Ten Years In, How Does “the World's Most Hippie Interior Design Magazine” Show Off the Messy Good Life?

No staged shoots, no renovation bibles, no shopping lists. What matters most is how the editors and their subjects express their own taste.

Ten years ago two Spaniards, Nacho Alegre and Omar Sosa, and an Italian, Marco Velardi, found they shared the same tastes and decided — without ever having met — to start a magazine, Apartamento, “an everyday life interior magazine.”

They did not meet face to face until the first issue launched in Milan.

Creased bedsheets, the lady of the house lounging in a robe, a dining table of toppled wine bottles the morning after a party. Here was an interior design magazine that was dirty and messy but not at all bad, and it broke every assumption readers had about what a home magazine should look like.

They raised the money themselves and printed 5,000 copies. The run sold out fast, and so did the next two issues.

Some of the credit belongs to how Apartamento was released. In its early years the magazine tended to launch at design events, to squeeze out as much exposure as possible. Issue 4 came out during Tokyo Design Week; issue 5 launched at New York's International Contemporary Furniture Fair. Since the founding, the team has also thrown itself into exhibitions about space, architecture and design — attending them, curating them, even opening pop-up shops.

By issue 4, Apartamento had a real reputation in the trade. It won a Yellow Pencil at Britain's D&AD design awards, and in 2012 Britain's Guardian called it “the interior design magazine leading a global trend.”

The lighting manufacturer FLOS and the furniture brands Kartell and Vitra came knocking with ad deals, one after another.

Jeremy Leslie, founder of the magazine platform magCulture, has never hidden how much he likes Apartamento's layout. In his book The Modern Magazine he takes apart its visual makeup: the arrangement of images is always the strongest element and holds the center of the page; headline type never runs above 60 point; and the team would rather let the whole book get thicker than run text across both pages of a spread.

Today each issue of Apartamento prints 50,000 copies. It sells well not only in cities at the front of the trend — London, New York, Berlin — but also as far afield as China, Japan, Lebanon and Kenya, 45 countries in all.

Going into business with anyone is a risk, but partners usually know something about one another's temperament and working habits first. These three barely knew each other. Nacho met Omar, who lived in Barcelona, through a friend, and met Marco, who lived in Milan, through another friend.

Young as he was, Nacho Alegre already had a name in fashion and design, and was the photographer the Swiss furniture house Vitra used for its annual catalog. Marco Velardi was a freelance writer and curator based in Milan. Omar Sosa had plenty of experience in publishing and design magazines; the design of Metal and Tiger, among others, came from their hands.

Agreeing to start a magazine together before ever meeting is something all three describe as “naive and reckless.”

But three people working together also makes for an interesting kind of balance. In a pair, one person's objection can kill an idea on the spot; with three, a decision only needs two votes to move, so nobody gets stuck defending his own corner. And three people with three idiosyncratic ways of living kept learning about each other, and learning how to work together, as they made the magazine.

The bigger gamble, though, was what they chose to do.

By 2007 internet media had spread everywhere, plenty of newspapers and magazines were struggling, and there was no shortage of people in the trade saying print was dying. The three put every penny they had into starting one.

“It was a naive decision,” they wrote together in the editors' letter for the 10th-anniversary issue. “We became newcomers to an industry that seemed to be dying.”

While editing the first issue, they worked apart all day and emailed each other the results at the end of it, so the others could read, argue and revise. As Nacho remembers it, he took a dummy of the first issue to Milan, where he and Marco set out to find brands to work with. They came back with nothing.

Omar Sosa ran into the same embarrassment when he carried the first issue into the biggest bookstore in Barcelona to sell it. Looking at the cluttered cover, the owner gave him a dressing-down: “Who on earth would buy an interior design magazine this messy?”

There was, after all, no shortage of mainstream home magazines — INTERNI, Elle Decor, Frame. In the houses they shot, the lighting was layered with care and the frame was clean and orderly. Not only had the furniture been placed to a plan; even the throw draped over a chair as if by accident, or the spot chosen for a scented candle, hid some small calculation by the owner.

That style did set the tone in home aesthetics for a good while. The lifestyle magazines that came later and did well, Kinfolk and Cereal among them, pushed it further still, and it went on to feed a whole crop of home bloggers on Instagram.

Omar Sosa, then 27, wasn't buying it.

He had not long left school and was working his first job in graphic design. As happens to many young people, his father offered to help with the down payment on an apartment. Having decided to buy the first apartment of his life, Omar Sosa also decided to start with interior design magazines, looking for styles he could borrow for his own place.

But the identikit home aesthetics in those magazines were not what he minded most. He realized that the beautifully designed houses they featured were simply beyond an ordinary person's means, and that the “must-buy lists” the editors handed out had none of the smell of real life about them.

Then Spain's property bubble burst and the national rush to buy homes stalled. Omar Sosa never got his apartment. But while turning over the question of what a real home should look like, he met Nacho Alegre and Marco Velardi.

They decided to make a magazine that would not steer around the “imperfect” corners of a house, and would use photographs to restore the true, unforced scenes of the people who lived in it. They took “living space” as their subject, in the belief that “a real space is achieved through living in it, not through decorating it. There's no perfectionism here — all it takes is participation.”

An antique sofa buried under clothes, records left in a stack on the floor: to them, this is life at its most truthful.

