Home Grown: Creative Team of the Year

As Dwell prepped its fifth-anniversary issue last October, the magazine’s business side became uneasy. Creative director Claudia Bruno had presented a cover photo featur-
ing a relaxed, middle-class Mexican family, dressed for a stroll in the neighborhood, rather than the standard sumptuous interior shot.

“That cover was more about people than about architecture, which was really nerve-wracking to everyone,” explains Bruno, who joined the title last May. Bruno’s instincts paid off—the image ran, and newsstand sales spiked. “It was one of the best covers we’ve ever done,” she says.

It is that disregard for the conventional photography and design of architectural magazines—coupled with the conviction that architecture is as much about flesh and blood as bricks and mortar—that has propelled Dwell’s unlikely success from the beginning, and led Adweek Magazines to select Bruno and photo editor Kate Stone as Creative Team of the Year.

One would expect Dwell to take bold steps given its mission of celebrating and promoting modern design. “We’re trying to dispel all the myths that modern architecture is cold, hard and unlivable,” says Stone, a former art buyer for agencies including Hal Riney and Publicis who has been with Dwell for two-and-a-half years. “We want to show how accessible and cozy it can be, and how families can actually live in it.”

The team at Dwell, which is published nine times a year, searches the nation—and, to a lesser extent, the world—for the best-designed modern homes, then showcases those designs in a clean, calm layout featuring shots by portrait photographers, rather than architectural photographers. Hence, the reader gets a glimpse not only of four walls, but of how dwellers relate to those spaces day in and day out.

“It’s not about fantasy the way some [shelter] magazines are, where you look at it and go, ‘Someday...’ and then get back to your life,” says Bruno, who has held creative director posts in the ad departments of Banana Republic, Kate Spade and Ann Taylor.
Dwell’s approach has been strikingly successful.

Among other honors, the book took a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2005. Its formula clearly resonates with readers as well as advertisers. Circulation hit 269,710 in the second half of 2005, a 25.5 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Newsstand sales soared 24 percent, to 80,049 copies. Ad pages numbered 985 in 2005, up nearly 32 percent year over year.

“We’re going after more of a mindset than a demographic,” says Lynda Richardson, media director at Butler Shine Stern & Partners in Sausalito, Calif., whose clients include Mini Cooper. The pint-sized auto “is an icon from a design standpoint,” Richardson explains, “and Dwell’s audience is forward-thinking, appreciates good design and under-
stands how design and functionality work together.”

Dwell’s numbers are particularly impressive given the fierce competition in the shelter category, which has claimed startups like Nestand left category leaders struggling. Circ numbers for Condé Nast’s Architectural Digest and Hearst Magazines’ House Beautiful, for example, have been flat since 2000.

At the center of Dwell’s rise is the passion of a single person, Lara Hedberg Deam, a 33-year-old publishing neophyte when she launched the magazine in 2000. Deam remains Dwell’s primary shareholder, although there are other private investors. Deam began working in her family’s Wisconsin-based mail-order business, Lab Safety Supply, which sold industrial and safety products, at the age of 10. After the Deams sold the company in 1992 for $160 million, Deam purchased a house in Mill Valley, Calif., and while remodeling the home fell in love with modern architecture. Deam ended up launching out of frustration.

“For me, it felt like a huge gap between [consumer] magazines that talked about design stylistically and trade magazines,” she says. “Modern design isn’t a style, it’s a philosophy. It’s a way of looking at the world.”

Her objective was to create a magazine that would be accessible to consumers, a sort of cross between Wallpaperand Utne Reader. From the start, Dwell played the heretic, challenging the shelter magazine establishment head on.

Founding editor Karrie Jacobs summed up Dwell’s split with orthodoxy in her so-called “Fruit Bowl Manifesto,” which heaped scorn on the fruit bowls and other clichés of improbable perfection that fill the pages of so many shelter titles.

“We think that real life...has been conspicuous by its absence in most design and architecture magazines,” wrote Jacobs, who left the title in 2002. (The manifesto is still post- ed on Dwell’s Web site.)

From the start,Dwell’sunique style of photography has driven its philosophy and message. Explaining its policy of using portrait photographers, Bruno says that architectural shooters “kind of bore me. They take pictures you’d think an architectural magazine would want—and that’s exactly what I don’t want. They take the expected wide-angle lens [shot], which has nothing to do with how you really see the world. You
don’t see the world through a wide-angle lens! It’s a lot easier to find portrait photographers who can capture architecture than architectural photographers who can work with living, breathing subjects," Bruno says.

