A Fairy Tale of New York
“I guess whoever said ‘you can’t go home again’ was right… “ ~ Carrie Bradshaw
And Just Like That …, the show is done. We may have been clinging to the wreckage of misplaced hopes for a series with the original vibes of Sex and the City, but cling on we did, and it’s been a ride!
I’ve been lying to myself that I’m only watching for the outfits, while burying the lede that many of the wardrobe choices for these characters have long since jumped the shark.
Most recently, I know I’ve been re-watching for the interiors, because the unsung heroes of this series may well be the set designers and decorators – for whom no reference is irrelevant, no detail is wasted, no bottle of dish soap left behind. The sets and their decoration have breathed life into a series where the writers have, at times, appeared to have lost the plot.
My focus here is the kitchens: those we have loved or lost, and those who have carried Carrie and her coterie through some significant ups and downs. So, hold onto your hats, for an eclectic, selective look at these important spaces, in which we have been stylishly entertained.
Chapter 1: “There’s No Place Like Home …”
Our real estate anchor has always been Carrie’s Upper East Side apartment – first introduced as soon as the Pilot episode got a green light for a series, and last seen playing for our sympathy in its newly cut and shut state of disconnection, as the show finally bows out.
“Zeke got the kitchen, because who cares?” ~ Lisette
We do, Lisette, we care!
The kitchen has maintained a steady, largely unreconstructed presence in this space across 6 seasons of SATC, two spin-off films and three seasons of AJLT – offering counter space for microwaves and toasters, shelf space for coffee cups and handbags, and oven space for shoes.
Stripped back to its core, it’s a basic in-frame from the fifties, boxed in and around a windowless space, with utilitarian stainless steel sink, freestanding appliances and checkerboard floor – a relic that endures as an archetypal fitted kitchen, and whose obsolescence serves as cipher for an idea of 90’s era feminism when the liberation of women from the shackles of a kitchen had long since been declared.
It’s also where we first encounter Carrie as a Gen X-er who is at once both frivolous and serious in her preference for Vogue over dinner and shoes over food.
The very blandness of its design provides opportunity for it to perform as an un-troublesome backdrop for props that help tell a story, and culminates in it transforming into a Bar in a (second) ‘Last Supper’ for Carrie, as she gives up her longtime love to move to Gramercy Park. The easy joke of its ‘Easy-Bake’ oven – unfit for the needs of a ‘Michelin chef’ (sic) – leaves the kitchen playing a blinder: its emptied glazed cabinets serving as altar space for candles casting limelight on a sentimental swansong.
Chapter 2: Kitchen Whites
Charlotte: Park Avenue
Moving up the scale of affluence, aspiration and lifestyle is Charlotte’s Park Avenue kitchen. A spacious, square, expensive, space that Charlotte uses for cupcake baking, familial nourishment, lavish entertaining and Zoom calls.
Once again, the kitchen is all white with knobs on (in a nickel finish), only this time the cabinetry is coded for quality and status, and is capable of hiding both a multitude of sins and any sense of individuality.
Unlike Carrie’s OG white space, Charlotte’s has natural light, high ceilings and generous square footage. There’s a walk-in pantry, in which you can cry if you want to, a dedicated utility area, and multiple prominent Sub-Zero & Wolf branded appliances – a full suite of Park Avenue scaled product placement.
White furniture is complemented by a white ceramic sink and NY style white subway tiles laid in a conventional brick-bond pattern (a common feature in the SATC universe). A white central island is capped with a white stone countertop and the walls are painted in a shade that might be called ‘Ivory Tower’ – if Laurence Llewellyn Bowen were asked to gift this kitchen a pretentious name, he might call it the ‘Ennui’.
With its All-American aspiration and influence, it’s a kitchen that only lacks imagination – a space as dutiful and traditional as Charlotte and Harry.
Carrie: Tribeca
Other white kitchens we have glimpsed include the dazzling white of the Tribeca apartment that Carrie “tries out” and sells on in a New York minute – a dystopian, handleless, glossy European affair, with an unresolved beep and a CGI view onto the Hudson – that proves to be a glaring mistake right from the get-go.
Che & Miranda: California Dreaming
To describe Che and Miranda’s LA kitchen as ‘white’ is to fail to connect the one-wall fitted furniture with a more nuanced picture. A grounding terracotta floor, biomorphically shaped furniture, expansive windows and louvered doors – giving access to the garden and able to filter the flow of light and air – combine to create a fantasy space that, taken as a whole, is a biophilic masterpiece – its appeal lies not in its cabinets or appliances but in its connection and vibration with a natural world.
