8 Secrets of the Friends Sets You Probably Didn’t Know—Including the Exact Color on Monica’s Walls

Photo: Brian D. McLaughlin/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images

In many ways, the instantly recognizable world of Monica Geller’s apartment in Friends—warm, eclectic, and invitingly shabby chic—is a love letter to production designer John Shaffner’s old New York City apartment.

When he began sketching the space alongside his partner Joe Stewart, Shaffner flashed back to the sixth-floor walk-up they shared on West 14th Street in Manhattan. The production designer borrowed real-life details from that space, including the open shelves in their kitchen and the tar beach roof they’d climb up to with folding chairs in hand. He’d continue to pull from his memories of living in 1970s New York City as he designed the rest of the Friends universe on the Warner Bros. backlot in Los Angeles, from the small, tucked away streets in the West Village to the city’s leafy pocket parks.

“Our world of New York that we created for 10 years [in the show] was, in a weird kind of way, a soft landing place of New York,” Shaffner tells AD. “We romanticized it. I mean, where else would you leave your apartment door unlocked?”

In celebration of the show’s 30th anniversary, AD spoke with the production designer about bringing the beloved sets of Friends to life.

The Friends sets were built on a tight budget

Shaffner was only allotted $45,000 to build the Friends sets for the show’s pilot. (As a reference, he tells AD, a pilot like that would have been given a budget of $250,000 now.)

There wasn’t enough money to rent a photographic backdrop for the windows in Monica’s apartment and Central Perk, so Shaffner borrowed them from Warner Bros. storage’s scenic art department. “I found these funny old backdrops that could have been a backdrop of New York in 1920,” he says. “The backdrop outside of the coffee house was awful…we put some frosted lines around the lower half, and I told [set decorator] Greg Grande we need to have something hanging in front of these windows, plants, light fixtures, whatever you can think of, because we do not want to see out the window.”

Joey and Chandler didn’t originally live across the hall from Monica and Rachel

When Shaffner presented a model of the apartment set to Friends executive producer Kevin Bright, he built an entrance area just outside the hallway. Bright initially turned down the idea, explaining that they didn’t need that extra space for the pilot. “I think we should have another working space for the performance,” Shaffner remembers telling the producer. “And don’t you think that ultimately the boys should live across the hall?”

That serendipitous pitch would lay the foundation for the show, allowing the characters to casually drop in and out of one another’s apartments. Shaffner created a nearly duplicate design of the scruffy landing in his old walk-up and placed the two apartments at the top of the building in the first season, with the idea that the cast would be seen huffing and puffing when they reached the landing.

“It was a moment we went, ‘Oh, can’t do that. That joke will be too old,’” Shaffner recalls. “So we dropped them down a few floors and never talked about it again.” (Look closely in the first season and you’ll see that Monica’s apartment door number reads 5—after that, it switches to 20.)

Monica was an avid second-hand shopper

A little-known secret for cash-strapped New Yorkers looking for free, chic decor? Head to the Upper East Side before trash pickup day. Shaffner used that trick when he was furnishing his own New York City apartment and suspected that Monica, who had an eye for design but a tight budget, would have done the same.

He, alongside set decorator Greg Grande, agreed that her apartment should be filled with an eclectic mishmash of found objects she picked up off the street. Grande dug through the Warner Bros. prop house, a treasure trove of vintage and secondhand items, and found plenty of gems for Monica’s apartment—including a Fortuny lamp, a large credenza, and overstuffed pillows featuring vintage postcards. He got a particularly enthusiastic sign off from Shaffner when he presented the now iconic cookie jar shaped like a clock for her kitchen.

“That’s been found, that’s interesting, it has color, it’s Monica,” Shaffner remembers thinking.

Shaffner wanted the Friends apartment purple—but not too purple

When Shaffner decided to paint Monica’s walls purple, he knew not to overwhelm the space with one strong color. The production designer added touches of bright blue to the kitchen cabinets, along with a hint of exposed brick, and went with neutral tones for the furniture, including an oatmeal-colored couch and a light-colored wooden coffee table.