Stone and Bruno look for photographers with a distinctive style and point of view. “I look for optimism, not voyeurism,” Stone says. “A lot of photography can seem cold, like the
photographer is intruding on the person. We look for photographers who are really connecting with the subject, and enjoying the experience.”

Photographers who have contributed to the magazine recently include Misha Gravenor, Dave Lauridsen, Todd Hido and Gregg Segal, who photographed the Mexican family for the fifth-anniversary issue. Bruno commissioned Segal for that shoot after seeing images of farm workers he had shot for Mother Jones.

Dwell’s editors instruct photographers to search out houses they’re assigned to shoot for details and vignettes, to discover what the inhabitants do in various spaces and capture them engaging in favorite hobbies. Props and styling are strictly forbidden.

Thus, fresh flowers, perfectly made beds— and especially fruit bowls—are largely absent from the magazine’s images, unless they happened to be there before the
photographer arrived.

Dwell instructs those featured in its spreads to simply pretend some friends are dropping by—not to prepare for a magazine photo shoot. “We like to see how the house is lived in,” Stone says. “We like to see dirty dishes in the sink, the bed unmade, dad doing laundry, the kids’ toys on the ground.”

Dwell’s design is strikingly spare, subtle and calm, and it rises above the cacophony of present-day magazine design.

“It follows more closely to an architectural monograph than a newsstand magazine,” Bruno explains. “Magazines that have loud graphics and 15 typefaces are those listening to focus groups. We listen to ourselves. We trust [our instincts] here.”

Dwell’s previous creative director, Jeanette Hodge Abbink, is credited with setting the magazine’s visual tone, which has remained largely intact since Bruno followed Abbink last May. “There are changes in the air, but we’re evolving things under the guise of the same vision,” hints Bruno.

Dwell employs just two typefaces. Font sizes vary withinnarrow limits, white space is plentiful, and the layout adheres to a simple grid structure so that the photographs—which run large, uncropped and uncluttered by typography—tell the stories.

Readers want visual consistency in magazines, observes Bruno. “At the same time,” she adds, “you have to change things every issue or else you bore people.”

To wit: The magazine uses typography in some unusual, interesting ways. The February/March 2006 issue sports several stories on modern renovations of old houses—stories that were tied together by a graphic motif inspired by Victorian wallpaper.

The magazine’s success has meant bigger editorial budgets, and Bruno has replaced the pick-up art in the consumer-oriented front and back sections of the book with commissioned still-life photos.

“We’ve slowly started shooting pots and pans, dishes, and appliances as high-end product art—clean and sexy on white background,” says Stone.

Bruno brought from Banana Republic and Kate Spade the styling sensibilities of high-end product catalogs. So instead of simply presenting dinnerware on a dull, white background, she might direct the photographer to show dishes in the context of a table setting.

Aggressive efforts to build readership and advertising continue. The magazine’s frequency will increase from nine to 10 issues next year. Thus, Bruno and editor in chief Allison Arieff are expanding Dwell’s editorial frontiers.

“We have to find ways of communicating interesting stories about modern life and architecture from different angles,” Bruno says. “I don’t want it to be a magazine with
too narrow a definition of what modern living is. We’re looking at how modernism affects community, and we’re taking a historical perspective—a process perspective, an
old-versus-new perspective.”

The theme of the February/March issue, “Modern on the Inside, Traditional on the Outside,” is one example of that broader perspective. Another standout was the anniversary issue, which examined how modern residential architecture is influencing community life in some unlikely places—from Washington, D.C., to Tijuana, Mexico. (The family pictured on the cover of that issue is that of Mexican architect Jorge Garcia, who designed his own home and who aspires to raise the architectural aesthetic of Tijuana.)

The April issue profiles three world-renowned designers, including an architect, two industrial designers and a furniture designer.

“It tells how they live, what inspires them and how they bring that inspiration to their work,” Bruno says.

For example, the architect featured in that issue, who is based in Korea, spends part of his year in Montana. So Dwell commissioned photos of the farm structures of the Montana plains that inspire his radically modern designs back in his homeland.

It is stories like that—stories that have as much to do with the people, the inspiration and the process behind the designs as the designs themselves—which give Dwell its foundation.

“We’re looking at the different life stages of design,” says Bruno, “not just the end.”

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