Sex And The City fans can now experience what Carrie’s New York apartment was really like but even after all these years, Kerry Parnell ponders how she could afford it.
Good news, we can rent Sarah Jessica Parker’s Sex And The City apartment for real – which is just as well, as Carrie never could have in real life.
To celebrate the launch of the SATC reboot And Just Like That (soon to stream on Binge), SJP has teamed up with Airbnb to recreate her original apartment on the hit show. This week, guests can check in, sit at her desk, tippy-tap on her laptop and play dress-ups in her wardrobe.
“The Carrie Bradshaw character is near and dear to my heart, and revisiting her world for the continuation of the Sex And The City story has been such a joy,” Sarah Jessica Parker said.
“I’m excited for our audience to experience Carrie’s New York like never before and walk in her shoes, quite literally, for the first time.”
And the last time.
For the bargain price of $23 (marking 23 years since the series began), guests are able to experience Carrie’s lifestyle for this weekend only and after that, have to come back to reality like the rest of us.
Perhaps they can turn investigative journalist and finally, after two decades, solve the mystery of how Carrie, on a freelance writer’s salary, could have afforded that apartment and lifestyle, never mind her designer wardrobe. In one episode, Miranda calculated Carrie had spent $US40,000 on shoes.
Like Monica’s massive apartment in Friends, Carrie’s New York flat was said to have been “rent controlled” at $750 a month, as opposed to “rent out of control” like everyone else experiences in Manhattan.
In truth, even with her column, Carrie would more likely have been living a Flight Of The Conchords-esque lifestyle, which has to be one of the few TV series that ever portrays anyone’s city-living conditions as grubby as they really are. With songs!
When I first house-shared in Sydney, we constructed a dining room table out of milk crates and found the chairs on the street.
Admittedly, like SATC, everything was cheaper in the ’90s, if only we’d known, so Carrie’s studio would have been somewhere that now only Kendall Roy could afford.
That budget Sydney house I lived in was in The Rocks and is now priced at $3 million. It’s the same with my first flat as a young journalist in London – it had a roof that leaked on to my bed and an avocado-coloured bathroom suite tacked between the kitchen and the balcony.
It is now worth $1.5 million, which is particularly pleasing, as the owners offered to sell it to me for $240,000 in the late-1990s, which I thought totally absurd at the time. Ha, ha, oh: I have continued to make sagacious real-estate decisions like this through my life.
I realise Carrie’s apartment – plus Monica’s, Jerry Seinfeld’s and every other character on TV’s, is a trope, meant to be aspirational and escapist, as opposed to realistic.
Even grief-stricken Tony in After Life manages to unhappily live in an oversized home in a bucolic beachside location, on a local newspaper journalist’s salary.
Now there’s a scoop.
The only time TV characters ever live in salary-appropriate homes is when they are about to be murdered. Just like my investment career.
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