The instruction was simple but emotionally complex: Make Carrie Bradshaw feel overwhelmed in her own home. For And Just Like That…’s third season, production designer Miguel Lopez-Castillo and set decorator Karin Wiesel Holmes were tasked with creating a space designed to mirror the Carrie’s internal state. “It was like a dollhouse that is too big,” Lopez-Castillo tells ELLE Decor. “[Showrunner Michael Patrick King] wanted her to feel really small in the space.”

Carrie is learning to navigate a life that suddenly feels too big for her to manage alone. Her townhouse needed to reflect that disorientation and sense of being unmoored in a space that should feel like home but doesn’t, at least not yet.

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“I designed it to be a little over-scale and bigger,” Lopez-Castillo says, before referencing the British series, Doctor Who. “It’s like the TARDIS, right? It’s bigger on the inside than it is from the outside.” The TARDIS, Doctor Who’s time traveling police box, makes for a particularly apt comparison—both spaces defy expectations of size and create a sense of displacement in their occupants.

Beyond making rooms feel larger than they should, the design team deliberately created a space that would feel authentically overwhelming to someone processing grief and major life changes. Any part of the renovation feels like too much. “At first she just stays up in the little office room and she can't even decorate it. She spends the whole season finding pieces," Lopez-Castillo says.

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This wasn't accidental. When people are overwhelmed by life, they often retreat to smaller, more manageable spaces within their homes. Carrie's initial inability to fully inhabit her new townhouse represents how trauma can make us shrink our world down to what feels controllable.

The townhouse’s emptiness was crucial to achieving this effect, Lopez-Castillo notes. Without the familiar clutter and accumulated belongings that made her old apartment feel lived-in, the townhouse's grand proportions become more pronounced and more intimidating.

But the scale manipulation was also a practical necessity for television production. "The footprint is significantly larger than the real townhouse," he said. "And it has to be because of all the script requirements." The set needed to accommodate cameras, crews, and the technical demands of filming, which meant walls on hinges, removable sections, and sight lines that don't exist in real architecture.

Yet even these practical considerations served the emotional narrative. The fact that the townhouse doesn't make architectural sense adds to the viewer's subconscious feeling that something is off and that Carrie is living in a space that defies normal expectations and comfort.

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The design team also made deliberate choices to preserve the townhouse's period details, avoiding the kind of modern renovation that would signal confidence and control. "We didn't want it to have anything, any sense of a modern update, a conversion," Lopez-Castillo says. Instead, the team kept the old stove, the wooden closet cabinetry from the 1950s, and more, and all of it contributed to a sense that Carrie had inherited someone else's life rather than creating her own.

Really, the space functions exactly as intended: overwhelming but not impossibly so, grand but not comfortable, beautiful but not yet home. It's forcing its occupant to grow into it gradually, room by room, decision by decision. The townhouse challenges Carrie and pushes her to expand beyond the small space she's been occupying emotionally since Big's death.

The townhouse makes Carrie feel small on purpose because healing sometimes means learning to inhabit spaces—both physical and emotional—that initially feel too big for us to manage.