🛋 The most influential interior design magazine you've never heard of
This week's issue is a bit late — I took the liberty of spending extra time researching, and I have no regrets about that decision! I hope you'll enjoy reading this installment as much as I enjoyed writing it.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at my favorite bookstore in San Francisco (shout out Browser Books on Fillmore!) and I decided to buy a biannual interiors magazine Apartamento. I haven't read it in a while — I was keeping up with it in the early 2010s and even produced a photo shoot dedicated to the magazine's office in Barcelona, but barely read it in the last couple of years.
One article immediately caught my attention — the aesthetic of the space felt heavily influenced by viral trends from TikTok and Pinterest. This is not Apartamento editorial team's fault. Tech algorithms are a homogenizing force that no editor can compete with — platforms rule our desires and shape physical environment (Kyle Chayka even coined a term, Airspace, for this streamlined aesthetic).
Finding traces of algorithmic culture in one of the most thoughtful interiors publications made me think about the predecessor of Apartamento that came out before these homogenizing forces came into play. Nest magazine, a huge inspiration for Apartamento’s founders, was published between 1997 and 2003 — the right time to forever remain in our memory and not be tainted by the post-2008 budget cuts in the publishing industry or competition with blogs, Pinterest, and AD Open Door.
Nest's creators first pioneered the type of magazine that looks more like an art book than a periodical — something that many other printed publications that are still around today are trying to emulate. I discovered Nest during the pandemic and SCOURED the internet for old issues and books authored by its founders. Below is my love letter to the magazine that feels fun and funny and even transgressive 20 years later. As someone who wanted to be a journalist since middle school, and then worked for multiple (digital) publications, this is what I imagined a magazine could and should be.
Here are all the things about Nest that I find tremendously inspiring:
Joseph Holtzman
The founder of Nest Magazine seems to be a character straight out of a 90s indie movie rather than a real person. The son of a wealthy luggage manufacturer who owned Baltimore Luggage, he lived an extremely secluded life until he was in his late 30s (probably due to his agoraphobia). At the age of 38, he started Nest and channeled his obsession with highly personalized and even protective spaces into every issue. Interestingly, Holtzman never used the term "interior design" — according to Lisa Zeiger, Nest’s former editor, he thought that it’s "too strict and puritanical." Instead, he called himself a decorator, which for him was an occupation that was more intuitive and engaged with pleasure.
Derry Moore’s photos
Born Henry Dermot Ponsonby Moore, the 12th Earl of Drogheda, Derry Moore is a British photographer behind the magazine's most impressive photo shoots, from palatial estates in India to elegant homes of English aristocracy. His works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Here is how Holtzman described meeting Moore:
I asked him [Derry Moore] to shoot the home of Aiden Shaw, a porn star who was briefly on my masthead. Aiden was a pretty interesting figure in the late-90s. He was one of the top gay porn stars, an AIDS activist, as well as a novelist. Derry was intrigued by my choice of subject, and he told me that I should start my own magazine, and I did. I was 39 years old.
Famous contributors
Nest magazine had the most impressive masthead among interior design magazines: Mary Gaitskill wrote about a little-known architect's house built out of shipyard junk, Catherine Opie photographed members of the SF queer scene, Chuck Palahniuk reported on life aboard a nuclear submarine, and Eileen Myles lived in a cardboard box designed for homeless people in Rotterdam. None of them were experts in decorative arts or interiors, which made their reporting even more interesting.
Graphic Design
In addition to publishing and editing Nest, Joseph Holtzman was its sole art director. He wasn't able to create layouts himself and relied on a hired assistant to do all the digital design for him, but it made a huge impact nevertheless. Now Nest is most known for its bright, eclectic layouts, always changing logo, and luxurious die-cut covers, but in the early 2000s Holtzman's design sensibilities weren't as universally loved. Here is how Todd Oldham remembers it:
Getting to shoot for Nest was a treat, but seeing what Joe was going to do with my images was the big thrill. Sometimes he would warp them to accommodate the physical shape of the magazine or occasionally add aggressive graphics. [...] Joe has shared with me that, on occasion, a photographer would not share my enthusiasm about his sometimes elaborate design additions to their work.
High and low
For the majority of shelter magazines, it was typical to have one unifying aesthetic or focus area, be it DIY renovation projects or celebrity homes. What immediately stands out is the range of topics Nest covered — from rooms featuring all possible Farrah Fawcett merchandise and Russian orphanages to the Rothschild interiors. According to Lisa Zeiger, Holtzman was focusing on "only fully realized interiors created by both experts and amateurs." In her keynote at the New York School of Interior Design, she notes:
In a lesser editor's hands, this range of prismatic subjects and luscious graphic design would have caused whiplash, but Nest had a secret weapon, and that was Joe's singular and superior, highly evolved and sophisticated taste. We would learn a whole new way of seeing interior space.
Follow me down the Nest magazine rabbit hole:
SCOUTING WITH: Joseph Holtzman by David Colman — a late 1990s profile of Holtzman as he was starting the magazine.
Rooms by Joseph Holtzman, Derry Moore, and Carl Skoggard — a book with fascinating interiors shot by Derry Moore, including my absolute favorite — Rudolf Nureyev’s Paris apartment. Here is how Carl Skoggard described it:
Meanwhile, the etymology for the word handsome has always seemed to me to show good solid sense. The earliest traceable meanings, "ready to hand" or "easy to handle," used in connection with objects of use, made the slightest of transits before attaching themselves to the likes of Rudolf Nureyev. After all, doesn't the handsome man strike you as functionally superb, as someone you are dying to get your hands on? These Paris rooms, conceived with the help of Renzo Mongiardino's associate Emilio Carcano, were as tactile as Nureyev himself.
Nest–A Wild Adventure by Lisa Zeiger — a talk by Nest’s former decorative arts editor at the New York School of Interior Design.
“NEST.” Or, How PROZAC Spawned the Greatest Interiors Magazine, Ever by Carson Chan — a recent interview with Holtzman. I loved that the author also explained how the magazine was funded:
Holtzman, born in 1957 in Baltimore, came from a wealthy luggage-making family that gave him the freedom to brood over his own curiosity. Similarly, making money was never a real concern for Nest. The magazine was run out of an apartment next to his own in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Production costs per issue hovered around $6 a copy, and with a newsstand price of just under $10 in 1997, Holtzman would cover the rest of the cost. At one point, he sold a Matisse bronze to finance the magazine. Holtzman told journalist Fred Bernstein in 2004 that he invested somewhere between $4 to $6 million of his own money into the magazine.
118 Years of History Through the Lens of Shelter Magazines by Laura Fenton — this article doesn't mention Nest but provides context about shelter magazines as a genre.
What’s your favorite forgotten magazine? And should I cover other similar publications in the future? I have a couple ideas, but I’m curious if it’s of any interest to anyone subscribed! Please, drop your favorite magazines and thoughts on turning this into a (mini?) series of posts in the comments!