If I could live anywhere, I might choose apartment 1901 in Seattle’s Elliot Bay Towers—a sprawling three-bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on the Space Needle. It comes furnished with an Eames Chair and a Steinway medium grand piano, and the wet bar is always stocked with sherry. Real–estate brokers estimate that the apartment would cost around $3 million today, but of course, it doesn’t exist. Still, as I burned through all 264 episodes of Frasier over the past year, I often coveted apartment 1901. (And I’m not alone—the show, which ran on NBC for 11 seasons, finishing in May 2004, once devoted an entire episode to a neighbor who adores Frasier’s eye for interior design so much that he copies every feature of the apartment for his own residence just one floor below.)
I’ve got a canvas print of apartment 1901 on my living room wall, one in a series of affordable wall hangings that map out fictional physical spaces. A real-estate marketing firm called Drawbotics has rendered 3-D digital floor plans of the workspaces from beloved TV shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Mad Men. My Frasier floor plan was created by Iñaki Alisle Lizarralde, an artist from Spain whose designs include, among many others, the iconic New York City apartments from Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and How I Met Your Mother.
I bought the Frasier print two months ago, when I decided finally to “move in” to the apartment where I’d already been living for the better part of three years. Until then, I fancied myself a millennial Neil McCauley from the film Heat, with no meaningful attachments to my living space, free to pack my entire life into a rucksack the moment I felt the heat around the corner. Despite owning a bed, I usually slept on one of two futons in my living room and hung very little on my walls. When I bought plants, they were condemned to a quick death, because I left town whenever I could and never arranged for them to be watered. I owned one fork and two spoons. But in early February, weeks before COVID-19 necessitated it, I felt a pull to settle in. I disassembled one of the futons and built a desk out of its legs and a seven-foot slab of plywood that I picked up at a nearby hardware store. Then the pandemic hit. I chalked up my nesting urge to coincidence and was just grateful to have a roof over my head, a place with running water, heat, and windows to let in sunlight.
Before the quarantine, I’d glance at the Frasier floor plan as I came and went from the apartment, but lately I’ve caught myself staring at it more than usual, picking up on nuances I never gathered while watching the show. I never realized, for instance, that Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) shares bedroom and bathroom walls with his dad, Marty (John Mahoney), or that Marty has his own tiny balcony, but prefers to spend his time in the living room, or just how little space Marty’s live-in physical therapist, Daphne (Jane Leeves), has to herself. Frasier is about many things, but the floor plan has helped me see that, at its core, it’s about being displaced: Marty, shot in the hip and forced to retire from the police force, has left his lonely apartment to move in with his son; Daphne has fled England and now lives in a stranger’s home; even Frasier, who had left Boston for Seattle after a bitter divorce and a suicide attempt, is displaced on his own turf—his Eames Chair cast aside for Marty’s beat-up recliner held together by duct tape.
It doesn’t take a radio psychiatrist to tell me that my reluctance to decorate my apartment stemmed from a deeper fear of committing to my current station in life, fueled by a belief that to settle down would actually mean “settling” in the larger sense, as well as an anxiety around the profound existential instability that pervades all of our lives. Now, more or less trapped in my space, I’m forced to reckon with these thoughts with no escape: like nearly everyone, I don’t have the choice to stay or go.
When I was in high school, long before I ever watched an episode of Frasier, I fantasized that when I was in my late 20s, I’d move to Seattle and live in a one-bedroom apartment with a dog. I got the idea after spending a weekend in the city while on a family trip. I liked the rain and being close to the water. I didn’t factor in considerations such as job prospects or health benefits or the cost of living or if my imaginary apartment even allowed dogs or if by that point in my life I might rather have a family. Just rain and Seattle and an apartment.
The Frasier floor plan reminds me that few physical spaces are permanent, and even fewer still remain ideal in the long run. They change, and so do we. In the series finale, apartment 1901 empties out: everyone leaves, including Frasier, who flies to Chicago, determined to start anew. With regard to the print, I’ve come to appreciate the artist’s decision not to label any of the rooms, which grants the space a sort of second life: the show may have ended, but the apartment remains. There’s no “Frasier’s bedroom” or “Daphne’s bedroom,” just a three-bedroom apartment, fully furnished but otherwise a blank canvas, waiting to be inhabited, an ambiguity that allows me to fantasize how I might fill out the space were it my own.
The problem is, it feels much too big for one person, especially now. So for the time being, I prefer to view it as Frasier’s apartment. I don’t watch much Frasier anymore, but when I admire the floor plan lately—especially on days when I feel cooped up and pace around my apartment—it’s like I’m peeking in on my favorite characters’ lives, as though I see imaginary dots moving through the space: Marty rocking in his recliner; Frasier tottering from his bedroom to the kitchen, yelling at the dog, Eddie, to get off the sofa; Frasier’s brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), in an early season, fumbling over his words in front of Daphne. So much living happening within those walls.
