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Apartment 4A is the primary setting in The Big Bang Theory, and is the apartment where Sheldon and Leonard live. It is situated in an apartment complex at 2311 N. Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena, California. Due to the primary characters in the series, albiet Penny, being of the "nerd" social classification, the apartment has been dubbed as "Nerdvana" by Howard in the season 3 episode "The Nerdvana Annihilation".

Apartment 4A is located on the fourth floor of the building across from Apartment 4B, where Penny lives. 4A is known to be a corner apartment, being that it has windows facing outside on two sides.

LayoutEdit

The apartment has one living room, one bathroom, and two bedrooms. A hallway links the the living room to the bedrooms. The kitchen is part of the main living area.

Immediately upon entering, the wall on the right houses Sheldon and Leonard's desks and the TV. The wall ends in the kitchen part. This wall is rarely visible, being the wall that is the view into the apartment from which the episodes are filmed, and has only been shown on two occassions (one is in "The Euclid Alternative", S2E5). There is an unseen window on this wall, being that Sheldon likes to open it to create a cross breeze when he is sitting in his spot.

The wall immediately to the left after entering the apartment has a long bookshelf that ends at a small closet, with the wall itself ending at a large window with a desk and telescope. Pasadena City Hall can be seen from from this window, which has has been used on several occasions:

"The Tangerine Factor" (S1E17), Penny throws her ex-boyfriend Mike's iPod out it
"The Panty Piñata Polarization" (S2E07), Sheldon shows Penny that he hung her clothes from a telephone pole outside
"The Einstein Approximation" (S3E14), Sheldon throws a whiteboard out the window, causing the sound of car tire screeching and car horns, implying that there is a fairly large road just down the window
"The Ornithophobia Diffusion" (S5E09), a blue jay lands on the window sill outside, which upsets Sheldon

After the window, there is a corner and the hallway that leads to the bathroom, as well as Sheldon and Leonard's bedrooms. The kitchen is a small area that has an island with rarely used barstools since they usually eat in the living room area.

Sheldon, at one point in time, had painted luminous glow-in-the-dark arrows on the floor pointing to the various nearest emergency exits throughout the room. He shows them to Raj in "The Roommate Transmogrification" (S4E24), but gets rid of them before "The Friendship Contraction" (S5E15) when he explains that they were "wildly carcinogenic".

Production-wise, the bathroom interior, Sheldon's bedroom, and Leonard's bedroom are actually filmed on a different set than the rest of the apartment. The actual apartment set ends at a corner in the hallway immediately after the bathroom door. This is for easier filming access and better view of the actors for the studio audience.

BathroomEdit

The bathroom has a double bath/shower. Sheldon and Leonard have a shower curtain with the periodic table of elements printed on it. Sheldon has placed a UV sterilization light box there to stop his toothbrush from being infected by germs. Sheldon also has tape on the floor which serves to avoid splatter on the mirror from flossing teeth, and to stop urine from getting on the floor when men use the toilet. Sheldon also has a squeegee to clean the mirror.

Sheldon's bedroomEdit

Sheldon's bedroom is located immediately after the bathroom. Sheldon usually keeps his bedroom locked, and rarely allows anyone inside.

Leonard's bedroomEdit

Leonard's bedroom is the last room in the hallway. There is a ledge outside that runs by both bedroom windows. Sheldon uses this during "The Bozeman Reaction" to access Leonard's room because he is too paranoid to go out of his bedroom because they were burglarized earlier in the episode.

HistoryEdit

In "The Staircase Implementation", the story of how Leonard and Sheldon meet is revealed. Sheldon places an ad for a roommate after his former roommate is driven to the brink of madness from Sheldon's antics. Leonard encounters Sheldon's former roommate on his way to the interview with Sheldon. The roommate tells Leonard to run away. Leonard is accepted by Sheldon as his new roommate and inherits the former roommate's room, only to discover that the roommate wrote "DIE SHELDON DIE" in red paint (like in a slasher film) on the wall.

At this time, the apartment also had significantly less furniture in the living room. Sheldon's only placement was two lawn chairs and cinder blocks as the TV stand. Even at this point in time, Sheldon's lawn chair was placed in the exact spot that he claims later on the couch. Their first major addition in furniture to the apartment was the leather couch, in which Leonard buys for a $100 from tenants on the first floor who were moving out.

