“Friends” Production Designer Reveals Joey and Chandler Almost Didn't Live Across the Hall From Monica and Rachel

Production designer John Shaffner told 'Architectural Digest' how the characters came to be neighbors

Some of Friends’ most memorable scenes took place in the hallway between Monica and Rachel’s apartment and Joey and Chandler’s — but that almost wasn’t the case.

The beloved sitcom’s production designer John Shaffner told Architectural Digest that his initial model of the set for the New York City home of Monica (Courteney Cox) and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) included an entrance area outside the hallway.

But one of the show’s executive producers, Kevin Bright, nixed the extra space for the pilot.

“I think we should have another working space for the performance,” Shaffner says he told Bright. “And don’t you think that ultimately the boys should live across the hall?” he asked referring to Joey (Matt LeBlanc) and Chandler (the late Matthew Perry),

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The rest, of course, is history, and the hallway is as recognizable to fans today as Monica’s purple-walled living room

An added bonus to the layout was that the proximity easily explained why the characters were often in each other’s spaces, which were also frequently visited by Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) and Ross (David Schwimmer).

Another component to the famous set was initially inspired by a sixth-floor walk-up in Manhattan Shaffner had once lived in himself: He wanted to place the apartments on the building’s top floor so that the characters would always be out of breath when they made it up the stairs.

However, that idea didn’t last long.

“It was a moment we went, ‘Oh, [we] 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.”

In Friends’ 1994 premiere episode, Rachel famously moves in with Monica after leaving fiance Barry at the altar. In the series’ fourth season, Monica and Rachel are forced to swap apartments with the guys after losing a trivia contest. Rachel eventually moves out of the apartment in season 6 and Chandler — who’s begun dating his future wife Monica — moves in.

While Friends was filmed on a soundstage in Los Angeles, the show used footage of a real building on the corner of Grove Street and Bedford Street in Manhattan’s West Village for exterior shots.

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After Cox joined Instagram in 2019, she shared a video of herself visiting the iconic New York intersection.

“Goodnight guys, I’m going home,” she joked as she walked toward the building.

In the style of the long-running series’ episode titles, she captioned the post, “The One Where My Rent Went Up $12,000.”

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