Sleek High Rise Apartment

Nice view.

Related to Cool House, this trope is for characters who live in a sleek, modern high-rise apartment overlooking a cityscape. Maybe it comes with a 360-degree view of the metropolitan area, with a car elevator, an indoor pool, a retractable skylight. Stainless Steel appliances and fine art are optional. Despite the title, it may be a Symbolic Glass House if there are wide windows.

The height suggests power (especially if they're a member of the Fiction 500): a mogul or baron likes to survey their domain. The setting conveys wealth, isolation, and influence, in the midst of teeming midtown. Said apartment is usually an indication of the character's chic style and taste. Inhabitants might be Wicked Cultured as well.

The Jeffersons could be the Trope Codifier: a married couple with a grown son (Lionel) that has moved out. George has his dry cleaning business keeping him nicely monied, and there are some wacky neighbors available for Comic Relief or for drama fodder. Much of the plot is confined to a limited space, which is ideal for television studio shooting.

Compare Big Fancy House. In sci-fi, may be housed in a Star Scraper. Contrast Apartment Complex of Horrors and Council Estate.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Marcus Octavius, the Big Bad of the anime film Highlander: The Search for Vengeance has one of these. A large towering office building overlooking New York City with a penthouse/pyramid structure on top.

Comic Books

• Reed Richards and the rest of the Fantastic Four were able to secure the top five floors of the Baxter Building in Lower Manhattan. Only 1½ floors are living space, while the rest are dedicated to laboratories and a repository of items too dangerous to go uncontained. By the time that Marvel Comics put John Byrne on the title, Reed had purchased the entire building. Though Reed is definitely not ostentatious, his growing family and Gadgeteer Genius skills mean the Four rarely lack for appurtenances.
• The Comedian was murdered by being thrown out of his own New York high rise window in Watchmen, putting in motion the entire plot of the comic and film adaptation.

Fan Works

• A Moon and World Apart: Twilight lives in one (courtesy of Luna arranging it when she was old enough), which is actually in one of the oldest buildings in the dome (it's where their leaders lived and worked out of during the early years), though it's been renovated over the centuries. She has the entire top floor to herself, consisting of a five-bedroom suite where she lives and a second suite that was converted into her private workshop.
• In misakiyu's illustrations of SlifofinaDragon's Sengoku Basara fanfics, Kyogoku Maria has a penthouse overlooking Basara town and some of Minato, Tokyo.

Films — Live-Action

• The Avengers (2012): Tony Stark has a very swanky penthouse in Stark Tower in Manhattan, in keeping with his being a billionaire industrialist playboy. It appears to become his primary residence after his mansion in California gets destroyed in Iron Man 3.
• Industrial magnate Eldon Tyrell from Blade Runner occupies a plush suite within the massive industrial Tyrell Pyramid. It's appointed with a subdued elegance: not quite Spartan, but clearly more functional than flashy. This man is effectively married to his work.
• Doctor Strange (2016): Stephen Strange's career as a world-class neurosurgeon affords him a large New York City apartment with Simple, yet Opulent modern furnishings, among many other creature comforts. After his Career-Ending Injury, he sells the contents and ultimately the apartment to fund his search for a remedy.
• The Dark Knight: Since Wayne Manor was burned to the ground in the previous film, Bruce Wayne lives in a nice penthouse. It's large enough to host parties, and sure enough, The Joker crashes into one such.
• Christian Grey's absurdly opulent high rise apartment from Fifty Shades Darker
• The narrator in Fight Club describes his home as a "filing cabinet for young professionals", a high-rise apartment block. He's no longer able to live there after someone blows up his apartment.
• This aesthetic is exploited in The Loft by a cabal of yuppies, who collectively lease a luxury apartment with a towering view of the city. They maintain this place as a "love den" for seducing cute babes, giving the illusion that they're wealthy moguls rather than the salarymen they are. The plot escalates when one partner discovers evidence of horrific carnage when it's his turn to use the loft.
• Poltergeist III is set in a high-rise apartment building. The Freeling family has sent Carol Anne to live with Diane's sister Pat and her husband Bruce Gardner in Chicago. They live in the luxury skyscraper (Chicago's 100-story John Hancock Center) of which Bruce is the manager.
• Predator 2: The titular Predator murders a bunch of folks inside of one, following a raid by Jamaican gangsters on a Colombian drug lord mid-coitus. Said high rise also overlooks downtown Los Angeles.
• Local Hero: Mac is a yuppie with a nice, modern, high-rise apartment in Dallas. After spending the film falling in love with a quaint, seaside Scottish village (and a certain woman living there), he returns to his fancy apartment, and it seems strangely alien.