In "The Bozeman Reaction", the apartment got burglarized. Some of Sheldon and Leonard's game systems and various games were stolen. The police were also called to the apartment in "The Zarnecki Incursion", in which Sheldon's World of Warcraft account was hacked.

In "The Staircase Implementation", an "apartment flag" is mentioned as a small blue flag with a coat of arms on it of a gold lion rampant on a field of azure on it. Flipping it upside down signifies that the apartment is in distress. In "The Roommate Transmogrification", Raj was given a lapel pin version.

List of known items in the apartmentEdit

Appliances

Kettle (Sheldon loves his tea)
Microwave oven
Refrigerator
Stove
Battlestar Galactica Cylon toaster^[1]
Toaster oven (destroyed by the guys' battle robot in "The Killer Robot Instability")

Comics

Batman cookie jar^[1]^[2] (Leonard gives it to Sheldon in "The Bat Jar Conjecture")
Leonard's bat signal (built by Leonard in "The Recombination Hypothesis" but Stephanie throws out in "The Vartabedian Conundrum")
Green Lantern lantern and ring (Sheldon brings them to a university mixer party)^[1]^[2]
Hulk Hands^[3] (Raj gives them to Sheldon in "The Psychic Vortex")
Various comic books

Furniture

Glass coffee table (where the gang usually eats and plays various games on)
Desks (for the laptops and iMac near the back window)
Leather couch (with Sheldon's spot)
Lounge chair

Gaming

Dart board (on back of the front door)
Rubik's Cube tissue box cover (seen in many episodes but featured in "The Rhinitis Revelation" where Leonard holds it out to a sick Sheldon)
Halo 3: Legendary Edition Master Chief Replica Helmet^[1]^[2] (was on an end table/mini-bookcase in front of rear desk by living room window)
Various games
Video game consoles: Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super NES, Nintendo 64, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation (1-3), Xbox, Xbox 360

Science-related

17 Base Pair DNA Double Helix Model molecule model^[1]
Periodic table shower curtain (in bathroom)^[4]
Planetarium (plastic sphere on top of bookcase behind couch)
Plasma globe (on bookcase behind couch)
Sheldon's reverse osmosis machine
Telescope

Star Wars

Leonard's green lightsaber (Leonard wields it after hearing a noise late at night in "The Big Bran Hypothesis", mocks Sheldon with it after the power goes out in "The Friendship Contraction", and Penny and Sheldon try a contest where they spin around it and then rush over to do a division problem while still dizzy in "The Re-Entry Minimization")
Boba Fett helmet (worn by Sheldon in "The Ornithophobia Diffusion" as he approaches the bird on the window ledge)
Action figures (on Leonard's nightstand in his bedroom first seen in "The Precious Fragmentation", a Sideshow Collectibles Han Solo Heroes of the Rebellion in Stormtrooper Disguise Sixth-Scale Figure and a Kotobukiya Chewbacca 15-inch Pre-Painted Soft Vinyl Model; the Luke Skywalker in Stormtrooper Disguise Sixth Scale Figure that accompanies the former has been on the bookshelf next to the apartment entryway since "The Vengeance Formulation")

Other film and television and pop culture

Weta Gollum from The Lord of the Rings model figure^[5]
A Game of Thrones bastard sword "Longclaw" (Sheldon and Leonard buy it at the comic book store in "The Russian Rocket Reaction")
Various action figures

Technology

Amazon Kindle (seen in "The Pants Alternative"^[6] and "The Gorilla Experiment"^[7])
Apple iMac
Cordless telephone
Dyson bladeless fan
Laptop computers (Sheldon and Leonard originally both had Dell XPS m1710s--Sheldon's was red--but both were stolen in "The Bozeman Reaction" and replaced with a red Alienware M17 Nebula for Sheldon and a Dell XPS Adamo for Leonard)
Razer Orca headset^[8] (usually hanging on the Apple iMac monitor on the desk near the rear window)^[9]

Miscellaneous

Sheldon's model trains (Sheldon gets an HO-guage model railroad starter set in "The Pulled Groin Extrapolation")
Various books and computer software on shelves
- Leonard's high school yearbook (read by Amy in "The Pulled Groin Extrapolation")
Sheldon's and Leonard's whiteboards

See Part 7: Shedding Light on Dark Matter of the book Unraveling the Mysteries of the Big Bang Theory by George Beahm (2011, BenBella Books, ISBN 9781936661312) for more fantasy, sci-fi, pop culture, and other items mentioned on the show in general.