkshire, which is used for the exterior, is very grand, but it would need to accommodate hundreds not tens of residents. I suppose we should suspend disbelief and lean into the charm and whimsy of the whole thing…Easier said than done.
Courtesy of Netflix2/15Emily in Paris, 2020-present
Season five of our favourite frothy Netflix drama will be hitting our screens on December 18, in which Emily (Lily Collins) will in fact not be (primarily) in Paris as she pitches up in Rome to head up the Italian office of Agence Grateau. Though this shiny new role will presumably come with a hefty pay rise, when Emily arrived in Paris she was a young marketing executive, which raises questions around her apartment (and her luxury lifestyle).
I know what you’re thinking: her apartment is tiny. But this is Paris and said apartment is meant to be located on Place de l’Estrapade in the highly desirable 5th arrondissement. The finance experts at Wise have estimated her monthly rent to be €2,659 per month, plus utilities, bringing her to a total of €34,193 per year. Considering that her starting salary has been estimated at just over €45,000, that doesn’t leave a lot for her designer clothes, dinners out and countless coffees and pastries. Frankly, we’re relieved that she’s landed the new job and new life in Rome! She might finally be able to get out of the red.
Erin Simkin/Netflix3/15Nobody Wants This, 2024-present
One of the best new rom-com series of recent years, Nobody Wants This is now in its second season on Netflix, with a third confirmed for 2026. Set in Los Angeles, the show explores the unlikely relationship between agnostic sex podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) and newly single rabbi Noah (Adam Brody). While we are heavily invested in the characters and their storylines, we do have one problem: Noah’s house. Namely, how can an assistant rabbi afford such a high-spec home in LA?
The location house is in Eagle Rock, an area known for its nice, family-friendly atmosphere. It was subject to an extensive renovation a few years ago, when it was transformed from a bungalow into a three-bedroom house, with a self-contained apartment in a garden, and Japandi-inspired interiors throughout by designer Kirsten Blazek. While we don’t know what the property sold for, Kirsten told Sunset magazine that it was snapped up, so we can assume it went for a good price.
If we take this very similar property currently listed for $1,725,000 as our starting point and assume that lenders might offer a mortgage that is three to four-and-a-half times your gross annual salary, that would require a salary of somewhere between $300,000 and $460,000 – assuming a standard down payment of 20 per cent ($345,000). The Rabbinical Assembly’s Salary Survey 2023-2024 states that the average compensation for pulpit rabbis serving as assistant rabbis or associate rabbis was $155,219 – not bad at all, but not quite enough. And let’s not forget that Noah actually ends up unemployed in season two so that mortgage would have proved even trickier…
We’re not the only ones with doubts. When GQ asked real-life 33-year-old associate rabbi Aaron Leven, based in LA’s Echo Park, just how realistic the series was, he too raised concerns over Noah’s housing situation: ‘A rabbi salary might buy you that in the suburbs of Chicago where a lot of my good friends are rabbis, but it’s not getting you that in Silver Lake,’ he says, referring to the LA neighbourhood where much of the series is set. It seems the only logical answer is the bank of mum and dad.
As a brief side note, we’re also not entirely convinced by Joanne’s Spanish-style home. We know that podcasters can do very well for themselves, but the real-life house hit the market this year for $3.8 million, so we can’t imagine the rent would have been cheap.
4/15Bridget Jones’s Diary, 2001
Bridget Jones’s 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 per cent 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’s quite know – but we love her anyway, just as she is.
beta.film.ai5/15Notting Hill, 1999
Another 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 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?
AirBnB6/15Sex and the City, 1998-2004
Sex and the City is many things: an iconic series, beloved by millions of devoted fans, and one of the most entertaining and relatable studies on modern dating (pre-app, that is). It is also perhaps one of the biggest culprits of unrealistic housing situations in both television and cinema. The six-season television 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 four, 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 $5,870 today), nor at its rent-controlled rate of $700 (equivalent to $1,370 today). The majority of her closet, too, is fully out of reach: Carrie’s Manolo Blahnik shoes, for instance, cost a minimum of $485 a pair (equivalent to $949 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.
beta.film.ai7/15You’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 per cent in just three years.
Photo: Gary Null/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images8/15Friends (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 last year. 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 Images9/15
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 Photo10/15Gossip 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.com11/15Breakfast 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 $1,059 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 lifestyle. Indeed, there was a 233 per cent 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 1960s. The house was reconfigured back into a single-family home sometime afterwards and 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 (£6.2 million).
film-grab.com12/15(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 day-long relationship with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) in a non-linear 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 one-bedroom apartment in DTLA was $2,570 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.com13/15The Princess Diaries, 2001
One of the most popular coming-of-age films of the early Noughties, 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 while we might be willing to go out on a limb and say that a wealthy princess could afford it, we’re not too sure how exactly her mother was able to splash over half a million dollars on prime Bay Area real estate.
kissthemgoodbye.net14/15New 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 four of them 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 four-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.com15/1513 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 dream).
