TV

Meet the man who makes a living modeling TV apartments

For fun, Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde started sketching floor plans of apartments made famous by popular TV shows, from “Seinfeld” to “The Simpsons.”

“Four or five years ago, I made the floor plan of ‘Frasier’ as a personal treat. I really liked the series and his apartment, and I wanted to see them modeled,” the former interior designer tells The Post.

Later, a friend who is an SATC fan requested Carrie Bradshaw’s Upper East Side home. He obliged, and another buddy asked for the loft from “Friends.”

The hobby, which resulted in drawings that went viral in 2012, has since become his full-time profession. Lizarralde’s colored-pencil creations, which he sells as prints and posters to television and real-estate obsessives (at 15 to 150 euros a pop), take ages to design and require tons of research.

(How much would those homes actually cost today? That’s another story.)

The Post conducted an email interview with Lizarralde, 45, who lives near San Sebastien in Spain, to find out how he does his painstaking research, exactly what it takes to create a floor plan from scratch (over 40 hours!), whether fans catch any mistakes and which fictional homes he’s eyeing for his next project.

How do you do your research to make them so accurate?

Usually I download the entire series or the movie, and I Google screen captures and pictures of the sets. I prefer to draw ended series so all the information about them is available.

In sitcoms, the principal set (normally the living room placed in front of the audience) appears in all the episodes. The problem is to find the secondary sets, such as the bedrooms and bathrooms. Normally those are movable sets that change continuously. One example is the hallway to the bedrooms in “The Big Bang Theory,” which looks slightly different in each scene filmed in it. In series such as “Sex and the City,” which are not recorded in front of an audience, the sets are closed and more logical. Their apartments are more real.

Sheldon and Leonard’s California apartment in The Big Bang Theory, across the hall from Penny’s.Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde

In a couple of hours, I can locate all that I need using the fast-forward button. I review the episodes several times and pick out the ones in which everything that I need appears. Meanwhile, I’m creating a basic layout. I use my experience as an interior designer to calculate the distances, dimensions and proportions. I developed a sense of space, and I can deduce and translate these elements from a screen to a sheet.

Then I start a second layout to place furniture. It’s a question of taking references of standard measures (the height of a countertop or a table, the depth of a sofa or a bed, the height of a door) and calculating, one by one, the other elements near them.

Finally, I start carefully constructing the third and definitive floor plan. In total, I need 30 to 40 hours — or more, in fact, I’ve never counted — from zero to the final uploaded result.

That time is multiplied when it’s a long-running series with many seasons. That time doubles when the sets of the series change throughout the seasons and/or when they are full of contradictions. That is usually the norm!

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” has one of the few floorplans Lizarralde is able to deduce and draw.Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde

The problem with a movie or miniseries is that there aren’t many that show all of their settings. Normally, we can see only a portion — the living room, kitchen and bedroom. There are few movies that show the entire house or apartment. The apartment of Holly Golightly from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is a good example.

Do any fans of shows tell you if you have gotten something wrong? Do you revise the floor plan?

All the series, especially the sitcoms, are full of mistakes and inaccuracies. You can see a bathroom without a window through seven seasons — but if the writers need to lock up some characters, and they need a window to escape, a window magically appears in the middle of a wall where there was nothing some episodes ago.

My idea is to represent the apartments and houses from TV shows and movies as real houses. I don’t want to draw the set where Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox play two characters from “Friends.” I want to draw the apartment where Rachel Green and Monica Geller lived.

So we are talking about two different languages: scenography and interior design. All the problems come from the translation from one to the other. As the Italian proverb goes: “Traduttore, traditore” (or “translator, traitor”).

Set designers use a lot of tricks. In the multi-camera sitcoms, the most evident is the absence of the “fourth wall,” because the sets are open to the audience. Another is the use of bizarre angles to “open” the spaces. Normally the sets are not square but trapezoidal, wider in the front part (where the “fourth wall” would be) and narrower at the back. This is very evident in the set from “Seinfeld.” But when you see the exterior of the building, the shape is normal with 90-degree angles.

The houses from “Family Matters” or “Full House” are narrow from the outside, but absurdly wide on the inside. In fact, the original building — the exterior facade — from “Full House” was a classic Painted Lady in San Francisco with a flat ceiling. But the designer built a set in a nonexistent third floor with sloping ceilings and dormer windows (where Uncle Jesse and Aunt Becky lived).

Nonsense is multiplied by thousands in the case of animated series, where absolutely nothing is physically real. The house on “The Simpsons” is basically a mutant house, with rooms changing positions, doors with different spaces at the other side every time they are opened, etc.

How to solve these problems? How to fit in all the information? That’s part of my work, and part of the fun.