In Apartamento's first few years, “a real home” and “messy and disordered” were the phrases readers reached for most. The three founders said the same thing over and over in interviews: many people's idea of a happy home never gets past the abstract, but a warm home does not come from buying beautifully designed tables, chairs or lamps.

A living space, Apartamento argues, exists to be lived in, not to be endlessly done up: “A dull materialist will never understand what a home really means.”

Apartamento comes out only twice a year. In this interior magazine that bills itself as a record of everyday life there are no staged show-home pictures and no home-decor bible — only one warm house after another.

In Omar Sosa's words: “We won't show an extremely tidy interior, because that only exists in mothers' imaginations. We want to show how people arrange their own homes, and the problems they run into and how they solve them — problems you and I might run into too.”

Nacho Alegre goes further and calls the magazine a diary, one that records “how people live in their homes, and all the interesting things that happen there.”

Besides the apparently chaotic pictures everyone mentions, the photographs come with interviews: how to garden on a roof, how to make your favorite salad, the story of a truly terrible roommate.

Some are stranger than that — a love letter the model Chloe Sevigny wrote to her own New York apartment, or the illustrator Raymond Pettibon playing babysitter, shirtless, baseball bat in hand, letting his 18-month-old son poke at his navel while one corner of the living room fills up with the boy's toy cars.

This is the home life, and the life, that readers actually want to see.

The design blog Cupcakejunky once compared how the house-and-garden title House and Garden and Apartamento report the same thing.

Take the American actress Chloe Sevigny's New York apartment. In the photographs House and Garden shot for its September 2004 issue, the place looks spotless: wallpaper covered in vines and flowers, Art Deco-era vintage furniture, country style all the way through. The guitar by the bed and the other odds and ends are put away neatly, as though the place belonged to a very organized person.

Through Apartamento's eyes the same rooms take on another mood. The camera settles on Chloe's antique sofa heaped with clothes, or on a charcoal drawing of a skull hanging behind the toilet. On the same country-print bedsheets sits a cushion with a tiger on it, and Chloe herself appears with her long hair thrown to one side and something wild in her eyes.

The disordered pictures, the focus on how people really live, the odd and funny subjects — these are editorial tactics, not a method that works forever.

In the magazine's tenth year, Nacho Alegre thinks one real, messy home after another is no longer enough to surprise or excite the editors, let alone the readers.

“What makes Apartamento special is the people, the stories behind them, and above all their way of living,” he says. “My view is that the stories of people who have lived well are also a way for us to learn how to grow and get better. The success I mean here isn't necessarily about money or fame or success in the commercial sense; it's something worth admiring and thinking about. We might ask ourselves: when I'm 60, what kind of life do I want?”

Read Apartamento and you rarely see the editor appear. It is not like the many home magazines that offer advice on doing up your new apartment, or list a shopping basket of expensive designer furniture.

Nacho Alegre insists that reporters and editors should not be the protagonists of a story. Their job is to find more inventive ways to help the reader explore the people in it and how they live.

Artists and creative people make up a large share of the homes Apartamento has visited: the designer Mike Mills, the artist Terence Koh, the design duo Bless. Beyond the realism, it is these houses full of ideas and character that define the magazine's tone.

That is not to say Apartamento ignores famous people. The point is that even when the team interviews a star, it always finds a way to get the guard down in front of the camera.

The Syrian singer Omar Souleyman's home is nearly empty: a television, and a jacket hanging on a hook.

In the home of an unknown young woman in New York, meanwhile, pictures of her posing without a trace of shyness in 1950s vintage underwear feel just as alive.

The partitioned bedroom rented by Maria Pratts, a 29-year-old artist, is her small world of work. The interview tells how she won her landlord over and was then left to do as she liked with a space that had once made her nervous.

The apartment of the Italian design master Alessandro Mendini holds his collection of signature pieces from the 1980s, when the Memphis movement was at full strength — and an IKEA duvet cover on the bed.

At the home of Kim Hastreiter, founder of Paper magazine, there is a view over Washington Square Park and, indoors, a collection that answers to no national border. Kim, who is forever holding salon-style dinners at home, was happy to talk about her tactics for entertaining friends.

Naoki Takizawa, once Issey Miyake's creative director, showed off the scenes of his everyday life in Tokyo without reserve.

As Omar Sosa puts it: “While other media are interviewing someone about a new album or a new design, we go into the subject's home and get close to their life. You find out whether they cook, or what the bathroom usually looks like. The point is that you can see these people's lives through the kitchen, the furniture, all the details.”

He has also given away his rule for choosing subjects: “Anyone who appears in the magazine has to be a first-degree connection — a friend of a friend, someone we've met, or someone we genuinely know.”

The magazine sells out as soon as it reaches stores, which is a shame for the many readers who miss out. In 2016 Apartamento launched an app, the only official way to read its back catalog free. Seven past pieces go up in it each week, chosen at random; they don't vanish the moment you read them, but they are only there for seven days.

Ten years on, the magazine that met embarrassment and a cold shoulder at its founding has lived into an age crowded with lively independent titles. Followers such as the British design magazine Dirty Furniture say openly that Apartamento shaped them, while playing the material differently. And a good number of mainstream home magazines have started running stories pitched on “real life.”

Apartamento itself, beyond its twin editorial offices in Barcelona and Milan, has opened a new studio in New York, in the hope that running a magazine between three cities will strike off more ideas that get near the way people actually live.

Cover image from Apartamento