Television shows can be seriously addictive, drawing us in each week as new episodes about our favorite characters are put on the air.
Some TV characters get so familiar in fact, they almost seem like family – we know just how they act in certain situations, thinking things like “oh, that’s such a Homer Simpson thing to do.”
We cry with them, we laugh with them, we hate them and love them – as we get into some TV series, we start living with the characters.
But how well do we really know the lives of the characters we love to watch ? Imagine it was possible to step into the home of ” The Simpsons” …. would you find the kitchen or bathroom?
Gilmore Girls
Spanish based interior designer Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde is now making a name for himself, by touching the nerve of TV series’ fans with detailed floor plans of their favorite shows eg The Simpsons family, Carrie Bradshaw, Friends, the clique from How I Met Your Mother, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, Friends, and many others.
The highly detailed floor plans include both architectural design and interior furnishings.
The illustrations consist of anything he’s witnessed from each respective show or film, from the famed couch in The Simpsons to the Carrie Bradshaw’s roomy walk-in closet on Sex and the City.
These are hand drawn plans, in scale, coloured with pencils and with full details of furniture and complements.
The design is made according with the “real” apartments respecting the spaces, proportions, furniture and objects present in the studio.
Some sets have changed throughout the different seasons and this floor plan is a mixture of various of them
“These sets are more theatrical scenographies than real houses,” Lizarralde says.
“I prefer a ‘closed’ set without the contradictions of a sitcom set.
The best example is the apartment of Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City or the apartment of Dexter Morgan from Dexter.
These are apartments entirely built in a studio; coherent and almost ‘real’ apartments that I enjoy drawing more than the complicated and absurd distributions of shows like Two and a Half Men.”
In many respects the set on a multi-camera TV show is an elaborate diorama, the front portion cut out to allow the camera set-up to shoot the action going on within the sound stage.
While production on a multi-cam show is more convenient and less costly, the drawback is sense of artificiality, in which scenery is limited so that equipment like boom mikes and lighting rigs aren’t caught on tape.
So even though we viewers may spend countless hours in the virtual homes of our favorite shows, we don’t get a full sense of the layout.
Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde ( who also goes by the alias name of Nikneuk) is a professional interior designer from Azpeitia in the Basque Country in Spain.
In his free time he makes detailed floor plans of homes from popular television shows and movies.
“The first drawing I did was ‘Frasier’ for four or five years as a personal whim. “I really liked the series and the apartment and wanted to see it reflected in the paper”.
What’s most impressive is the attention given to accurately portraying dimensions and proportions.
“As an interior designer with years of experience, I developed my sense of space and ability to see sizes and proportions of architectural elements and furniture pieces,” Lizarralde says.
“The problem with the living spaces on TV shows is usually located in the secondary sets, such as the bedrooms and bathrooms”
Almost all the shows have triangular proportions to lend the sensation of depth to the sets.
Even the apparently squared sets are in fact trapezoidal (wider in the front part and smaller at the bottom part) and sometimes it’s very difficult to translate to a sheet as “real houses” because all the tricks of the set decorators are in evidence.”
In other words, most apartments featured in sitcoms would have to have their own Narnias built into each doorway to fit all the space depicted.
The whole process of making a layout based on a show usually takes about 20 to 30 hours, though it can be much longer if it’s a series like Friends with a robust backlog of seasons.
He prefers having the entire series run on hand, in order to access as much information as possible while drawing.
In a matter of hours spent fast-forwarding through a series with a modest run, he can locate everything he needs.
After creating a first basic layout, Lizarralde refines and develops it with notes.
Once a composition is in place, he starts a second layout to fit the final dimensions and proportions, and to place furniture and complete the final shape of the drawing.
Just to be precise, Lizarralde then does a third and definitive floor plan, incorporating the colors, fabrics, and all the other details needed to make an accurate floor plan.
At that point, the results look like an actual blueprint, albeit one that would probably look bizarre if actually acted upon.
