Kristina at Three Layer Cake sent me this from her email newsletter:

"Paraphrasing FishbowlNY, the DWELL editor-in-chief abruptly left because
the magazine wants to build its own line of prefab houses, housewares and
accessories - thereby competing with its own advertisers."

Hmmm...?

Grace

(it was from the Wooden Horse Publication newsletter-- their words, not mine!)

Well... Martha Stewart Living sells products that compete with its own advertisers, and that's stayed afloat long enough to count as an okay business model. Is this the new direction for magazines -- extending the brand you love into solid objects you can take home?

I readily welcome a change in Dwell. That said, of course it may move further in a direction I don't care for. I cancelled my subscription last month. While still great eye candy, I found it becoming increasingly repetitive and I also objected to their high fees for some of the conferences, as Arief refers to in the Times article. I also thought they've deviated from their original mission of "briging modern design to everyone." Instead, I've watched them skew increasingly upscale, high-priced and instead, modern design for everyone who can afford it. The mag feels a little to self-congratulating, IMHO.

I agree with the change towards becoming upscale, though the recent sustainability issue was really awesome.

I guess we'll see!

http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/dwell/

"Mature" is the opposite of believing in something? OK. whatever. Anyway - we don't need a more upscale magazine, they already exist - and they are irritating.

It was getting repetitive, which is why I never bought it anymore. I like the 'Dwell' show on Fine Living.

anyway, am I the only who thinks Maxwell could have found a more flattering pic of Allison? What up with that?

I can see Dwell continuing its trend towards focusing on wealthy readership. I always felt that their advertising skewed heavily in the direction of high-end modern furnishing and fixtures of the "that's-really-cool-stuff-but-holy-crap-I-can't-afford-it" category.

Changing the focus of their content to more closely match that of their ads makes sense, from a business perspective.

"Mature" = management skills to handle a much larger and more complex enterprise. It's a really common phenomenon that the entrepreneur who starts a company is not the ideal leader as the organization grows. Entrepreneurs are often concrete-utilitarian types ( http://keirsey.com/personality/sp.html ), which means they're not as comfortable when the organization starts needing a grand strategy or a lot of bean-counting.

Lawrence M. Miller covers this in an entertaining little book on corporate life cycle, _Barbarians to Bureaucrats_.

Presumably when AT is a worldwide enterprise with outposts in every major city -- probably a public company with SEC and SarbOx requirements, as well as difficulties in coordinating corporate culture plus the work of marketing its own brand of housewares -- Maxwell will bring in professional management so that he's not bored and annoyed by the corporate stuff he never set out to do. ;-)

Well, whatever. I prefer a good magazine than a magazine with "mature" management skills. These "mature" skills nearly always mean that a magazine that was once interesting becomes crappy.

wende,
Thanks for that book title - sounds very interesting.

I don't know what to think about the Dwell shake-up. I LOVE Dwell (and used to love the show, when I got FLN). It's currently still my fave (with LivingEtc trying to push it out of first place) but lately some of the issues are too dry and almost academic and I find that I have to push myself to get through an issue. I hope the change doesn't mean more of that. A recent, very memorable issue was the one with that very creative bed in a loft space/kitchen box in a NYC apt.

I've said before that I used to be a fan of Dwell but don't buy it any longer but not because it went upscale. As Pixie said, it just got too dry and kinda boring.

I will have to dig up my copy (I think I may have bought 2 because I knew this was going to be such a good mag) of the 1st issue and see how much they have really deviated. I'm not so sure it has been that much - at least in terms of cost of product.

Wende: Did you mean mean to say:

"Maxwell will bring in professional management,
*who'll propmptly fire him*, so that he's not bored and annoyed by the corporate stuff he never set out to do."

jp: I'd be interested in your impressions of Dwell 1 vs Dwell latest. I came to the Dwell party late (September 2003) and left early, for reasons many have you mentioned. Dwell seemed to me to be occupying no-magazine's land -- squarely between Metropolitan Home and Metropolis -- and, as such, had little new to say to me.

I am a charter subscriber to Dwell, and have felt the mag has shifted toward those with more means as well. I still like Dwell, but their original mission statement of "briging modern design to everyone" seems almost silly now.

I remember back in a very early issue (I think their first issue?), when they went to Home Depot to find good design... And found several items that were of good design within the realm of everyday people. Now it is all about reviewing things like tile that costs as much as $300.00 per sqare foot. And showing houses that were obviously more than a million dollars.

What happened to articles about good design in unexpected places?

