Issue # 4
Archive stories

I moved to New York in 1993, two days after graduating from high school in Connecticut. Some friends of mine had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights with a room available. I brought my parents into the city to my favourite vegan restaurant at the time, Angelica Kitchen, and mapped out how I would afford to live there with...

Stella’s room: Keep out! London: Stella and I first met when we started at the same secondary school four years ago, but we only really got to know each other during our third year. She lives in Kentish Town, North London, in a beautiful Victorian building made up mainly of open-plan spaces and heavy-beamed ceilings which hint...

Studio, Factory, Bachelor Pad New York City: Philip Crangi’s grandmother used to tell him every dog has his day. Lately, it seems his day has arrived. Two years ago he won the prestigious CFDA/Vogue fashion award for best accessories designer and his life has been non-stop ever since. I met him at his loft in New York...

Locals only Buenos Aires: Gustavo Di Mario is an Argentinian self-trained photographer who, for 15 years, has been printing his fashion photos with a flavour of the local and native, faithful to the origins of the peaceful and modest neighbourhood where he was born, Ramos Mejía, where he still lives with his mother. But his roots...

The essence of beauty Milan: I was in a really tight spot when Marco’s iChat bubble came up on my screen, asking me if I wanted to interview Enzo Mari. I didn’t know what to say. Why me? I just didn’t get it. I’ve never been interested in design, or architecture, or chairs and whatnot....

Control tower Tokyo: Like beavers gnawing at tree trunks to turn their habitat into sophisticated shelters, Cyril Duval, a.k.a. item idem, tends to transform any place where he spends more than a few consecutive hours into an ode to his sophisticatedly exuberant self. Tellingly, any hotel room quickly wears the stigma of his obsession for...

A true picture of an artist It’s funny how sometimes when you discover something or someone very good, you like to keep it as a secret, but when that’s not just good but extremely good, keeping the secret becomes unbearable and you feel an urge to share it with who ever you can. This is...

When asked to photograph apartments in Beijing I had delusions it would be fairly easy. ‘Hey, I’m taking pictures for this magazine Apartamento of people’s apartments, would you be into that?’ Fairly straightforward, but like many things in China, actually not. Besides living with their parents or saying they were ‘too busy’ (a very popular response...

It has been suggested that there is no such thing as a weed. It’s just a plant that happens to be growing in the wrong place. I thought about this recently as I yanked out some of the plants that had grown in the wrong place on my roof. Technically, I guess you could argue that all of...

Jan Lindenberg My friend Jan Lindenberg is showing me around his apartment on a cobbled, leafy street in the Neukölln district of Berlin. There’s something about this place that always impresses me: a thoughtful austerity, something German and post-materialist (Jan is a sustainability researcher at the Institute of Technology), but also Japanophile, studious, ethical and...

A theory of evolution I have known Mark and Garrick for many, many years. Mark is a curator, currently at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where he has been responsible for many glorious shows, most recently the wonderful concrete poetry exhibition ‘Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.’ Garrick does mysterious things, somewhere between academia, management consulting,...

Winchester’s widow, Sarah, ordered the construction of a Victorian style mansion at the end of the nineteenth century in San Jose, California. In this house, with 160 rooms, 47 chimneys and three lifts, all types of fantastical inconsistencies occurred. Some of them were death traps: the finest of oak staircases arriving nowhere, carefully carved doors...

          Edited by Laura Alcalde We’ve all enjoyed the childish game of making a stack out of seemingly inappropriate materials, and though it might be more for kids, it’s nevertheless a lot of fun. For most of us it’s an occasional pastime, but for Apartamento it’s a duty, involving serious research,...

Milan: An entrepreneur: Patrizia Moroso, Art Director of the homonymous family company. A journalist: Silvia Robertazzi, director of AtCasa, the portal of design of Corriere della Sera. A designer: Alisée Matta, in Italy since 1993 signs ideas branded Nobody&Co. with her partner Giovanni Gennari. We met them in Milan at Casa-Museo Boschi Di Stefano, to have...

Some years ago Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore moved from New York City to a rambling old place in Northampton, MA.—an unlikely epicentre for the noise music scene. I remembered their old loft where I would browse through Thurston’s record collection in sheer amazement. As we drove up there late this past winter, in the front of...

Tomo says that my images have the air of post-sex. This is precisely my intention when I meet her on one very grey day in Tokyo. Intimacy in photos is what matters to me most. I try and make pictures that you can look at and actually feel the moment, where you feel the presence of the...

I bought the flat when I was twenty. Twenty and sad. And lonely. I renovated it in a hurry, eager to get my own real home. I bought fake oak from Ikea, everything from the kitchen to the bed was in this disgusting material. When I was younger I used it as my studio too,...

Collecting is a condition of humanity. To collect is to possess. Ownership is something that very few people manage to live without, collecting is almost a subconscious activity. What I am interested in is the peripheries and the extremes. Collecting is to do with entertainment; an enthusiasm for a particular object or experience, for whatever reason....

Shauna T. & Misha Hollenbach live in a place called SHITLAND (insert any place name here) and within/outside of this have created their own little vision of Utopia called FOREVEREVERLAND. From here comes all their joy, celebration, good times, P.A.M., Pambooks, Someday, and all their other ‘fun’ and creative pursuits/hobbies/lifestyles/‘other worldly’ experiences. And recently their...

When I was growing up, a lot of my friends lived in communes. It was New Zealand in the 1980s. There were ponies at the communes and the kids ran around in bare-footed packs, raising hell. In summer my mother would trade fish we had caught for bottles of milk in commune kitchens and some...

kinder It is 5:30pm on a September Saturday afternoon in Barcelona. Lined as it is with flowerpots, this courtyard shelters no grande dame but a group of young artists who have divided it into studio spaces. As we wait, Jordi finalizes some last-minute details. A nearby modernist tower casts a receding shadow. In a corner, the...

Well… free… okay… so you have to buy the paper and pay for the copies yourself, but the design is free. I like the idea of giving away stuff for free. I have always liked making presents for birthdays or other occasions. There is something innocent about presents that makes them better than stuff bought...

Intimate in Tokyo Tokyo: Celebrated wardrobe stylist Sonya Park came to Tokyo via Hawaii via Seoul. Born and raised in Seoul until she moved with her family to Hawaii when she was 12, Park later picked up in Tokyo without a plan. She has since become one of the most influential people in fashion today. Her job has...