Chapter 3: Lofty Ambitions
Petrovsksy: Downtown
Unlike Samantha’s avant-garde, Meatpacking district kitchen – always destined to be overshadowed by the bedroom (natch) – and leaving only a faint memory of its plate-shattering intensity, Petrovsky’s style with substance loft leaves an indelible mark: for its scale and magnificence and for how Petrovsky uses it, shares it and styles it – and because of the capital ‘A’ Art that is essential to his core. According to legend, Mikhail Baryshnikov – the real-life artist who played the role – was so impressed by this set piece that he hung artwork from his personal collection on its walls.
The kitchen is minimalist, sleek, and internationally coded – a marketing team might term it ‘essential’. And it suits our dark horse suitor by appearing more refined and mysterious than overtly expressive.
Accessorised with abundant bouquets of wooden spoons and spatulas, end-grain chopping boards and fresh ingredients, its central feature is a grand ‘piano cottura a gas’ (or gas hob for those not fluent in multiple languages) on which a maestro can play with some smoking hot pans.
A stylish espresso maker shifts its ground on the counter depending on how it’s feeding the plot – but rest assured there will be no ‘Mr Coffee’ drip-feed in this kitchen or Billy Joel singalongs in this space.
As a side note: the colour red was flagged multiple times in this set up – from the full-bodied Barolo they ingested to the red-coated steel beams that held the apartment together – and perhaps most presciently in an extravagant bowl of red pomegranates in full view on the countertop early on in the relationship – redolent (if you’ll excuse the pun) of Ancient Greek myths that warn of entrapment, and which Carrie would be wise not to ignore. …
Chapter 4: Mid-Town Mid–Century
Carrie & Big: Fifth Avenue
When Carrie marries Big, her style choices for her home change to match his money and his sharp suits. The kitchen is all bold framings and masculine lines. Hard stone surfaces mix with cold steel details and warm red-veined wood units.
Contemporary ‘Dimensional’ textured tiles show a twinkle in their eye under artificial light, overhead cupboards glide and slide sideways – never fully opening up – and light fittings are mid-century Mad Men modern, with a vintage edge.
Chunky cookbooks dedicated to Cuba casually remind of once illicit tobacco smoked late into evenings. Hobs are cutting edge glass, for creating food designed to impress, and if a fridge faces out toward the dining space, it will be one dedicated to a wine collection. It feels grown up and ‘considered’, theatrical and performative if, ultimately, also impassively impersonal to ‘our girl’ – a nod to how Carrie shoehorns her life into Mr Big’s choices.
Chapter 5: Vintage Carrie
Gramercy Park
While we waited for the rest of the apartment to come together, the kitchen was there right from the start. We’re back in a room full of traditional white fitted furniture – only this time, Carrie has added her own thrift-store-style detailing.
It’s a dolls-house of a kitchen – an incongruously narrow galley in an enormous and glamorous house, where the kitchen would originally have been below stairs and inhabited by servants.
This contracted space, set into a corner has been afforded two windows with two different aspects and given access to a garden via a door and a view – important features that help inform the plot, but are also cornerstones on which a design can start to take shape.
A table is not optional, but here it is both petite – like Carrie – and fold-away-able as needed, as are the chairs – a metaphor, perhaps, for another day. The sink is located under a window – because, even in a kitchen in which cooking rarely happens, the sink is where most time gets spent. And while we’re on the subject, I might just add – for this very good reason – never underestimate the value of a thoughtfully chosen kitchen sink and tap.
The sink is a vintage beauty, requiring some creative thinking about how to house its underpinnings. In this instance, the design choice was for an equally vintage idea of a ‘modesty’ curtain, brought up to date by the kind of deep pleated headings normally reserved for more formal rooms, and a contemporary ‘patchwork’ style choice of fabric whose pedestrian squares have been transformed into diamonds. A subversion of the traditional providing the innovative touch that makes it look chic, where a pastiche from the past would just look like a cliché – all very Carrie.
We love the small details that remind of who Carrie has always been –the Chinese-Takeout boxes in the fridge that are so iconically USian, and that have featured since the first cold sesame noodles shared between the gang of girls back in the day. The washing up liquid left in view by the sink, the X shaped dish-drainer, the lamps and the coffee tins, the toasters and the tea-towels – the Cointreau bottle – there to help make the Cosmo’s ….
Carrie may not do much in the way of cooking, but the character of Carrie inhabits all her kitchens believably thanks in no small part to the set designers and decorators who have taken the trouble to imagine her fairy tale history moving through time, and as the happy ever after she’s been hoping for turns out to be being settled in her own space and on her own terms.
Chapter 6: Epilogue
White Kitchen Inspiration
London Style Lofts
Subway Tile subversions