I think I'm going to let my Dwell membership runout when it expires in November now that I've found the Brit. mag Living Etc. As other people have commented, Dwell no longer "brings modern design to everyone." Instead, we see an expensive concrete house with minimal furnishings that looks like a piece of artwork, not a home.
But what really did it is the fact that the pictures accompanying the article are God-awful! I don't need to see the owner in every photo. I always feel that i don't have a good sense of the house from a few very limited pictures. My Dad stopped getting the magazine for the same reason. How many pictures of the owner do you really need when you barely know what the house looks like.

Design Dabbler -- Nope, I did not mean to say that, as I assume that when the day comes that AT is the dominant paradigm, Maxwell will be savvy like Bill Gates and cut a deal where he gets a nice chunk of change to do what he enjoys as the spiritual leader of the organization, while the bean counters keep the beans in order.

If he hadn't thought about that yet, he's certainly now been given a whompus hint. (As many people get screwed by not planning for success as from not hedging adequately against failure.)

don't start rehashing the dwell, is it worth it debate. magazines flounder, businesses flounder, people flounder, that's life. sometimes you get back on your feet, sometimes you don't. but the dwell horse has been beaten like a drum, so... find something else to harp about.

I know many here are Dwell fans, but I've always found it booooring (although sometimes, they'll have some house I find amazing). I was on their forum for the first time in ages today, and I did find it interesting (esp. with this news) that the forums seemed to promote prefab houses like crazy. (The poll of the day was "Why haven't you built a prefab house?") Guess it's more than just believing in the product...it's market research.

Don't even click on the comment link of any Dwell piece in that case.

As much as I dislike the common refrains of "go somewhere else" or "start your own blog" I have to say that a dwell debate hater clicking on a dwell thread is simlpy wasting their time and would be better off not doing so.

i'm sorry to see her go. i'm a "charter" subscriber and have been dismayed to see the magazine shift away from it's original focus. it seems like a glossy "mother earth news" now. and although i'm all for sustainability, there are other issues in the world of residential design.

in general their project coverage has been poor from the start with no, or inadequate, plans and sections, and pictures of stuff, not the spaces so that one couldn't judge the buildings at all. i used to read the issues from cover to cover and save them... now i generally scan and recycle.

Well, really, yay for Allison to get out.
As others have said, I used to love Dwell and quit buying it when it became clear their original mission was abandoned in lieu of showcasing ultra high end products and homes within a sea of Hummer and Rolex ads. Perhaps, along with their new direction, they should rewrite the mission to read: "brings pretentious modernism to everyone with a lot of money".

If this thread so far is any indication, Dwell could indeed be in trouble. Or maybe, as splatgirl suggests, they are pleased to now "bring pretentious modernism to eveyrone with a lot of money."

"...glossy mother earth news" as David I says sums it up, too.

Too bad. C'est la vie.

Of all the reasons mentioned to dislike Dwell, no one hit on mine: the magazine has a nasty tone. The editors ought to just come out and say they believe they are morally superior to people who don't share their design aesthetic. I actually do share it, but I can't stand the writing. I used to buy it anyway for the pictures, but then I decided I don't want to support these snotty people.

I have no idea of its availability in the US, but buy Grand Designs magazine if you can (off the back of the UK TV series hosted by Kevin McLoud). Excellent eclectic mix of houses and other buildings, with more of an architectural slant than Living Etc. Good photography and floor plans, and has eco creds without being green in the face. And Kevin McCloud has just announced that he is to set up a development company to build low-cost, well designed houses in the SW of England.

I have been reading Dwell from its inception. I am amazed that it has survived in such a competitive market. I hope it continues to have a down to earth sensibility and not turn into another boring architecture rag.

Quote:
"we hope that this is an instance of a scrappy "pioneer" being replaced by an mature organization that is better suited to grow this magazine through its next phase"

So AT "hopes" that Goliath comes out on top? That's what's wrong with business these days. Why would anyone believe that only a "mature organization" can handle growth? That's completely narrow minded. The fact is most of the time these corporate moves end up extinguishing the flame of creativity that started the enterprise in the first place.

Greed takes over and substance suffers as the mandate of the "mature organization" is to please the masses with eye candy and watered down content that any number of competitors also put out, so that they can attract the almighty advertising dollar.

So any originality of thought is gone, and you soon become trendy until that fades and it's time to do a repackaging overhaul.

People who have a good thing going, by all means RESIST this kind of corporate mindset. Sheesh!