“Another good color that goes with purple is gold…I mean, how many sports teams are gold and purple?” Shaffner adds. “So [Grande] got that kind of pale gold, yellow gold fabric for the window curtains, which I thought was a very, very good selection.”

And if you ever wondered exactly which shade of purple appears on Monica’s walls, Shaffner confirms it is Benjamin Moore’s Persian Violet 1419.

Small design details helped define the Friends characters

Look closely at Monica’s bedroom and you’ll see the fleur-de-lis emblem, an ancient symbol of a flower, on her curtains, the faded partition behind the door, and a wall hanging. “It gives you a little bit of a character statement about Monica being decorative,” Shaffner explains. “She was more into that than a bookshelf full of books. She wanted it to be pretty. I think she was, in many ways, always a bit idealistic.”

Much like the living room, Shaffner went with a bold color for her walls—deep pink—and splashed the rest of the space with more subtle colors: light pinks, neutrals and some greens.

Central Perk was partially inspired by a real-life West Village restaurant

Friends cocreator Marta Kauffman was mulling over ideas for the upcoming pilot season when she drove by Insomnia Café on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. The space, with its plush couches, Christmas string lights, and oversized bookshelves, sparked an idea for Kauffman, per Saul Austerlitz’s book Generation Friends. Maybe she, alongside her writing partner David Crane, could base their new show in a coffee shop.

When Shaffner read Kauffman and Crane’s pilot script and envisioned the gang’s café, he thought back to Arnold’s Turtle, a now shuttered eatery in the West Village, described by The New York Times as a “cozy and intimate restaurant‐cafe at the corner of West Fourth and Bank Streets” where you could “look out onto serene streets…munching a Toll House cookie and sipping a cappuccino.”

Shaffner matched the brick walls of Arnold’s Turtle, along with a corner doorway, and also pulled inspiration from the Bohemian era of coffee shops past, when folk singers performed and tables were piled high with magazines. “We sort of updated that concept and said, ‘Let’s make this a cozier place. Let’s throw a sofa in here. Let’s put in mismatched furniture. Let’s Village-ize it,’” he tells AD.

“The One With the Football” caused quite a production design conundrum…

When Shaffner got the script for “The One With the Football,” which involved the gang playing a game of outdoor football for much of the episode, he had questions. Namely, how was he supposed to create a realistic-looking park inside their soundstage?

Bright reassured him that they would be filming the scene outside, likely in a park adjacent to the soundstage. About a day later, that all changed. The executive producer realized that it would be far too difficult to shoot on location, with the sun changing angles and planes flying in and out of nearby Burbank Airport. With less than a week left until shooting, they changed course—renting out a large empty soundstage clocking in at 21,600 square feet, which Shaffner transformed into a pocket park.

The set needed to be nearly 20 feet high to accommodate the football scenes, so Shaffner and his crew patched together a combination of freshly built pieces and borrowed pieces from other sets and exteriors. He filled up the space with a fence, some railings, benches, and trees wired with autumn leaves. The ground, which was made from jute padding to cushion the actors’ falls during the game, was littered with dirt, sticks and leaves.

“I give credit to the director of photography who just gave us a lovely, slightly gray day, which happens a lot on Thanksgiving in New York,” Shaffner says.

…as did many of the other memorable sets

Shaffner would often have his hands full when Friends stepped outside the comfy stomping grounds of the West Village.

While prepping for “The One With Las Vegas,” Shaffner was tasked with building Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace on their soundstage. In order to mask the fact that their fictional Caesars Palace was much smaller than its real-life counterpart, Shaffner used a bevy of design tricks to distract the audience. “One way to disguise that you don’t have much space is to make the walls complicated, zigs and zags and columns and wallpaper and a busy carpet and lots of slot machines and tables to make it look crowded,” he explains. “You never really know how big anything is if you do that.”

Another creatively challenging design assignment? “The One at the Beach,” an episode which called for Shaffner to build a beach house on the soundstage flanked, corner to corner, in piles and piles of sand. That episode, he remembers, was the one that kept on giving. “It took two years to get rid of all the sand that made its way all over the soundstage.”

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest