BOOKS 'Sitcom Style' explores favorite TV homes

The tour goes through the sets of more than two dozen shows.
NEWSDAY
NEW YORK -- What type of interior designer writes a book about television? Someone who once believed those weren't characters on the tube but real people. Someone like Diana Friedman.
"When I was watching television as a kid, my older sister used to tell me that if I could see them, then they could see me, too," says Friedman, 33, a freelance writer who, as a child in Manhattan, fixated on "The Brady Bunch" kids as well as their four-bedroom, three-bath California split-level house.
Friedman's love for TV, especially sitcoms, and her passion for interior design meet in the new book "Sitcom Style: Inside America's Favorite TV Homes" (Clarkson Potter, $29.95). She serves up 50-plus years of pop culture with a picture-perfect tour through the sets of more than two dozen shows, from "I Love Lucy" to "Everybody Loves Raymond." Full of color photos and recollections of set designers for some of TV's most popular programs, "Sitcom Style" is a blend of obsession, confession and investigation. (It's probably just what Kramer was thinking when he pushed for that coffee-table book on coffee tables.)
Like lots of Americans, Friedman grew up watching TV -- perhaps a little too much. Like lots of Americans, she found herself, as well as friends and colleagues, saying things like, "I grew up just like 'the Cosby Show'" or "My childhood was very 'Leave It to Beaver.'"
Two-year hunt
Unlike lots of Americans, Friedman spent two years hunting nationwide for set photographs and tidbits from the shows' designers to put into a book. (In case you're wondering, many pieces from these legendary shows now sit in the offices of those same designers.) She included interior and exterior photos; several of the latter are of New York City buildings from sitcoms such as "Sex and the City," "Friends," "The Odd Couple," "Mad About You" and "Seinfield." Building addresses, of course, are in the book.
Friedman emphasizes that sets are much more than a series of exterior TV shots and a collection of random props; they're carefully structured show pieces, built to unveil moods and to help actors create memorable characters. The sets breathe life into personalities, unwrapping mothers and fathers and siblings and friends so real that a child might actually believe she could look back at them.
It's in the details
How detailed are designers? Mel Cooper, set designer for "Seinfeld," made sure the cereal boxes on Jerry's kitchen shelf in his Manhattan apartment were alphabetized each week. "I love that because it identifies his obsessive-compulsive behavior," Friedman says. Melinda Ritz, the designer for "Will & amp; Grace," another show in the city, used a framed Boys Life magazine cover to hint at Will's sexual orientation. And the cultured and sophisticated appearance of Frasier Crane's Seattle apartment came at a price -- a half-million bucks -- including Martin Crane's recliner, says set designer Ray Christopher.
Some decorators shopped at thrift shops and antique stores, Others at Sears and J.C. Penney. Some even rumbled through the garages and attics of relatives. The goals were to provide more realistic looks inside the homes.