Literature

• In the third Artemis Fowl novel, Jon Spiro’s apartment takes The Rich Have White Stuff to the tackiest possible extreme, but nobody can say it isn’t sleek and modern. The Old Money Fowls, by contrast, live in a hereditary manor.
• The Dresden Files: As of White Night, Thomas Raith lives in a luxury apartment in Chicago's expensive Gold Coast district, decorated in stark Art Deco style with plenty of stainless steel. Harry isn't surprised that he, a wealthy vampire from a Fiction 500 family, can afford it, but is surprised that the perennially messy Thomas can keep the place so neat.
• The narrator in Fight Club describes his home as a "filing cabinet for young professionals", a high-rise apartment block. He's no longer able to live there after someone blows up his apartment.
• Torchwood: Skypoint, first seen in its titular novel, is a high-rise apartment building with high levels of technology installed within it, such as fridges that order food, HD T Vs, and remotes that operate the lights, TV, and window blinds.

Live-Action TV

• Daredevil (2015):
  • Wilson Fisk has a very beautiful if minimalist high-rise penthouse in Chelsea. It's considered a top secret that only himself and James Wesley know about. They treat it as a very serious threat when Madame Gao manages to figure out where Fisk lives and personally visits him there to intimidate him. Vanessa moves in with Fisk partway through season 1. In the season 1 finale, this apartment is where the FBI arrest Fisk after Matt and Foggy get Detective Hoffman to flip on Fisk.
  • Marci Stahl lives in a pretty nice Upper East Side apartment.
  • Elektra lives in a Midtown penthouse in season 2, and it's established that she and Matt spent many nights there when they dated in college.
  • While it's technically just a sixth-floor place, Matt Murdock lives in a fairly spacious corner apartment in Hell's Kitchen. The place has a somewhat rundown aesthetic (the kitchen counter is still unfinished plywood), but it has a large open living room/kitchen space, and a spacious bedroom to the side. He explains to Karen that he's able to afford the apartment because the neon billboard across the street makes the place undesirable to anyone but a blind man like Matt himself, and rent prices are further driven down because Hell's Kitchen was hit hard during the Incident. Following the closure of Nelson & Murdock, we see at the start of The Defenders (2017) that Matt has also moved his old desk into his living room.
• Frasier's apartment fits the bill, and even has a cityscape view that wasn't even possible in real life until 2014 - ten years after the show's last episode was aired.
• Mrs. Coulter in His Dark Materials lives in a gorgeous Art Deco apartment with polished marble floors, beautiful decor, designer furniture, and a large balcony looking out over London.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): The moneyed vampire couple Louis de Pointe du Lac and Armand reside in a Dubai penthouse apartment that is the most desired real estate in the United Arab Emirates, and the Al Sharaf Tower is sufficiently tall that the edifice sways by design. The living room is vast and it has many windows, so Louis and Armand have a wide view of the cityscape. The décor is in the minimalist style and the walls are adorned with fine art, such as Francis Bacon's triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
• Iron Fist (2017):
  • Once Danny has gotten his identity reestablished, he spends his first few nights in a penthouse suite. However, as he falls in love with Colleen, he moves in with her at her dojo and makes that his primary residence.
  • Harold Meachum lives as a prisoner of the Hand in a special penthouse inside the General Electric Building.
• The Jeffersons: This spinoff from All in the Family is about literal upward mobility of an African-American couple named George and Louise Jefferson who move into a swanky high-rise building. George and Louise started out as one dry cleaner in Astoria, Queens. Their series has George's dry cleaning expand to multiple facilities, enabling the couple to move into a luxury condo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
• Jessica Jones (2015):
  • Trish Walker lives in a high-rise apartment in the Tribeca neighborhood. Following Jessica's experience with Kilgrave, Trish has turned her apartment into a virtual fortress, outfitting the place with bulletproof windows and a steel-reinforced front door with a security camera system, and converting Jessica's old bedroom into a private gym where she practices krav maga lessons (in season 1) and blows off steam (in season 2).
  • Kilgrave likes to regularly take over fancy penthouse apartments, as is his penchant for hedonistically indulging in the finer things in life at a whim, and using his mind control to keep the actual occupants from refusing.
  • In season 2, Jeri Hogarth has moved from her brownstone into a very fancy Upper East Side apartment.
• The Punisher (2017):
  • Dinah Madani lives with her parents in a nice Upper West Side apartment.
  • Billy Russo lives in a sleek-looking bachelor's pad.
• The Steve Harvey Show: Steve Hightower who was a 1970s funk legend (who is now a high school music teacher/vice-principal) lives in one of these, overlooking Chicago. Probably a hold over from his more lucrative career as a musician.
• Squid Game: The ultra-rich host of the Deadly Game has a massive high-rise apartment that's almost completely empty except for the corner with his sickbed, demonstrating that all his wealth hasn't brought him happiness or staved off his mortality.
• Stringer Bell from The Wire is a drug-lord who has a high-rise apartment showing his sophistication. McNulty is genuinely surprised when he first gets a look at Stringer's refined and elegant penthouse, full of classical books and styled very differently from the archetypal mansion of a drug lord. Also has a great view of the city.

