A peek inside Apartamento magazine’s new blockbuster book

Twice a year for the past ten years, Apartamento magazine has offered a look inside the world’s greatest homes. The word home, rather than house or interior design, is key with the magazine’s ethos. In showing readers the bookshelves, bedspreads and balconies of extraordinary people, the publication offers continuous mounds of helpful advice into how to live life happily, clutter and all. With back issues hard to track down by now, Apartamento fans will be pleased to hear that an anniversary tome looking back through issues has now hit the shelves.

Founded by Nacho Alegre, Omar Sosa and Marco Velardi, Apartamento was the result three people who didn’t even really know each other that well but that had a shared curiosity – and a great eye for good design. As contributing editor Michael Bullock writes in the book, they started Apartamento because “the world that excited them was nowhere to be found in their current media landscape,” and the three founders jumped into publishing “with equal parts great ambition and great naïveté”.

Now with ten years, and just over 20 issues to look back on how its subjects “lived when no one else is watching,” the book compiles several now-iconic Apartamento shoots. But more than a compendium, it’s a reflection on how the three founders have “grown up”, as they jointly write in its tenth anniversary issue: “Ten years is not such a long time, but the years between your early 20s and mid-30s compress so many of the big changes that define your life as an adult.” In turn, the book pulls together the connections they’ve made with writers, photographers, illustrators, interviewees and friends, and is more of a “tribute to these connections,” as Michael points out. “It further shares the moments that tell us about how and why people who have chosen to live outside of society’s conventions have achieved the life they desired. And at the end of all of this, what we have collectively learned from Apartamento is one meaningful and comforting fact: there are no general rules for how we should inhabit our homes or live our lives.”

The World of Apartamento has been published via Abraham featuring everyone from Omar Souleyman to Chloe Sevigny, graphic designer Na Kim and Rose McGowan. You can read a feature interview with co-founder Nacho Alegre, here.