Rooted in curiosity and a desire to disprove unrealistic expectations, interior design studio Hovia gathered a list of popular sitcom apartments and calculated how much characters living there would pay in today’s rent.
Using Zumper data, the firm found that today’s average rent for Ted and Marshall’s Upper West Side apartment in “How I Met Your Mother” would be $7,100 a month. A real two-bedroom in the neighborhood would be affordable for the architect and lawyer’s salaries.
Considered one of the most popular apartments in television history, Monica’s purple-walled New York space of “Friends” was a very low $200 a month thanks to her grandmother leaving a rent-controlled lease to her. Today in West Village, Manhattan, a two-bedroom apartment just like Monica and Rachel’s can be rented for an average of $6,554 a month.
In “The Big Bang Theory,” Sheldon and Leonard’s and Penny’s Pasadena apartments were in the “Los Robles Apartment Building” with at least five floors and 16 units. In 2022, Sheldon and Leonard’s spacious place on the fourth floor would be leased for $2,894 a month, the least expensive of the list.
An apartment comparable to Carrie Bradshaw’s “Sex and the City” one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side today would average $4,072. Also a writer, Richard Castle’s SoHo two-bedroom apartment in “Castle” would come in at $10,450 a month at today’s rates.
In the Arts District of Los Angeles, Nick, Jess, Schmidt, and Winston’s loft was a three-bedroom unit that the characters converted to four to split the rent even more. Today, a similar loft in the area would average $4,800 a month.
For a single-family rental, Meredith’s house that she inherited in “Grey’s Anatomy” had many characters live in it from fellow interns to the next slew of doctors at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. In today’s rent, Meredith could have charged an average of $4,200 a month for the three-bedroom on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.