“I’m a big girl in a big city with a big house to furnish.” Minutes into the season three premiere of And Just Like That… the humble viewer is confronted with the not-so-humble quandary befuddling our heroine: She’s got fabric—and a relationship—on backorder. I couldn’t help but wonder…has Carrie left the rest of behind?
It seems that way, even if the show is hesitant to admit it. Carrie now resembles a protagonist in a Nancy Meyers movie much more so than her once financially-illiterate self. They say money changes people, but instead of engaging with the complexity of inheriting her husband’s wealth, we’re asked to believe that Carrie is still, effectively, from the block, even if that block now comes with a key to the city’s only private park.
Carrie sits at the window of her new home in And Just Like That…
I, for one, am not buying it. A particular scene in episode 15, season 4 of Sex And The City feels as apt a metaphor for my feelings now as it was for Carrie’s then. Her fiancé, Aidan Shaw (John Corbett), has purchased the apartment next door to hers and is taking a sledge-hammer to a wall that divides the two. As he begins to break through, Carrie panics, eventually shouting at him to stop, unable to face the impending new reality as it takes physical shape.
Carrie in her old apartment.
Fast forward twenty-odd years and this sums up my relationship with And Just Like That… The show is a proverbial sledge-hammer, demolishing what I loved about the way Carrie lived—shoes in the oven, bed in the living room, cigarettes inside—to make way for unbridled real estate porn. This isn’t Selling The City. It’s not even The Real Housewives. What happened to the girl who would buy Vogue instead of groceries because she felt it fed her more?
Carrie stands in the kitchen of the Tribeca loft she lived in for just 24 hours.
There was something honest about the way Carrie lived in Sex And The City that isn’t true of her character today: She had constraints. She was limited by her budget, her love life, her career prospects. (A shame «Little Cathy» and her magic cigarettes wasn’t green lit.) That relatability is why fans still make the pilgrimage to her apartment’s West Village façade. (Or used to, before it was gated.) SATC knew this, celebrating the ways in which Carrie was able to live authentically even if it meant accidentally spending $40,000 on Manolo Blahniks.
Now, that neighborhood is full of young people who casually spend that much (if not double) on rent in a year, while Carrie has become an archive of the eccentricity she once embodied, running around the empty halls of her Gramercy Park townhouse like a yassified Miss Havisham.
And Just Like That… is, in many ways, the story of a woman trying to find herself through real estate. It eschews the intimacy of decoration in favor of the unflinching logic of an asset class: You get what you pay for. Carrie pays for a lot. Without limits to run up against, who will she become? I’m not sure I want to find out.
Sean Santiago is ELLE Decor’s Deputy Editor, covering news, trends and talents in interior design, hospitality and travel, culture, and luxury shopping. Since starting his career at an interior design firm in 2011, he has gone on to cover the industry for Vogue, Architectural Digest, Sight Unseen, PIN-UP and Domino. He is the author of The Lonny Home (Weldon Owens, 2018), has produced scripted social content for brands including West Elm and Streeteasy, and is sometimes recognized on the street for his Instagram Reels series, #DanceToDecor