Uh...I found a more flattering photo of Allison Arieff:

http://www.mediabistro.com/content/archives/03/07/29/allison.jpg

I bought a copy of Dwell a couple of years ago to take on a long subway ride. It wasn't too bad, but I didn't really feel like I got a whole lot out of it.

I've been following this thread for a couple days. Here's a question, what exactly do we expect from a magazine like Dwell? I saw "more plans and sections" (further up), and "design in unexpected places". How could Dwell be better? What do we want to see/read vs. what we don't want?

I think ppl want ready made or budget living but they already exist or did exist.

My 1st copy is in storage so it will be a while before I can confirm my theory what Dwell was like when it first started out.

One reason I plop down twelve bucks every once in a while for World of Interiors is because it takes me to places I have never thought of or heard of, yet has an interior or exterior woth looking at. That is the way Dwell could be better. It seems like the writes and editors stopped digging for these kinds of places. I was a charter subsciber, but let it go about a year ago, in light of the unexpected missing.

All the best to Allison....

yeah, i'm lettting my subscription expire, too. Too many dumb advertisements for crap i'm not interested in. too upscale, too "adult," not enough fun...

Harry,
To answer your question: one thing I've noticed are these weighty (well, for a magazine)overviews of certain topics, like "modern architects or designers of the 20th century", with profiles of each. Just an example. I'd rather see the work than just read bios of these people. And I don't want the bulk of the issue to be on this kind of stuff. I don't read magazines to get "History of Western Design." I do plow through these, but that's going to get old pretty fast.

I'm with those who say Dwell's just plain gotten boring. How about profiling homes not owned by rich architect couples? I have nothing against rich people or architects, but for god's sake there are middle class folks out in the wide world doing interesting things with their homes. And quite a few of them frequent this website.

I am also an early adopter Dwell that has grown somewhat disenchanted by the more recent direction. For multiple reasons. For one thing, I have to laugh whenever they get all pedantic about green technology and about conserving the earth's resources, not polluting the waterways, etc. All the while, the Dwell Home II is being built in an environmentally sensitive coastal area, every other ad is for a gas-guzzling SUV, most of the houses they feature are huge and have no green features whatsoever, etc.

And I am so sick and tired of these obnoxious architects and designers showing off their homes. Um... they could probably afford to build these great modern spaces because they had the means/connections to score discounts on all of their cool modern materials! And the sheer amount of BS coming out of their mouths is just astonishing- especially the article in the most recent issue about that cheap, ugly Irish house, in which the architect/owner "intentionally" left exposed, unfinished studs in the living room so that his children would appreciate how a house is constructed. Puhlease... he was too f***ing cheap to finish it!!!

Don't get me wrong- every once in a while I find something inspiring and noteworthy. But the rest of the time I just feel my eyes rolling into the back of my head.

THANK YOU mattS

Pedro, above, nailed it... When we start equating "scrappy" or "pioneer" with "immature" or "underdeveloped" we do, in fact, work against those we claim to admire.

And anyway (in my opinion) Dwell under Arieff became much more than an interesting underdog... She was the impetus for all of the prefab-centric coverage and has transformed public opinion on the subject. Dwell became a fun read and greatly influenced the direction/interest-level of design for a large swath of the public.

With Arieff gone, get ready for Dwell to REALLY suck.

Apartment Therapy is a great web site. Perhaps it would make a great magazine. Lord knows the media would like to write all about that trajectory!

I'm thinking MAKE meets old-school DWELL with a METROPOLIS eye (but no METROPOLIS academic noodling).

Let someone else write about prefab until they pop. Most of us live in apartments anyway.

I like previous editor Karrie Jacobs' idea for a new magazine about choosing to live within smaller confines with less stuff: "Minimum" with the tagline: "Less is the New More"

From mediabistro.com via mastheads.org:

"The dust from last week's shakeup at Dwell is still settling. According to Mastheads.org, Gayle Chin has been promoted to creative services director and Joy Pascual has been bumped up to production coordinator. Photo editor Aya Brackett has left, and a new copy editor, fact-checker, and junior designer have all joined the magazine... "

"Minimum" would need to be supported by some means other than advertisers... maybe higher subscription costs for the pleasure of no ads, a la Consumer Reports and Cooks Illustrated?

Oh -- and it'd need to biodegrade, so that if one had a yen to packrat it, the magazine would prevent this by self-destructing.

I'm not actually kidding. There's a concept here.

herstory.
are we being tardigradegreed on this.

maybe this is a step into a better direction. someone leaves and it's a bad thing? i hope most of you post comments saying you were wrong just as quickly as you're doing so now.

dwell continues to be a magazine about good design. rich or poor, exotic or local, it's still good design. take it for what it is.