The Simpsons
The Simpsons house
The Simpson family house from the Fox TV series “The Simpsons“
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Will & Grace
The apartments of Will Truman, Grace Adler and Jak MacFarland from the show “Will & Grace”
Two & A Half Men
The Malibu Beach house of Charlie Harper from the CBS TV show “Two & a Half Men”
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Big Bang Theory
The apartments of Sheldon, Leonard and Penny from the CBS TV show “The Big Bang Theory“
Sex & the City – Carrie Bradshaw Apartment
The apartment of Carrie Bradshaw from the HBO TV show “Sex & the City“
Frasier
The apartment of Dr. Frasier Crane from the NBC TV show “Frasier“
Friends
The apartments of Monica-Rachel and Chandler-Joey from the NBC TV show “Friends“
How I Met your Mother
The apartment of Ted mosby from the CBS TV show “How I Met Your Mother“
Seinfeld
The apartment of Jerry Seinfeld from his NBC TV show “Seinfeld“
Up
The Ellie & Carl Fredricksen’s residence from the Pixar film “UP“
Lizarralde’s carefully sketched floor plans even accommodate for slight discrepancies in size he’s taken note of, especially in the Up house.
He explains: “For it [to] seem more real the designers made a house as small as possible. The result is that this house is bigger inside than the outside… I have tried to reconcile these two aspects in this floorplan.”
Dexter
The apartment of Dexter Morgan from the series “Dexter“
Lizarralde made the floorplan above of Dexter Morgan’s apartment, but had problems with the bathroom
“Has the bathroom appeared completely ???” Lizzarralde asks.
“In one episode, Dexter enters his house through the window of the bathroom, but we can only see the wall of this window and the bathtub below… I have another doubt with the doors of his bedroom: There are two doors in the wall in front of the bed (the one on the right to the living room and the one on the left to the corridor behind the kitchen.) But there is other door in the wall of left side, just between the closet and the door to the corridor. Any idea of the function of this door???
I think that could be another access to the bathroom, but… And, BTW, there is another door in the living room ???”
The Gilmore Girls
The house of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore from the TV series “Gilmore Girls“
The Golden Girls
The house of Blanche Deveraux, Rose Nylund, Dorothy Sporznak and Sophia Petrillo from the NBC TV show “Golden Girls“
Kusakabe Residence
The (temporal) residence of the Kusakabe family featured in the 1988 film “My neighbour Totoro“
This floorplan is an adaptation of the (temporal) residence of the Kusakabe family featured in the 1988 film “My neighbour Totoro” by Hayao Miyazaki.
Three’s Company
The apartment of Jack Tripper, Janet Wood and Chrissy Snow from the ABC TV show “Three’s Company“
Holly Golightly’s apartment – “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”.
Almost an empty house, with a few furniture pieces and all the space for the parties…
Lizarralde even includes minute, iconic details like the half-bathtub sofa in Holly Golightly’s fairly empty party pad in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
I included some iconic elements as:
– The half-bathtub sofa.
– The black phone in top of the suitcase.
– The turntable-suitcase and other luggage.
– Her mask with eyelashes near the bed.
– The piñata-bull and the blue stuffed pony in her bedroom.
– The red blanket from Harvard in the bed.
– The suitcases of paul Varjak (George Peppard) in the door.
– The guitar near to the window of the fire escape staircase…
Lizarralde Prints are available to purchase on RedBubble, Etsy and deviantART.
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March 14, 2013
Designers in legal brawl over novelty floor plans of The Simpsons’ house
Via News.com ( http://www.news.com.au/technology/designers-in-legal-brawl-over-novelty-floor-plans-of-the-simpsons-house/story-e6frfro0-1226596591916 )
All this fuss over The Simpson’s. It’s The Simpson’s. Who can get mad over The Simpson’s?
What was meant to be a project designed to bring people joy, quickly turned into a legal battle between two designers who created blueprints and floorplans for the fictional homes on TV shows including The Simpsons, How I Met Your Mother and Mad Men.
Spanish interior designer Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde created hand-drawn floorplans for some of the most famous fictional homes including that of Ted Moseby from How I Met Your Mother, Sheldon, Leonard and Penny’s apartments from The Big Bang Theory, the pads belonging to Monica, Rachel, Chandler and Joey from Friends and even Jerry Seinfeld’s old place.
Mr Lizarralde told news.com.au that his hobby blossomed out of his love of 1990s sitcom, Frasier, and that he drew the floorplan of protagonist Frasier Crane’s apartment as a “personal treat”.
It can take up to 30 hours or more to complete a single floorplan, and countless hours of TV watching to nail the layout.
