Shelter mag blues
If all the dire news about the crumbling housing market isn’t sufficient evidence that the halcyon days of real estate lust are over, maybe this is: After more than a century on newsstands, House & Garden magazine is closing its pages. Its parent company, Conde Nast, announced Monday that the December issue would be the last.
Though the decision was, according to a company spokesperson, based on poor ad sales, the dark rolling clouds that now seem to accompany any discussion of real estate -- not to mention House & Garden’s venerable history -- make the magazine’s demise all the more poignant. Founded in 1901 as an architectural journal, it was trafficking in aspirational living before a term like “shelter porn” was even a twinkle in Martha Stewart’s eye. Conde Nast acquired the magazine in 1911, and for much of the next century the name House & Garden was synonymous with the notion of home decorating as a fine art.
But in recent years, even a dowager like House & Garden was hard-pressed to distinguish itself among the dizzying array of publications now devoted to telling us our lives would be better if we lived in glass-and-steel cubes filled with Danish armchairs and strategically placed volumes of Proust. There were, according to Oxbridge Communications’ 2007 National Directory of Magazines, 210 shelter magazines on the market last year -- a 90% jump from the previous year. Conde Nast itself has three other titles in that genre: Architectural Digest, Vogue Living and the Gen X- and Y-targeted Domino.
So, although it might not be shocking that the stately and rather old-school House & Garden has fawned over its last fainting couch, it’s worth wondering if its departure says less about the glutted magazine market than about how the real estate frenzy has changed the way we think about houses.
Back when House & Garden was established, people looked at beautiful homes as though they were looking at works of art. Today, we look at them and wonder what we have to do to live there too. The shelter magazine craze, after all, rode in on the wave of record-low interest rates, “creative financing” and our sudden and inexplicable obsession with granite countertops.
As anyone knows who can remember back to, say, 2004, the real estate frenzy was so intense that America seemed suddenly to have a new religion. Instead of going to worship services on weekends, we went to open houses (often with checkbooks in hand). Instead of a deity, we had that interest-rate-slashing god known as Alan Greenspan. Best of all, instead of having to lumber through cryptic holy scriptures, we could choose from an endless supply of guidebooks like Dwell, Metropolitan Home, Elle Decor and even Dome Living Magazine, a publication -- you guessed it -- devoted to the geodesic-dome lifestyle.
But House & Garden always seemed more akin to an art appreciation class than a crafts workshop. We were supposed to admire the rooms, the furniture, the parterre gardens, not necessarily try to replicate them (the implicit and ultimately soothing message being “don’t bother”). And despite the magazine’s less-than-totally-groovy style, there was something deeply satisfying about its voyeuristic slant.
That’s because reading a lot of other shelter magazines (or watching any of the approximately 5 million cable shows about how to hang drapes or use caulking guns) had come to mean being stripped of our tourist visas and forced to become citizens of the housing bubble. It was as if home ownership/improvement was the kind of Broadway musical in which the cast suddenly appears in the aisles and drags audience members up on stage; we had no choice but to sign the papers and get in the market. We were goaded into believing that we were just one loan approval or kitchen remodel away from having our own magazine-worthy manse. This mission, should we choose to accept it, would make us full participants in the contemporary American dream. If we chose to remain observers, well, that just meant we were lazy or, worse, uncreative.
House & Garden never quite got over proving to us that only the elite few had the luxury of turning their homes into vehicles of fashion. Sure, it offered advice, but it never really laid that DIY trip on us. Such passivity might have been dreadfully gauche in the era of house flipping and drive-though mortgage lenders. But as the market steadily slows to the pace of a three-toed sloth, we’d do well to remember the lesson that House & Garden imparted for more than 100 years -- namely, that there’s a difference between aspiration and appreciation.
And one costs a lot less and lasts a lot longer.
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