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OH NO! This is one of my favorite! I am SO disappointed.

Damn! Damn! Damn!

Oh no! Figures they fold it just as I was beginning to like it again. Their covers were divine.

The Reaper has his own report up now:
http://www.magazinedeathpool.com/magazine_death_pool/2007/11/house-garden-ri.html

I was just going to say that, Aaron. Grim

I loved their issues when they restarted (? 1999? forget when), and love the food section, but find the rest of the magazine too high-end to relate to. I stopped buying it a couple of years ago.

I was thinking the same thing snoopy...i just picked up the november issue and thought "wow, they have really changed".

strange that they would mail out renewal notices, then go belly up.

actually I remember it being relaunched in the 80's after a hiatus by Anna Wintour in the late 80's... pretty sure there was not a continous run from its founding...

(excerpt from a wikipedia entry on Wintour) Wintour returned to New York to take over House & Garden. It had long lagged Architectural Digest, and the company gave her a free hand. Again, she made radical changes to staff and look. "She destroyed House & Garden in about two days," complained a fired editor, referring to the $2 million worth of photo spreads and articles she cancelled in her first week. She put so much fashion in photo spreads that industry wags began to refer to the magazine as House & Garment, and enough celebrities that it was referred to as Vanity Chair.

Wintour's changes did, indeed, have a negative effect on the magazine. When "HG" became the name on the cover in March 1988, many longtime subscribers thought they were getting a new magazine and put it aside for the real thing to arrive. Many eventually canceled, and while some fashion advertisers came over, most of the magazine's traditional advertisers pulled out.

House & Garden closed for the first time in 1993, then was relaunched in 1995. Its editors in chief have included Richardson L. Wright, Albert Kornfeld, Mary Jane Pool, Louis Oliver Gropp, Anna Wintour, Nancy Novogrod, and Dominique Browning.

Just sad...

hearing rumors it's to be replaced by Vogue Living, to add to the VOGUE dynasty. What crap!! even MORE high end stuff no one can afford - and probably an overdone aesthetic as well!

Vogue Living Australia is really nice and afordable

I had just subscribed and got my bill in the mail today. After reading this I wrote "cancel" across the bill and am mailing it back. Thanks for saving me $$! This is the third time in two years that I have subscribed to a magazine and it folded before I even got my first issue!

But...it's my favorite. This is very sad news. They just pulled the plug on Jane, too. What a bummer.

I can't remember whether it was this or Better Homes and Gardens, but one of them just seemed to have too many gardens for me, so I stopped subscribing a while back.

wow, tough business. I liked it for a while in the '90s. As my tastes skewed more and more modern, it wasn't for me any more. It is a shame though.

Actually, I just realized that I have been getting it recently. See, I really just seldom ever look at magazines I get, so I didn't even realize that I actually get this! Well, I guess that means they'll start sending me that Vogue Living? Oh, well. We'll just have to see how that turns out.

How does on confuse Better Homes and Gardens with House & Garden?

Whoa...

Does this affect the UK issue?

No the UK and South African issues are unaffected; totally unrelated magazines, except corporately: different editors, different staff, different success rates. If you want to read about the H&G closing in the US see:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/05/AR2007110502020.html

http://www.wwd.com/memopad/article/120067

i'm very sad. they always had such great classy spreads and vibrant colors.

that and the death of jane all in one month. too much for me.

best article about H&G's closing is page B1 in the 6 November issue of the Wall Street Journal ...

Oh, Jeez, not again.

I remember the last time they did this, back in the days before the Internet & fast communication, when, one day, I was just going along, reading Nancy Novogrod's monthly editorial letter in the new issue of the magazine, when, in her next-to-last sentence, she just mentioned, sort of casually, that this was the final issue. I swear, it was like someone punched me in the chest: WHAT? I could hardly breathe. I kept looking for a fuller explanation, but there wasn't one.

And so, now, the only consolation for losing this, flat-out the best shelter magazine on the market, is the fact that H&G already died and came back from the dead once before, like Fannie May candies & Fiestaware & the Mustang. Maybe it can do it again. But that's a long shot, I know, and even if it happens, it probably won't happen any time soon.

Here's the thing: unlike down-market wannabees like the late, unlamented American Home, House & Garden never turned the back end of the magazine into a thin-paper slum of 2-inch ads for lawn sprinklers & mixed-variety flower seeds & greeting cards & girdles, and unlike Better Homes & Gardens--and, yes, I know the latter won an award last year--H&G (not HG, its evil, celebrity-obsessed doppelganger/bastard child) never stooped to budget DIY projects, and unlike its conceited big sister Architectural Digest, it never put on airs or embarrassed itself with obsequious fawning over projects remarkable only for their big budgets. And unlike its closest competitor, House Beautiful (which is even older and which I also read every month, and where a friend of mine is an editor) H&G never got too chummy, either with me or with its subjects. I may be obsessed with design & decoration, but I'm not obsessed with the details of the personal lives of those whose rooms are pictured in other magazines. Then again, half the time I don't even recognize the 'celebrities' who snag the biggest spreads in most shelter magazines. I guess that comes from not watching TV.

No, House & Garden--except, as noted, for that whole lost-in-the-woods HG period--has always been above the decorative fray, and looking at 6o-year old issues of the magazine, I am always struck by how well the rooms they featured back then have held up. Sure, they reflect their own period, and no one would mistake those rooms for today's rooms--not even the late 193Os Vogue Regency rooms, the direct source of much that is Jonathan Adler & most that is Kelly Wearstler--but in each of its successive perioods, House & Garden chose the best examples of a particular style, not necessarily the most commom versions thereof. In any historic style (and even in the apparent lack of style from time to time) there are good examples & bad examples, and these folks consistently showed the best, least cliche'd rooms. And even considering the unavoidable lack of hindsight, the rooms they show today have a quality which seems like it will endure longer than the rooms in other magazines, even when both rooms fall within the same general stylistic categories. Let's put it this way: I don't remember seeing any big fake-Tuscan clock faces or a bunch of rusty iron curlicue doodads on any joint-compound- Venetian-plaster walls in the pages of House & Garden

Add that consistent level of quality in the rooms pictured in the pages of House & Garden to the way each month's editorial content opened with the honesty & warmth of Dominique Browning's essays and then finished up with Mayer Rus' tart, ice-cold critiques skewering current-but-stupid design trends, and there was never any danger of closing an issue unsatisfied, even if, occasionally, some of the features were not to my individual taste.

I don't read shelter rags for 'inspiration' or because I need affirmation of my own decorating choices--I say I already know what I like & to hell with everybody else--but to see good examples & interpretations of as many different styles as possible, and this has been the best place for that. All I can say is when House & Garden goes away, it's going to leave a huge hole, and I am going to miss not only those rooms but those voices.