He said he usually watched an entire series or film before attempting a floorplan.
“In the sitcoms the principal set (normally the living room placed in front of the audience) appears in all the episodes,” he said.
“The problem is usually locating the secondary sets as the bedrooms and bathrooms.”
The interior designer sells his plans on website Etsy from anywhere from $50 to $150.
Mr Lizarralde has received copyright complaints – not from the various TV studios but a rival who also designs and sells floorplans of fictional homes from TV shows and films.
News.com.au has not named the person for legal reasons but approached them for comment. ( PS Actual name is Brandi Roberts see below )
Brandi Roberts floor plan of Absolutely Fabulous
brandi roberts floorplan golden girls
According to Mr Lizarralde’s blogs the rival’s lawyer sent him a cease and desist letter saying that his floorplans were “unauthorised derivative works and use the copyright protected works owned by my client’s intellectual property rights”.
The interior designer says it is obvious he is not copying the rival’s blueprints.
He also said he felt harassed by the competitor who wrote comments about him on articles that had been written about his work.
These alleged actions have caused some of his art to be removed from his DeviantArt account as well as from other websites.
Mr Lizarralde said he had also lost money due to the ongoing battle.
His Simpson’s floorplan has had the greatest coverage – shared on social networks including Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and My Space – but he was reluctant to send it on to the show’s creator Matt Groening.
He said he was nervous about Groening’s opinion as he had already copped criticism from pop-culture pedants.
“Behind the stairs there is a door that sometimes appeared as a wardrobe closet, other times as a cupboard full of shelves and sometimes as an entry to the basement stairs,” he told news.com.au.
He said he decided to draw it as a storage space as that was the most common way it was presented, but this was met with criticism from fans.
“If I had drawn the stairs to the basement the same (people) would complain that there (should have been) a closet, so I do not want to think what Matt Groening would say,” he said.
Inaki response to the above
Via http://homevoyeurs.com/2012/08/30/floor-plans-of-famous-tv-homes-by-brandi-roberts/
Hello.
I would like to condemn here the attitude of Brandi Roberts, author of any of these drawings, which sells through its web Fantasy Floorplans.
This design diva is the responsible for which have eliminated my work of several websites.
She is calling to these sites to complain that my drawings are a copy of their simple blueprints.
Can someone with a minimum of common sense think that this: http://pinterest.com/pin/435230751458351453 is copy of this? http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/terminal05/2012/8/23/13/enhanced-buzz-19978-1345744474-17.jpg
My drawings are artistic artworks, extremely acccurated in dimensions and proportions, coloured and full of furniturs and decoratons details.
Her layouts are like a simple technical blueprints, undetailed and monochromatic.
The only similarity it comes from the use os the same theme and the same sets to make both floorplans.
And he must believe with the exclusivity of being the only person in the world that can make floorplans of TV series.
When a site as Deviantart or RedBubble receives a demand from copyrights automatically retires the artworks without making and analysis of the works.
This woman (Perhaps envious because I am able to do it better than she, fearful to earn less money if someone likes more my drawings as hers) are systematically claiming an absurd copyright that she does not have and harm me professional and morally..
This is something absurd especially coming from another “artist”.
We are all free to create what we want….
Thank you very much.
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http://pinterest.com/nikneuk/tv-floorplans/
ializar@hotmail.com
About Brandi Roberts
Brandi Roberts is a full-time artist and a native of Columbia, South Carolina.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in Interior Design.
She has been hand-drawing floorplans for over thirty years and started at about the age of seven.
Fantasy Floorplans was born out of her love of drawing, Pop-culture and television.
Brandi “invented” her career of hand-drafting floorplans of fictional homes; bringing life to homes that have never actually existed.
She has created more than 125 floorplans for fictional TV homes spanning seven decades.
“My floorplans are great conversation pieces. They generate a lot of interesting dialogue when people get in front of them.”
Mad Men Offices by Brandi Roberts
From a historical perspective, Brandi says the floorplans represent how America’s values and our culture have evolved since the 1950s. “America has come a long way since the era of the twin beds on I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
Her floor plans merge Pop-art with celebrity to form artwork that doesn’t just entertain and engage, but captures the evolution of the American TV home over the last seven decades.
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Some Other Non-Lizarralde , Non-Roberts drawn TV show floor plans
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