Writer Lisa Zeiger on working for Nest magazine, secret gardens, and creativity
After writing about Nest, a pioneering interior design magazine that was in print between 1997 and 2003, a couple of months ago, I wanted to interview someone who was a part of the editorial team and learn more about the way the magazine was operating and what made it so influential.
In a landscape of legacy interior design publications and new, but extremely polished and minimalist publications like Wallpaper, Nest stood out thanks to its eclectic approach. The first issue featured a story about an IKEA employee who was a fan of Farrah Fawcett and covered his whole room in the actress's memorabilia — magazine covers, hair sprays, dolls, shampoo bottles, and beanbag chairs. This story suggested that readers could expect this kitschy sensibility from Nest, but that was only the beginning — the magazine combined high and low, featuring the homes of porn stars alongside photoshoots of British aristocracy estates.
What makes a space in sync with Mr. Holtzman's vision, […] is an urgency, a design that transcends the boundaries of taste, good or bad. “We're all attracted to people who do things with passion, […] and with Joe, I'd go one step further and say compulsion.” SCOUTING WITH: Joseph Holtzman; Guerrilla in the Midst by David Colman, September 10, 1998
As I was obsessing over the next legacy and compulsively buying old issues on eBay, I stumbled upon a talk by Lisa Zeiger, a writer and former decorative arts editor at Nest. Lisa was kind enough to agree to be interviewed and discuss her career, her influences, and her time working with the magazine founder, Joseph Holtzman.
Lisa’s interest in decorative arts began when she first discovered the Bauhaus’ legacy, leading her to study at Sotheby's Institute and write about art and interior design, as well as passionately decorating her own apartments in Glasgow and then in NYC. We talked about Nest’s eclectic style, Lisa’s favorite pieces for the magazine, and her new book about private gardens in New York City.
How did you get interested in decorative arts and writing?
When I was about six years old, I started constructing little idealized dollhouses out of cardboard boxes — it came partly from my desire to redecorate my parents' house. Then, when I was around 13, my mother bought some small Studio Vista paperbacks on the history of cinema — they were brilliant. I began finding other subjects in the series, a book on the Aesthetic Movement, for example.
There was something about furniture that moved me deeply — and still does. When I found Studio Vista’s book on the Bauhaus, it was as if I’d found my calling, although I did not aspire to be a designer. I just wanted to immerse myself in the history of beautiful objects. At the Bauhaus, there was a silver teapot by Marianne Brandt that caught my attention; tapestries and upholstery by Gunta Stölzl; and then there were the architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who, along with the Dutch De Stijl movement and the Expressionist architect Bruno Taut, brought intense color to their radically simple designs. Someday I want to write Bruno Taut’s biography. He had a fascinating life, leaving Germany in the 1940s and living for a time in Japan. He spent his last years in Turkey, where he was much respected as a designer and teacher.
In my early teens, I attended an all-girls school where I met a girl from a very eccentric family. They lived in a beautiful Spanish style house in Beverly Hills, and they were very much involved in what I would call rich Hollywood bohemia. My friend’s parents were an education to me. They collected works by Ed Ruscha and David Hockney, among others, the first time I’d seen original contemporary artworks in a house rather than a museum.
In 1972, they decided on impulse to move to London. This girl’s mother was good friends with David Hockney. I spent a summer with them in London, and we were all invited to tea at Hockney’s flat one day. He had the best stuff — for example, decorative wooden cut-out trees that had been made by Mo McDermott, Hockney’s studio helper and an artist himself. That was when I was 15.
In one of your keynotes, you mentioned that studying at Sotheby's Institute informed a lot of your work as a writer. Could you please tell us a bit more about it?
Sotheby’s gave me the best education out of all the schools I attended, and I'm an Ivy League graduate. Initially, from 1987 to ‘88, I studied in London, and then went on to Christie’s program at the University of Glasgow the following year. What was wonderful about Sotheby's was that it was not yet affiliated with any university. It was where debutantes from different countries would go to learn about fine things so they could set the table beautifully when they got married.
The teachers were mostly curators who had worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Their knowledge was formidable. They never read from note cards. It was all in their heads, and they were fluent, fascinating speakers. But at the same time, they had practical experience working in museums and actually handling objects. In those days, curators were called keepers.