The Golden Girls’ troublesome layout on a made-up street in Miami.Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde

Another classic example is “The Golden Girls.” In the pilot, Blanche’s bedroom appears to the left of the living room, and the other three bedrooms and the bathroom are in a corridor to the right. But in the next episodes, Blanche’s bedroom is in that right hallway. They never changed the look of that hallway, keeping the original four doors — even though there are five rooms behind them.

I usually add new elements — an ottoman, new cushions, etc. — and details that I find on reruns or that are suggested by fans.

Which are a few of your favorite shows and movies — and favorite apartments — and why?

My taste in shows and movies is different from my taste in interior design. And I’m not even an obsessive follower of TV shows!

I think I’m a bit old-fashioned, especially with movies. I have a very complete video collection, with all the classics from Billy Wilder, John Ford, Woody Allen, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Chaplin, etc. And in TV, I was fan of “Northern Exposure,” “Six Feet Under” and even “Fraggle Rock.”

But I love shows and movies with anodyne houses; I’m not a particular fan of ones with interesting houses. At this moment, I prefer to make more affordable floor plans of “normal” houses and apartments instead of mansions.

In my youth, I was a big fan of luxurious soap operas. I remember the beautiful Napa Valley residence of Angela Channing from “Falcon Crest.” One of my all-time favorites was Alexis Carrington’s penthouse from “Dynasty” — a kind of Art Deco fantasy mixed with elements from the Hollywood of the golden era and pastel colors of the ’80s.

Lizarralde’s first floor plan is also his dream home.Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde

The house of my dreams would be a two-story small house in a city or town with a porch, some grass and a couple of trees outside and a fireplace next to the stairs on the inside. Like one of those charming farms in Connecticut that appeared in films like “Bringing up Baby” — an impossible fantasy. But I pick the apartment from “Frasier” as a good example of a perfect place — designed with class and elegance, filled with beautiful furniture, great-quality materials and artwork. It is definitely one of the best designs from the last decades of television.

What is the most challenging part of making and selling your floor plan art?

The hardest part is to fit and fix all the tricks, contradictions and mistakes made by set designers and producers into one coherent floor plan without betraying the “reality” of those houses.

And then there is the making and selling of the handmade originals. These “master floor plans” are in fact very small, so that they can be scanned and uploaded to the web. I start each drawing from zero, on white cardboard — it’s impossible to use templates to make them — and I need between 20 and 30 hours or more to finish.

“Gilmore Girls” (left) and “The Simpsons (right).

Larger drawings require more time because they are more detailed. In a smaller floor plan, I can draw a flowered cushion with dots or lines of different colors, but for the same floor plan in a bigger size, I can draw these flowers with more detail. The same thing happens with the veins of wood or marble, tiles, plants, carpets, artwork, etc.

What is the best part of making and selling your floor plan art?

I started this project just after losing my job, so in a way it was a kind of therapy. I’ve never been someone with great self-esteem, so experiences like that can be devastating. The attention of media and the compliments of the fans helped to feed my collapsed ego. And, obviously, it has served to help me recover from economic loss. There is a saying in Spanish: “When one door closes, a window opens.” This new job was my window, and it became my way of living.

Besides “The Holiday” and “Little House on the Prairie,” what shows’ apartments or houses are you considering drawing next?

I usually create new designs in my free time, but I haven’t had free time in a couple of years! I’m working a lot of hours by day to fill delayed orders. I want to finish them before Christmas.

“Sex and the City” (left) and “Seinfeld” (right).Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde

My idea is to take some time this year to create new designs to amplify and update my catalog. The list of projects is very long, and includes from TV: the apartment from “2 Broke Girls,” Laura Palmer’s house from “Twin Peaks,” the apartments from “Girls,” the suburban houses from “Roseanne” and “Married with Children,” the bachelor pad of Barney Stinson from “How I Met Your Mother,” Don Draper’s later apartment from “Mad Men,” Tony Soprano’s house from “The Sopranos,” the vintage house from “Bewitched,” the house from “The Nanny,” the bar from “Cheers,” the coffee shop, Central Perk, from “Friends,” the houses from the animated series “Family Guy” and “American Dad,” Walter White’s house from “Breaking Bad,” the ranch from “Bonanza” and Alexis’ penthouse from “Dynasty.”

From movies, I want to draw the hobbit hole from “The Hobbit“ and “The Lord of the Rings” sagas, the apartment from “The Apartment,” the house from “Psycho,” the house from “The Party” — one of my favorites, the house from “Home Alone” and Diane Keaton’s beach house in “Something’s Gotta Give.”

I’m always looking for new ideas, especially for movies. In the TV shows, the setting becomes familiar episode after episode. It’s harder to find such iconic interiors from cinema. Hogwarts’ castle from the “Harry Potter” films and the house from “Psycho” are very recognizable buildings, but their interiors aren’t that memorable.

So let me know if you have any suggestions!