Floor Plans of Most Known TV Series, Friends, Big Bang Theory

Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde is a Spanish interior designer who is also a huge fan of ‘Frasier’, (an American sitcom that was broadcast on NBC for 11 seasons) sketched  floor plan of the apartment . Afterwards, the plan was sought after, he decided to draw other TV series’ floor plans. Without using technology, he sketched and coloured the most known TV series, including Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Sex and the City, Big Bang Theory etc…

He explains the situation with these sentences; ‘ Four or five years ago – I am very bad with dates – I made the floor plan of “Frasier” as a personal treat. I really liked the series and his apartment and I wanted to see him molded. I didn’t make another floor plan until a couple of summers later when a friend of mine, a huge fan of “Sex & The City,” asked me to draw the apartment of Carrie Bradshaw. So I did that for her. Then I was asked for the apartment of “Friends,” and then for… Until now… ‘ ( interviewed by Katie Watkins )

However, it is impossible to know each corner and detail of houses. That is why, Lizarralde completed plans imaginatively. Mostly, bathrooms and bedrooms haven’t shown so well. Despite of it, as you can see in the pictures, completion is perfect. You can imagine yourself at Joey and Chandler’s flat. Monica can come inside any moment, and the feeling is priceless.

He aimed that sketches should be understood by everyone, not only by architects or fans of the series. The main reason he doesn’t use technology is that. In that case, Lizarralde eliminate unnecessary details and that makes the plan easy to understand.

You can find much more about Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde

Why Fictional Floor Plans Resonate With Architects

A sitcom set is built for camera angles, not for people to live in, yet fans rarely notice the contradictions until someone draws the plan. Reconstructing an apartment from a TV series forces the illustrator to reconcile dozens of separate shots filmed across many seasons, often on sets that were quietly remodeled between episodes. The result is part architecture and part detective work. For designers, these drawings are a reminder that spatial memory is built from fragments, and that a believable interior depends on consistency the audience feels rather than measures.

How a Set Differs From a Real Apartment

Television interiors break several rules that govern real residential design. Walls are removable so cameras and lighting rigs can move freely, ceilings are frequently missing to allow overhead equipment, and rooms are made oversized so a crew can work around the actors. The famous Friends apartment, for instance, would be implausibly large and well lit for its rent in real Manhattan. When an illustrator like Lizarralde redraws these spaces, the hardest task is choosing which version of reality to honor: the impossible on-screen geometry or a plausible plan a person could actually inhabit.

The Case for Hand Drawing

Choosing pencil and watercolor over CAD is a deliberate communication strategy. Hand-drawn plans read as warm and approachable, which matters when the audience is the general public rather than a building department. Soft linework and color let the illustrator emphasize the rooms people remember while quietly simplifying the parts that were never shown on screen. CAD would demand precision the source material cannot supply, so the analog approach is both an aesthetic choice and a practical one. It is a useful lesson for any architect preparing presentation drawings for non-specialist clients.

Try It Yourself: Mapping a Space From Memory

You can practice the same skill on any show you know well. Start by listing every room you have seen, then sketch the adjacencies, noting which doorways characters walk through and where windows appear. Establish a rough scale using a known object such as a sofa or refrigerator, then test your plan against tricky shots that reveal sightlines across multiple rooms. Where the footage contradicts itself, make a reasoned choice and move on. This exercise sharpens the ability to translate scattered visual information into a coherent plan, a core skill in survey and renovation work.

Key Takeaways

Lizarralde’s series shows that floor plans can be popular culture, not just technical documents. They invite non-architects to think spatially, they expose the gap between staged sets and livable homes, and they prove that clear communication often beats technical precision when the goal is to help people understand a space. For students and professionals alike, studying these illustrations is a low-stakes way to practice reading and representing interiors.