Video Games

• In Grand Theft Auto Online the most expensive player homes take the form of these.
• Mass Effect 3: The Citadel DLC has Shepard being granted the use of Anderson's apartment◊ on the Citadel and sure enough, it's a multi-floor exercise in restrained opulence overlooking a futuristic Neon City
• One early mission in Saints Row: The Third involves acquiring a new headquarters, since the Saints are stranded in Steelport, an island city controlled by The Syndicate. After spotting one of the rival gang's apartments - complete with rooftop pool and helipad - the Boss parachutes down in the middle of a party, blasts through the Syndicate's goons, reaches the elevators to let Saints reinforcements in, and foils an attempt to blow up the compromised penthouse, all while "Power" plays in the background. The high rise becomes the Saint's primary base for the rest of the game, leading to missions where you have to defend it from your rivals.
  Pierce: So, what d'you think?
  The Boss: Some asshole's in my pool.

Webcomics

• Dead City: It comes out that JP lives in a 19th-floor luxury apartment on the Toronto waterfront, complete with a greenhouse, not that it does him much good when he's stuck far away from it in the Zombie Apocalypse. In the finale, he and Mikael make it there and build a new life together.
  JP: At least it's not the penthouse.
• The Pizza Delivery Man and the Gold Palace: Seo-an lives in a penthouse in the Gold Palace, one of Korea's most sought-after luxury apartments which houses some of the country's wealthiest.

Western Animation

• David Xanatos is usually the arch-nemesis to the Gargoyles, and hatches his latest Xanatos Gambit from his penthouse suite, perched atop his corporate offices. Xanatos likes to survey Manhattan from his towering aerie since he intends to make it all his personal domain.
• Rick and Morty: In "Rest and Ricklaxation", Healthy Morty moves to New York and makes a lot of money as a stockbroker with his newfound Lack of Empathy. He is shown to have been living in an apartment with a wall of windows looking over NY.
• The Venture Brothers: After the death of Jonas Jr., Rusty inherits his estate and quickly moves into a penthouse atop a highrise in the center of New York City.

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