Apartamento #20 – homage to Nest
The latest issue of ‘everyday life interiors magazine’ Apartamento has been out for a few weeks already but deserves recognition for reaching its tenth anniversary. Famously launched without a business plan, the magazine has been an influential part of the independent magazine scene since its 2007 launch.
Like other titles that have survived such relative length, Apartamento can easily be taken for granted. Every six months another issue arrives and the challenge is to maintain an element of the surprise of its initial arrival. The Apartamento secret is to ignore such pressure and carry on doing what they enjoy. That’s how Omar, Nacho and Marco have approached the project from the start, and it’s a major part of their success. It is a happy magazine and readers get their own enjoyment from that – there’s a generosity of spirit that is infectious.
One story from the latest issue exemplifies this; the magazine tracked down Joseph Holtzman, the man behind the hugely influential nineties magaizne Nest. Writer Sabrina Tarasoff visits Holtzman at his upstate NY home and finds it decorated in the over-the-top, maximalist style celebrated in his magazine – it’s even called Camp Nest.
Although the two magazines have many differences, the similarities of approach are evident, and the Apartamento team don’t need to labour the point. Instead they pay generous visual homage to the exuberance of their predecessor, the usually calm page design going haywire as they echo the patterns, colours and stripes used by Nest to avoid blank white space in its pages.