I remember reading the Fruitbowl Manifesto in their first issue. As a refresher, here it is again:

Fruitbowl Manifesto...
You know what this is, right? It's a bowl of fruit. Maybe you've got one this pretty, this perfect, sitting on your kitchen counter. Or maybe not.

Generally, in magazines concerned with the design of homes, fruit bowls abound. High-priced photo stylists spend hours arranging them. You see them in photographs of kitchens and living rooms. Often there's a bowl of unblemished green apples on the bathroom vanity or a bowl of pomegranates in the bedroom. The fruit bowl is sometimes accompanied by a vase of tulips, glistening with spray-on dew, and precious little else. No quart of milk. No crumpled bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies with only half of one cookie left at the bottom. No dish of Meow Mix on the floor. In short, no signs of life.

At Dwell, we're staging a minor revolution. We think that it's possible to live in a house or apartment by a bold modern architect, to own furniture and products that are exceptionally well designed, and still be a regular human being. We think that good design is an integral part of real life. And that real life has been conspicuous by its absence in most design and architecture magazines.

We understand the impulse, the desire to show rooms that are insanely perfect. There is something compelling about an empty room or a house in which no one has lived. Something virginal. It would be an awesome responsibility to be the first one through that door.
Perfection is intimidating. You have to be on your best behavior to live with it.

By contrast, we want to demonstrate that a modern house is a comfortable one. That today's best architects are able to fashion environments that are at once of the moment and welcoming. And the only way we know to demonstrate that a home is truly livable is to show it as it is lived in. If a photograph in this magazine includes a fruit bowl, it's there because the homeowners
eat fruit.

Our philosophy of fruit bowls is directly related to our feelings about modern design.
Here at Dwell, we think of ourselves as Modernists, but we are the nice Modernists. One of the things we like best about Modernism—the nice Modernism—is its flexibility. Rather than being an historical movement from the first half of the 20th century, left over and reheated, we think of Modernism as a frame of mind. To us the M word connotes an honesty and curiosity about methods and materials, a belief that mass production and beauty are not mutually exclusive, and a certain optimism not just about the future, but about the present.

Maybe that's the most important thing.

We think that we live in fabulously interesting times. And that no fantasy we could create about how people could live, given unlimited funds and impeccable taste, is as interesting as how people really do live (within a budget and with the occasional aesthetic lapse).

While a lot of magazines show homes as pure space, so isolated from the particulars of geography or daily life that they might as well be constructed on a Hollywood sound stage, we think that the connections to society, place and human experience—call it context—are exactly what make good architecture great. Those connections are also what makes architecture interesting to people who aren't architects.

One more thing: Be grateful that we are not more like Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect who wrote the seminal essay "Ornament and Crime." He was one crabby Modernist. Take the following: "When I want to eat a piece of gingerbread, I choose a piece that is plain, not a piece shaped like a heart, or a baby, or a cavalryman, covered over and over with decoration."

Were we Loos-ish, we would denounce the styled bowl of fruit as an anachronism, an example of old-fashioned handicraft that has contaminated any number of otherwise pure Modernist environments. We would argue that the only truly Modern arrangement of fruit is one made by machine, a symbol of mass production: the canned fruit cocktail. We would slip cans of Del Monte (in heavy syrup) into every photo.

We would. But we're too nice.

-Karrie Jacobs

P.S. We prefer our gingerbread decorated.

Originally published in Dwell #1, October 2000

OK, so Fruit and Bowl are two words. Sorry...

I wish that I hadn't bought a multiyear subscription to Dwell. I bought it based on a friend's raves, but I've found it to be too impractical. Look, I can have a gorgeous house if I spend $1M and not own more than 10 sets of clothes! :p

The only thing that I've learned from Dwell is that my dream modern home needs closets/cabinets on every vertical (and even some horizontal) surface so that I hide all my stuff to get that clean/not-lived-in look.

Umm, thank god for the advertisers because I guess it allows Dwell to have reasonable international rates, as does 'Metropolitan Home'. Someone mentioned 'Grand Designs'. Damn, that magazine is something like US$20 an issue for international delivery. I subscribed to 'Metropolis' until they jacked up their international delivery, and can only laugh about subscribing to 'Architectural Record' or 'Wallpaper' etc. Dwell may advertise expensive products, but those products cost less than the price of some of those other magazines (OK, slight exaggeration).

