This story is part of Dwell’s yearlong 25th-anniversary celebration of the people, places, and ideas we’ve championed over the years.

When Dwell hit newsstands in October 2000, its founders wanted to make a bold statement. “We’re staging a minor revolution,” wrote then-editor-in-chief Karrie Jacobs in “The Fruit Bowl Manifesto,” an essay that introduced the magazine’s point of view to readers. That revolution intended to prove that “good design is an integral part of real life.” The issue featured examples of this philosophy, including a 330-square-foot bachelor pad in Hong Kong, a renovated carriage house in Brooklyn Heights for a family of four, and the Phoenix home of two firefighters with an inventive roof made out of fabric. The location, style, and residents of these homes were wildly different, but they shared the manifesto’s optimistic perspective that it’s possible to create a thoughtful, well-designed space that represents exactly how you want to live.

Jacobs and her team searched far and wide to find the homes that formed the magazine’s identity. “One of the things people kept saying to me is that all the good modernist houses are taken [claimed for exclusive publication by other titles], meaning that an upstart like Dwell would obviously have no access,” Jacobs says now. So they went to regions that most national shelter magazines didn’t cover—places like Baton Rouge, Omaha, and Louisville—to find interesting architects and clients who were trying something new with residential design and construction. It worked. “There were more of them than we could have imagined, and every single one of them was an incredible story,” she remembers. “The best thing was finding these people who were doing remarkable things. That was really satisfying to me.” And very satisfying to readers: Dwell soon gained a following and earned a National Magazine Award for General Excellence less than five years after it launched.

In the quarter century since “The Fruit Bowl Manifesto,” the “Dwell Home” has become ingrained in culture as a style—but what style that is is in the eye of the beholder. It has taken on many expressions, but the recurring visual and structural themes—prefabrication, midcentury modernism, Scandinavian minimalism, a strong connection to the outdoors, and small spaces—are found in those early issues. The access problem that skeptics warned Jacobs about eventually became nonexistent as architects and their clients began to pitch homes. Some of the most common—and heartwarming—letters Dwell has received over the years are notes from readers who share that the magazine inspired their dream homes. Sometimes the results look as if they could be published in the magazine; and sometimes, according to its editors, not so much.

The editorial direction affects the idea of a prototypical Dwell Home, too. When I worked at Dwell as an intern in summer 2010, the Unhappy Hipsters Tumblr—which had the tagline “It’s Lonely in the Modern World” and posted photos from the magazine with captions that mocked them—had just gone viral. After I joined full-time, there was an interest in publishing stories about homes that looked warmer and had more visual variety in order to prevent them from becoming fuel for the blog.

If you ask someone today what the Dwell Home looks like, they’ll usually have a specific vision that happens to align with their own fantasy of a modern house, despite a wider range of styles appearing in the magazine. To get a better sense of what the Dwell Home of the mind looks like, I talked to a few people who said the magazine informed their own projects.

Design magazines all represent some type of aspiration, but over the years, through many teams behind the scenes, a sense has remained that the Dwell Home is something a reader can attain, unlike what’s featured in celebrity-studded glossies. “For us, it has always been a resource and inspiration,” says Sebastian Tondo, who has read the magazine for 15 years. He and his partner often flip through to discover new furniture, but when they read about a 400-square-foot studio apartment in Manhattan renovated by Robert Garneau of Architecture Workshop PC in the magazine’s November 2016 issue, they scaled up their design ambitions. “We were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a well-designed studio apartment that can have multiple functions, given the price of real estate in New York?’”

Tondo held on to the issue for years. Then, in 2021, he and his partner hired Garneau to renovate their studio. They asked him to give more character to the place—which had undergone a “horrible” renovation sometime in the 1980s, Tondo says—and to ensure that it had a view to the window overlooking the Hudson River from every space. They received exactly what they wanted. “We love what we have,” he says. Reading the magazine helped make designing their home “feel more approachable,” Tondo says. This is especially true, he adds, if you don’t come from a background where architect-designed homes are the norm. Once they completed their renovation, they had a pinch-me moment. “Robert is an award-winning architect, he teaches at Columbia University, he has features in Dwell and Architectural Digest—I never thought that someday my home would be designed by someone like that,” Tondo says.

Like Tondo, the filmmaker Chris Leclerc is drawn to the small, well-designed homes (and the lifestyle they embody) that have come to define Dwell. “What I love about Dwell is it’s not posting about multimillion-dollar mansions as much as it’s posting about how people are using space in a creative way,” he says. Some of these ideas factored into the camper van conversion he built in 2020. Riffing on Japanese minimalism and Midwestern Craftsman architecture, he outfitted the interior of a Sprinter van with wood cabinetry, ceilings, and a bed. “I want this thing to feel like a little cocoon on wheels,” Leclerc says. “Can I build something that’s inspirational to me, that gives me this adventurous outdoors lifestyle?” The van is also outfitted with solar panels and a Starlink connection, which enables him to work remotely.

After completing the build-out, Leclerc camped along the California coast, drove around Texas, and eventually went to Colorado, where he now lives. The experience was eye-opening. Leclerc values a home that is “designed for everything that you need and nothing that you don’t. I think Americans today, we’ve just gone into, we need more. One thing I did learn about living in the van was it has everything I need, and I’m still happy. I don’t need this huge thing to be happy.”

