The creative chaos of Apartamento magazine
One of the world’s best known and most beloved indies, Apartamento magazine launched in 2008 and quietly revolutionised the way we think about interior design. Pristine, posed perfection was out, replaced by a warmer, more intimate, more human approach to showing interesting people in their interesting spaces. Eighteen years later, the magazine remains strikingly similar to the first issue, but these days it reaches a global readership and sits alongside a full slate of Apartamento books.
So how do they maintain the same spirit that has powered the magazine for so long, while scaling up to take on more and bigger challenges? I spoke with managing editor Laura Frade at the end of last year to find out what day to day life looks like on the world’s most famous independent interiors magazine, and the word she kept coming back to is “chaos”.
Of course it’s a particularly creative type of chaos, and one she clearly loves. She concedes that the less structured approach can make life stressful at times, but it seems that she wouldn’t have it any other way:
“I think there’s something very important about this way of working, even though sometimes it can be chaotic, that’s what makes it what it is – it affects the result… The founders leave us a lot of freedom in the way we work in the magazine. They’re not looking into every detail and they trust us on how to do the magazine.”
I was probably expecting that she had been an Apartamento super-fan before joining the magazine, but that wasn’t the case, and it was lovely hearing her story of how she went from studying design to finding her place as managing editor. I hope you’ll enjoy this first Stack podcast of 2026 – if you’re new here please do check out all our other episodes in the podcast archive. And please do follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and we’ll be able to deliver all our new episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.