Maybe Dwell will suck, maybe it won't, but it will still have photos (although, as others have pointed out, it could have more) and that's all I really care about. With regard to people in the photos, I don't care. Its not like they are blocking the view of the Eames chair, eh?

Hmmm, no mention of cost in that manifesto. It was more to so with everyday living with great design instead of fake, staged design for essentially display purposes.

I must admit, I buy design mags for the pictures also because, as much as I believe that form should follow function in a lot of cases, you can see that function very easily in a picture. Dwell did well in that regard for the first few years but, as someone else said, what they continued to feature got repetitive.

yeah, I was just imagining how the Dwellers can still read that and feel fine, knowing they're not straying too far.

People in $1mm+ houses ARE, just "regular human beings" who have more money than you.

My guess as to the real reason she's leaving:
As an editor, she made a fairly large error in running a cover story of a house that was not truly sustainable.
As an architect whose firm is based on the principles of sustainability, I very much appreciated her article entitled Sex and Sustainability from the September issue. She brought up some important points: that truly sustainable design is becoming sexier, which is what we need it to be. At the same time, she brings up of the difficulty in effecting real change in housing. We are experiencing this on a daily basis!
She mentioned the hope that some day the term green architecture will be redundant. I too, hope this will be the case.
With such a keen eye to the problems we face and the process of bringing green design into the mainstream, I was shocked to read the story about Enric Ruiz-Geliís house outside of Barcelona. That is, I was shocked that this was her Green Goes Mainstream home from the cover. This is what we, in the industry, call GREEN WASHING. I found mention of only three design elements that might relate to what we would call a green home: the roof garden, the windowless walls with small portholes that enable air flow, and the light amplifiers in the ceiling. These three features do not make the house sustainable.
Now, I understand from the article that Mr. Ruiz-Geli himself was not looking for a green label. Maybe he just didnít design a sustainable home.
If the house does not have any further sustainable features, then she green washed this project and mis-represented it to the readers. If it truly does have other sustainable features, which it could very well have, then she mis-represented the facts.
When one sets out to design a sustainable home, he considers a number of potential impacts of the home, such as the materials used, the energy efficiency, the longevity, and the indoor air quality. There are many different angles from which a home can be viewed to be sustainable. The US Green Buildings Councilís LEED Rating system has been in a pilot phase for homes and will soon be implemented as a standard. (See link below) This program is valuable in that it provides accountability, which is what we sorely need in the green building industry.
As the editor of an up-and-coming lifestyle magazine, she was in a position to educate. But what happened was she diluted her authority on the subject, and was likely forced to resign.

I'm ahead of the curve in letting my Dwell subscription lapse. After receiving an issue containing more advertisements for design out of the reach of the common person then scathing pseudo-intellectual articles on design out of the reach of the common person, i felt it no longer fulfilled its stated intent. I found it absurd to see a two page advertisement for the original Hummer truck in a issue reviewing "gas concious" SUV's and Green design. Advertising speaks louder then articles in where the folks at Dwell put thier ideals.

I can only hope that someone else will pick up the banner of "Modern Design with in the reach of everyone" and does it without selling out to elitist forces.

Like most of you, I am a long time DWELL fan and have enjoyed it as a user-friendly alternative to the glut of "modern" shelter/design mags. I too have become disenchanted with the upscale consumerism being promoted within Dwell's pages and wonder how much longer I can find enough material to keep me interested.

I hate to see another one go down (i.e. Wallpaper after the first year and a half, but that's another issue), but they seem headed that way. Let's hope for a change of heart, but as the song goes...

"Money...money changes everything!"

Well, good luck Allison. That said, I think it is time for a change. Modernity has always relied on ‘the new’ as its mission. The magazine has become flat in the past couple of years. Previously, I would have pulled the magazine off the shelf to see where all the interesting, new residential projects were being built for the average Joe. More recently, I knew that picking up the magazine meant the frustration of seeing expensive contemporary homes and trendy home furnishings that are out of touch with the middle class. With a new direction, hopefully away from the ‘lifestyles of the modern and famous’ they will get back to their readership.

I started to subscribe to Dwell around the 3rd issue.

It has gotten more upscale. As an architect it it makes me mad because I am wondering how these other architects got all this money to design these great houses. I don't know any other architects with that kind of money.

It has become excedingly political. I like politics in the correct forum. Dwell is supposed to be a design magazine. Give me good design. Good design isn't political, it's universal.

They must get paid by Apple. The last issue Ive read (I am about 8 issues behind) seemed to have some mention of an apple product.

Lastly...Ive started to get the feeling that they were trying to sell me something.... hmmmmmmmm