Dog toys, baby dolls, cookbooks
Apartamento describes itself as an ‘interiors magazine’, which always makes me think of beige sofas. Flicking through this twenty-sixth issue you are met with something more intimate. Interviewees are carefully chosen, and the conversations are revealing. The London menswear designer Martine Rose opens the magazine, and she talks, among other things, about her Jamaican grandparents’ obsession with country music; how she worked in a bar until she was 34; and how, when she got the call to design for Balenciaga, she was broke, squatting in Hackney with a three-month-old baby.
There are a couple of portraits of Rose printed to accompany the interview, but mostly we are shown photographs of her home: the toy giraffe in her kids’ room; baby dolls; the kitchen table. This is the great pleasure of Apartamento: you get to snoop around other people’s houses. One of my favourite interiors in this issue belongs to Charles Perry, who is one of the world’s foremost experts on medieval Arabic cuisine (interestingly: he also served as Rolling Stone’s ‘resident dope editor’ in the seventies). His interview is accompanied by fantastically messy shots of his living room, which is strewn with dog toys and cook books.
Below, I’ve collected some of my favourite spreads.