It's such a beautiful word, a keeper; a learned person who loves and cherishes forms that have evolved through history, usually with a particular material as their starting point. Hence there were keepers of ceramics, of silver, of embroideries, of furniture.
The phrase “cherish or perish” comes to mind when I remember these gifted mavens, most with advanced degrees from elite schools like the Courtauld Institute. Then again there were self-taught experts. One of them, the late Raymond Notley, worked for decades as a foreign language telephone operator for British Telecom. From his salary, he amassed a world-class collection of 19th and 20th-century glass and ceramics which he bequeathed to the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.
What was really interesting about our professors was that even though they knew social history, their approach was object-based teaching. They could tell you all about the physical characteristics, manufacturing, materials, and style of the tiniest object. And of course, we were taught about the designers or makers of these things. During class, the teacher would bring in objects and ask us what we thought they were, and we would write down our hypotheses about the history of the object based solely on its appearance.
How did it inform your writing or decorating?
When I went to Sotheby’s, I was really only interested in early 20th-century furniture. And then when we started the first course, Styles in Art, it gave me a much longer vocabulary that I could use. We talked about architecture as the foundation of all the other arts, which is actually a very Bauhaus idea. "The ornamentation of the building was once the main purpose of the visual arts." I remember just absorbing it all — each object and each building. Every image that we were shown was more beautiful than the last.
How did you meet Joseph Holtzman and what made you interested in Nest?
I first met Joe at his sprawling Upper East Side apartment. It gave new depth and panache to the word “eclectic.” After spending seven years in Europe where I had done a lot of magazine writing, I returned to my small apartment in NYC. It was later featured in Nest — all the fabrics were red, and there were shelves, and paintings and ornaments on every wall. Looking back, it had a kind of Victorian density. I was in a decorating frenzy, and I asked one of my contractors where I could get a good haircut. He recommended someone in the Village. It turns out that Jason Croy on West Fourth Street was the salon of choice for the rich and the creative. Jason always had the most amazing flower arrangements by his partner, florist David Brown.
I became Jason's client, and during one of the visits, I complained about the difficulty of pitching stories to magazines. So one day, he mentioned that he had another client who was starting a magazine and thought I might be interested in meeting him. This person was Joe Holtzman. He had a charming setup in an apartment on the top floor of a building in the East Seventies off Madison.
Joe possessed a most curious style, attired in plaid or flowered pants, which made a bizarre but ultimately harmonious impression. He was unafraid to wear psychedelic clothing when it wasn't popular. He could pull off the same eclectic style in his apartment, which had fabrics in vibrant colors like turquoise and orange. His apartment featured a small Rembrandt etching and another by Goya; dark haunting items that clashed beautifully with his 1960s-inspired Op-Art fabrics and wallpapers, some of which he printed himself.
When I joined Nest in 1997, our experiments cost Joe dearly, both in terms of people and processes. It took us two years to get the magazine onto the shelves of magazine stores! Regardless, Nest was a charmed coterie of dedicated oddballs. Joe's idea, which I now recognize as really smart, was to avoid hiring design writers; he mostly focused on fiction writers and, in some cases, journalists who covered other disciplines.
He also hired the author Matthew Stadler, a young novelist and Guggenheim fellow with the beat sensibility of the 1950s, who brought some very subversive writers into our fold, well-known renegades like Frederick Tuten and Eileen Myles.
The topics we covered were different from those that fill other shelter magazines. Joe once said to me, "It's not interesting if somebody just sticks chewing gum to the wall." We would get a lot of weird proposals from people, but there had to be a high seriousness even about the most debauched things.
Another big departure from other shelter magazines was the advertisers that Joe chose — there was no furniture or anything like that. It was all about fashion. He was always several steps ahead of even the most sophisticated New Yorkers.
What was your favorite issue or maybe one of your favorite assignments as a writer during this period?
My favorite piece was about Carlo Mollino. I spent three or four weeks writing this piece because I really needed time to think about this story. I was fascinated by prostitution and the idea that Mollino would invite women in, dress them beautifully, and create his famous polaroids. And then there was his apartment which he made so otherworldly. That was his own very private world and, from what I understand, he would only go there to photograph these ladies.
