With his first editor’s letter, Holtzman asserted that “our houses have private parts. His subjects ranged from the overtly macabre to the merely eccentric in stories showcasing palaces, pissoirs and more than a few nude models - posed in, for instance, a plastic Garden of Eden. Holtzman clearly had no templates for Nest stories, and certainly no rules. To a 1960s Eliot Elisofon photograph of the Los Angeles dining room of Hollywood A-listers William and Edie Goetz - which featured a Sheraton table set for 18 - Holtzman added a ragged top border of what appeared to be dripping yellow paint There were very few, if any, sacred cows in Nest world. In 2002’s fall issue, enlarged botanical drawings of cabbage roses sit beneath photos of Marlene Dietrich’s grandmotherly Manhattan apartment on Park Avenue. Oldham writes admiringly in the book that Nest “felt like a magazine made by someone who had never seen a magazine before.”ĭecades before Victorian granny florals reappeared on walls like mine, Nest deployed them incongruously on its pages, as a sort of bizarro graphic frame for assorted photos of Bauhaus interiors. That freed him, and his magazine, to profile a kid from the IKEA decorating department with the same interest and curiosity that he bestowed on such design doyens as Mario Buatta and Andrée Putman. As an arriviste, he wasn’t burdened by the conventions of New York’s publishing industry. Holtzman grew up as a reclusive rich kid in Maryland, moving to Manhattan in the 1990s from the spoiled seclusion of his relatively provincial youth. Nest is no waist-up publication.” Here, a millennial Adam and Eve pose in removable swimwear designed by Oldham on the cover of the Summer 2000 issue. Holtzman revealed a fair share of nude models in his issues, writing in his first editor’s letter that “our houses have private parts. “Joe is deeply unusual,” he says, “just a square peg.” (The book project occurred to Oldham, and got Holtzman’s approval, after another idea - the release of boxed sets of Nest back issues - went up in smoke, literally, in a warehouse fire.)Īccording to Oldham, Holtzman - who served both as Nest’s editor in chief and its art director - was both a generous boss and an extremely unlikely impresario. For the book, he grabs representative spreads and stories, both his own and others’, from each of Nest’s 26 issues, reprinting them in the order in which they originally appeared. Oldham shot more than 20 features for Holtzman. Compiled by Todd Oldham - a Nest contributor, fashion designer and former host of MTV’s House of Style who has subsequently turned to consumer products and book packaging - the book reminded me that it was this magazine that provided the fabulous urtexts for my alarmingly demented decorating, and that of so many others, too. Leafing through the exhaustive new 524-page hardback The Best of Nest ( Phaidon), I found the source. Such mad eclecticism is not exactly the manner in which I was raised. Today, my East Village living room has a BDDW blanket-stripe chaise, Josef Ramée floral-swag wallpaper designed around 1815 and a framed Roy Lichtenstein film still from 1971. During the award-winning publication’s seven-year run in the late 1990s and early 2000s, editor Joe Holtzman produced what the book’s author, designer Todd Oldham, describes as “a magazine made by someone who had never seen a magazine before.” The often eclectic maximalism of the interiors in Nest’s pages - such as the Paris apartment of socialite and art patron São Schlumberger, decorated by Gabhan O’Keeffe- was in some ways ahead of its time. A new book from Phaidon gives a second life to the iconoclastic interiors magazine Nest.
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