If we’re talking Dwell Homes, one style that has become closely associated with the definition is midcentury modernism, famously parodied in the Portlandia “Did You Read” sketch and in an episode of The Simpsons when a young couple moves into a house next door to Homer and Marge for its “Neutra bones.” The affinity between the magazine and the style grew over time. “There was this assumption at the beginning that we would be focused on midcentury modernism because all existing magazines that had declared themselves to be about modernism were looking backward,” Jacobs says. “It just seemed obvious to me that the modernism that we’re interested in was looking forward, not backward.” I asked Jacobs what she thinks most people today think of when they imagine a Dwell Home: “nondoctrinaire minimalism—if that makes any sense—unornamented, but colorful and just informal.”

Still, midcentury homes have an avid fan base today for their democratic approach to architecture. Jessica Steier, a real estate agent based in Los Angeles and a decade-long reader of Dwell, is especially drawn to the style. To her, the Dwell Home has lots of natural light, is made with “not always the most expensive or the fanciest materials,” and features an open floor plan—in other words, what midcentury architects promoted. She recently purchased and renovated a midcentury Richard Dorman house in Encino. Much of the work, led by the architecture and design firm Studio Benson, involved undoing a bad 1980s remodel and leaning into what made the house distinct, namely its structure. “Reading Dwell, there’s an understanding that you don’t need to add square footage to make a house interesting,” Steier says, nodding to the typical property-value-increasing renovations she sees on the market. “If there’s some integrity in the architecture, you can carve out the inside and really make it beautiful without sacrificing the original bones.”

Tym De Santo, a designer and former professional athlete, picked up an issue in the early 2000s; he’s remained a loyal reader ever since. He associates the Dwell style with prefabs—especially designs by Resolution: 4 Architecture and Rocio Romero and the container homes that have appeared in the magazine—but mostly with the ethos that these homes demonstrate. “A Dwell Home to me would be by people who are highly versed in their craft, have paid a lot of attention to the detail and nuance, and come up with a structure that is kind of everything that it needs to be and nothing more,” he says.

De Santo recently designed a house for himself and his wife in Nashville and says that “everything about the house feels like a Dwell component,” from the Cor-Ten steel cladding he spied on a Northern California house published in the July/August 2017 issue to the polished concrete floor, plywood finishes, and gabions. “I love raw materials as the finish,” he says. He used engineered wood for the exposed ceiling joists and left the manufacturer’s printing on them. “People freaked out and said, ‘You want that up there?!’” he recalls.

Truth to structure and materials also guided João Completo, an architect based in Portugal, on a house he designed in Serra do Louro, a rural region south of Lisbon, for his parents. The three-bedroom, 1,900-square-foot home features concrete walls, a standing-seam hip roof, interior walls composed of Scandinavian-leaning birch plywood with a clear finish, and a stainless-steel kitchen. There’s a remarkable sense of cohesion throughout the house because of its limited material palette. Meanwhile, the house is oriented toward the south, welcoming in warm natural light throughout the day.

“It’s an incredible privilege to have the time and the funds to build a place like this and then to be able to live here and enjoy it and share it.”
—Tym De Santo, designer and resident

Dwell, in abstract, inspired the house, along with other online publications Completo reads, like Dezeen, ArchDaily, and Divisare. “Many times it’s like I have seen something on a subconscious level that I used in some way in the house,” Completo says. He gravitates toward Dwell specifically for its widely appealing nature. “The houses that I see in Dwell have a certain warmth and comfort quality to them that anyone can appreciate,” he says. “This separates Dwell from the other magazines that only talk to architects.”

And let’s not forget that Dwell itself has staked a claim on what a Dwell Home is—a few times. Most recently, in 2022, the magazine launched a collaboration with the prefab builder Abodu and Norm Architects on a prefabricated ADU. At 540 square feet, the one-bedroom space is like a composite of many of the aforementioned design details: built-in storage, blond wood floors, and a folding glass wall that turns the living room and deck into an indoor/outdoor space.

But that’s just one design opinion. William Hanley, Dwell’s current editor in chief, keeps a forward-thinking perspective in mind as he and his team curate the mixture of homes that appear in the magazine or on the website. “It’s a design that presents a new idea for what a home can or should be in a contemporary context,” Hanley says. “Even if you couldn’t or wouldn’t ever want to replicate it in your own home, there should be a sense of what’s possible.”

There’s a level of dreaming involved in these homes, Hanley adds, but they are also grounded in contemporary reality. Recently, this has included the renovation of an affordable senior living building in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, traditional nomadic structures in Mongolia, and an Indigenous women’s shelter in Toronto. “How does this structure hopefully improve its social and ecological context? How is a place better for the fact that this thing is here?” he asks. “Not every home checks all of those boxes, but that’s the criteria we hold it up against.” The notion of the Dwell Home remains just as open to invention as “The Fruit Bowl Manifesto” outlined 25 years ago. It happens each time someone picks up an issue, sees something they love, and dreams about what their home could become.

Top photo courtesy Sebastian Tondo.

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