Another project I really loved doing was the Rosemarie Trockel wallpaper because I knew her quite well at that point. Joe wanted her to design a wallpaper that he would actually be able to use to paper a room and then have a sample of it on the cover. She blew up photos of caterpillar droppings that were just blobs of different shapes, and transposed them onto flocked wallpaper. The pattern had to be velvety and it was hard to find someone to manufacture the wallpaper, but Joe found a manufacturer in New Jersey who made several dozens of rolls. We featured a fragment of it, pasted onto the front of the magazine. I wrote the article because I knew Rosemarie and could explain her process.
Did you always start with a theme for the entire issue? Or with pitches about different interiors and locations?
It never started with an existing story. It all came from Joe's mind. When I think about him, he was like a fountain — he had many preoccupations. Joe liked the idea of obsession. The most privileged part of the whole experience for me was that Joe and I would sit down together and brainstorm themes.
We would find the idea first, and then we would find a writer who could take that idea and write something highly individual about the place we picked. I remember sitting down with Joe, writing things out by hand, and creating piles of papers with lists of ideas. Many of them came to fruition. It was magical, seeing how something could start in your head and then materialize. I also came up with author ideas because I've always been a voracious reader.
Where do you get inspiration today? And what do you think about contemporary shelter magazines, especially viral Architectural Digest's video covering celebrity houses?
I don't want to sound snobbish, but these days I pay no attention to them at all.
Shelter magazines were once my passion, however — notably, the old House and Garden when it was edited by Louis Oliver Gropp in the 1980s. It was brilliant! I would read every page, I just ate it up. Then, Anna Wintour became editor. The format was changed from oblong to a broader horizontal, a shape that reminded me of textbooks. I all but lost interest; then it went under. But nothing equaled The World of Interiors, which I read addictively during my years in London, Glasgow, and then Cologne.
Some of my inspirations begin as linguistic, but ultimately they become visual. When I memorize a quotation or poem, the visual presence of the letters on the page helps me to remember the text as a whole. I really understand what the British novelist Muriel Spark meant when she said that her first step in writing a new book was her creation — or more accurately, her recognition — of a title. Once the right title came to mind, the book was in essence already “written,” its entire story and thoughts following from the sound and meaning of the title. Spark would ruminate for three months, and then begin to write automatically, as if the text were being dictated from above rather than springing from her own mind. Truman Capote described a similar experience, with his first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Please, tell us about your new book, Repose in the Metropolis: The Private Gardens of New York City.
Seven years ago, I had the great good fortune to be fired from not one, but two very unpleasant jobs, each so ill-paid that I found myself suddenly homeless in New York City. I was scared, but underneath the fear I exulted in my freedom, after a decade of pointless servitude.
From a beautiful Catholic women’s shelter in a Harlem convent run by a handful of Mother Teresa’s nuns, I jumped from New York to Newark. For the next four years, I lived in a former nun’s cell in a cheap rooming house, the time-honored form of dwelling once resorted to by scores of writers from Walt Whitman to Henry James. There, I started to write with the fervor I’d had as a college student. I was really happy and didn't mind having disappeared down a rabbit hole.
I revisited all essays I had been writing for my blog, Book and Room, since 2015, along with earlier published work. I tried to link them into a memoir, building on them with very indirect connections. My agent kept saying, "Well, can't you somehow connect everything?" Without exception, the editors she knew all demanded a mysterious “narrative arc.”
I have a close friend, Kyle Marshall, who is an architect and writer. A couple of years ago, he published a book called Americana: Farmhouses and Manors of Long Island — it's about the very New Englandy enclave he grew up in. Kyle took all the photographs himself with only beautiful natural light. The publisher of that book, Schiffer, wanted to commission several other books from Kyle. But he had no time. So he asked me if I would want to do a book on gardens in New York.
And here we are three years later — my NYC book is finished. It was a really fun project for me because it's all about private gardens in New York City, and as far as I know there's no other book on that subject. I had to really search for these secret spaces.
As I mentioned, I have this conviction that once you have a good title, the book is already written. That's what I try to do; to be true to my title. And I do feel that you can reason and explain all you want, but there is something about language that comes from a different dimension.
You just have to wait for your book to be dictated by God.