The 10 Coolest Sitcom Apartments, Ranked

The apartment is one of the most important settings in sitcoms, and for series that center on characters who live together, it’s where the majority of the action happens. It’s the characters’ home, after all, and because of the amount of time the audience spends with the characters, it becomes a sort of figurative home for them, too.

Sitcom characters often have extraordinarily large and desirable apartments, despite working as bartenders (Nick from New Girl), waitresses (2 Broke Girls), or struggling actors, such as Joey from Friends. While this may give viewers unrealistic expectations of what is affordable and achievable — not to mention create apartment envy — it’s nevertheless fun to imagine living above MacLaren’s bar in New York or even in a pineapple under the sea.

10 Max & Caroline’s Apartment (2 Broke Girls)

Max and Caroline’s funky and crafty home in 2 Broke Girls is located in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. One of the most gentrified and desirable areas of New York, it is unlikely that the two ‘broke’ waitresses would be able to afford this spacious, open-plan apartment, which has a garden and exposed wooden beams.

Still, the girls’ pad, which is located near the diner where they work, is the setting for many of the show’s funniest episodes, such as when they rent the place out on Airbnb to a group of supermodels, or when Caroline slips in the garden and gets covered in horse excrement.

9 Leonard & Sheldon’s Apartment (The Big Bang Theory)

This Pasadena-located crib is home to The Big Bang Theory roommates Leonard and Sheldon for the majority of the series. For this group of introverts, their apartment is a surprisingly sociable place. The living room is full of comfy seats, which host their friends for dinner every night and many of the show’s most memorable scenes — such as when Sheldon and Amy build a fort, and when Sheldon tries to teach Penny physics.

The apartment is also packed with cool science accouterments and collectibles, including a Rubik’s cube, hundreds of books, a DNA Double Helix Molecular model, and a telescope.

8 Dev’s Apartment (Master Of None)

Although it doesn’t feature in the most recent season of the show — Dev himself barely does — Dev’s Lower East Side New York abode is a fixture in Master of None‘s first two seasons and aptly mirrors Dev’s personality.

The apartment has a generously sized kitchen for making homemade pasta, a cozy living room for watching old black-and-white movies while it’s snowing outside, and a hipster retro industrial vibe throughout, with exposed brick walls, cool lamps, and a sizeable record collection. According to Apartment Therapy, Aziz Ansari even helped design it based on his own interior design tastes.

7 Spongebob’s Pineapple House (SpongeBob SquarePants)

While not strictly an apartment, the eponymous protagonist of SpongeBob SquarePants definitely has one of the coolest living situations on TV. Spongebob’s three-story house is complete with a home library, workout room, garage, and backyard. He lives with his pet snail Gary at 124 Conch Street, and next door to his Krusty Krab colleague, Squidward.

The house does have its drawbacks, though. For one, it’s located at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It also gets completely destroyed on numerous occasions, once by a self-destructing Krabby Patty messaging device sent by Mr. Krabs, and another time when it gets eaten by bothersome little nematodes. Still, a foghorn alarm clock is pretty cool.

6 Ted’s Apartment (How I Met Your Mother)

This two-bed Manhattan pad situated above MacLaren’s bar is home to Ted, Marshall, and Lily for most of How I Met Your Mother until the latter two move to a house in the suburbs. Similar to the setup in Friends, it’s complete with a roof, perfect for parties and interventions, and is the center of the show’s universe.

Every square inch of this Upper West Side location is packed full of books, video games, and other cool and unusual items acquired by Ted and Marshall over the years, including a red phone booth and a pair of swords. It also features a piano, Ted’s work desk by the window, and many other iconic and important objects.

5 Troy & Abed’s Apartment (Community)

This is the only apartment to make the list that contains a Dreamatorium. Troy and Abed from Community converted their second bedroom into a play area in which to engage in any type of adventure or fantasy that their heart desires. The walls are black with yellow squares and the room is empty other than the Dreamatorium’s “engine,” which is kept in a closet. Unfortunately, they dismantled the Dreamatorium in “Introduction to Finality.”

However, their apartment is very much a place of fun and games, whether it’s Yahtzee, constructing a scale model of the boulder scene from Indiana Jones, building a blanket fort, or putting on a show for Annie using cardboard cutout characters.

4 Spencer & Carly’s Apartment (iCarly)

This three-floored apartment is home to Carly’s brother Spencer in the iCarly reboot, but it was also home to Carly during the original series run. Located in Seattle’s Bushwell Plaza, this fun and colorful loft has been converted from business use to residential. This means it has a private cargo elevator (for transporting ostriches), high ceilings, and space for Spencer’s weird and wonderful sculptures — such as the robot made of soda bottles (‘Bottle Bot’), Yippee-Yi Yo-Yo, and a bar made out of the back of a pickup truck.

The apartment’s third floor is where Carly, Freddie, and Sam shoot the web show in the original series. There is a large window with colored glass panes on the back wall, beanbags, rugs, tons of props, and even the hood of a car embellished with orange flames. Any apartment with its own studio is pretty special.

3 Frasier’s Apartment (Frasier)

Frasier Crane’s upscale, sophisticated property in Elliot Bay Towers has sweeping views of the Seattle skyline and Space Needle. It’s decorated in line with his fussy but eclectic taste and includes a grand piano, African statues and paintings, and high-end furniture. It’s also perfect for hosting fancy dinner parties, with its dining room area and large living room.

Frasier lives in this three-bedroom pad with his elderly father and his father’s caregiver, and later Frasier’s love interest, Daphne. When his father first moves in, he insists on bringing his old recliner chair, which looks very out-of-place among Frasier’s swanky artifacts. Fraiser initially tries to get rid of it, but eventually warms to it, and even asks the removal men to be careful with it when his father moves out.

2 The New Girl Loft (New Girl)

Ever since inner-city lofts have been converted from industrial to residential use, they have been home to waves of different groups. At one point, it was musicians who used them for studios or intimate showcases. Then came the artists, who took advantage of the cheap rent and huge windows. Then came the young professionals, such as Jess, Nick, and the rest of the gang from New Girl.

Their Los Angeles loft is a highly desirable space, with high ceilings, huge rooms, industrial metal doors, and a large roof area. They even have a communal, locker-room-style bathroom. New Girl might set unrealistic expectations of what a houseshare with strangers is like, but despite this, it’s a great space and the setting for plenty of sweet scenes about friendship.

1 Monica’s Apartment (Friends)

No sitcom apartment is more iconic than Monica’s purple-walled home on Friends, which she shared with numerous other members of the group over the show’s 10 seasons. The West Village apartment is the most essential setting of the series next to Central Perk. Fans all remember the gold frame around the door’s peephole, the “Aux Buttes Chaumont” poster, and the countless key moments from the series that take place here.

This is where Ross dresses as a giant armadillo to teach Ben about Hannukah, where Chandler stays in a box for six hours to win back Joey’s trust, the setting for the apartment-switch quiz, and for the fateful final scene in which the gang all place their keys on the kitchen counter on the way out the door. It unequivocally deserves the top spot as the coolest apartment in sitcom history.

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