The Oral History of Apartamento

I was obsessed with how people lived. And I remember it was very hard for me to picture myself living anywhere. I was very young, like 24. I started looking at interior magazines and they all seemed, to me, too cold. Too much architecture. There was no vibe there.

We started in 2008, 2007, when the economic crisis was hitting. We were at the beginning of our careers. But we never had a business plan. I was personally convinced that we weren’t going to last more than two, three issues. We didn’t want to run a subscription; I was personally very afraid of having to give money back.

The homes were important to us because we were 20 and we didn’t have a home, or we had a shithole, or we were living with our parents. Home was something that for us was important—you know, an identity. We weren’t interested in decoration. It was more about how we felt the home had to represent our new life as adults.

I was shooting for, like, indie magazines and stuff. And because there was no money, I was traveling around Europe staying with friends. So I had enough pictures of the places where my friends were living. And then [Omar and I] came up with the idea of doing like a sort of fanzine with the pictures I had from my travels.

Our friend Sean [Michael Beolchini] suggested that we show this to Marco, because Marco was another friend of ours in Milan. And we couldn’t meet, so I left a mockup. And then after a few days, Marco called back and he was like, hey, I just saw what you left with Sean. I love it. Let’s do this or that here. I put Omar and Marco in touch as well. We started working together, evolving it a bit more, and then one year later we came up with the first issue for Apartamento. And the thing is they never met until we launched the issue with them. We were working on Skype. That was high tech at the time.

At the beginning our style was really punk. I mean we would just show up at somebody’s house if we were traveling with a camera and explain that we have this project and then just publish it.

Nacho and I ended up going to Art Basel and we drove my parent’s car up. I think the first issue had just come out. I remember one night we met some people, and ended up inviting ourselves for breakfast and taking pictures the next morning. It was really just how natural that was in the sense that you build intimacy through connections, and then we ended up at their house and took pictures of these people, and then basically sneaking up in the bedrooms and taking photos of their beds. They were still warm, probably. We didn’t sleep there, but it just gave you the sense of how private that was. We were just there. They invited us for breakfast. The sun was shining. Everybody looked beautiful in a sort of hungover way. But if they wouldn’t allow it, we wouldn’t have published those pictures.

We are very respectful when we photograph houses. We try to be respectful when we lay out stories, when we tell things. Obviously, the more details, the more gossip, the better. But at the same time, there is a layer of respect that goes with the privacy of the individual, and their understanding of what that word means for them.

People definitely say no. We actually have a letter from David Attenborough sticky-taped up in our office kitchen, just saying no. Thanks, but no thanks. He was actually really lovely about that.

Above all, the number one reason that people say no —and it’s totally understandable— is they just don’t want the privacy of their home intruded upon. But it’s actually kind of surprising; you can never quite tell who will say yes and who will say no. You have people who might seem very private, then all of a sudden open up. We try to make people feel comfortable with what we do.

I think after Issue 1, we had…not a following, but like, oh, some people liked it. Ooh, let’s do another one.

Distribution was complicated. The time when we started the magazine it was almost a suicide because we were in-between what was mainstream and what was independent. They were either fanzines with 500 copies, or mainstream magazines. But slowly, over all these years, we made our own distribution. We distribute most of the copies ourselves. It’s quite a special case. It’s not the standard.

Media companies, they didn’t understand that we were doing a magazine that wasn’t based in the country. So we would go to, I don't know, to see an advertiser or in London. And they would say, “Oh, no, but you’re from Spain.” So it was very difficult at the beginning.

This is one of those stories I've re-told so many times that it kind morphs into something else and I wonder—it's still real, but it almost feels like fiction. Anyway, I was studying in Sydney. I used to work at American Apparel on the weekends, folding t-shirts and stuff. I had just come across Apartamento Issue 2 on a blog. I was just, for some reason, really inexplicably attracted to what it was. And I remember they didn't even really have a website at that time; they did, but it was pretty basic.

American Apparel had started selling magazines in the shops, and as a staff member, you were allowed to buy stuff for half-price. But the thing was, we'd only get one copy of the magazine, and you could only get the staff discount if there were more than two of the items in stock. I had to speak with one of my manager friends, and they still gave me a discount. I fell in love with the magazine, and really loved looking at it. I think that started me thinking that when I finish university, maybe I'll go to Europe. I'll go to Barcelona—I remember saying this to a friend at the time—maybe I'll work at Apartamento. Crazy.

A while later, a friend of mine called me up and asked me if I wanted to go to Japan for a holiday, because there were these two-for-one tickets. Apartamento, by coincidence, was in Tokyo. My friends had RSVP'd to their party, and I wasn't on the list, but I showed up with my friends that were and I remember them saying, “It's OK, come in.” And we just started chatting. Later, I sent my portfolio to Omar when I finished uni. The next day or a week later or whatever he said that he was really into it. This coincided with them getting their first office. Omar asked if I wanted to be an intern. I was still in Sydney at this point. I got the email and literally the next day I called my dad, like, you've gotta come get my stuff, I'm moving to Barcelona, I've got a flight.

A week later I was in Barcelona, knocking on the door of the address they gave me, and I said, I'm Robbie, I'm the new guy. And everyone's like, no, we have no idea who you are—we don't know anything about you. As it turns out, Omar hadn't told anyone. Not Nacho, not anyone. And I just arrived and sat down and they were like, okay.

It’s the sort of place that takes over your whole life. It’s a little bit unconventional at times, that approach. But I think there’s an overall feeling that everyone has this indulgence that is a little bit particular about the way that they work. The goal is to continue long-term, and make this whole thing work as part of your life.

For me, all of these things are integrated: where I live, what I wear, where I walk—they’re all part of life, and we’re attempting to communicate with people and inspire them. And it’s our only hope against ugly buildings, other than bazookas and bombs. Well, one of the things about Apartamento is that they are concerned with living spaces, and it’s not, shall we say, a display or a facsimile. [They] would rather be it the way it is.

I can't really recall ever staging anything. I’d be like: don’t clean. It’s really about what the space is and just sort of finding little nooks within it that the people— the subject—can fit in. And it's a nice excuse to be able to explore shelves and see what’s on them, and look at all their stuff. Whereas if you went and visited someone in their home, you can't really can't do that.

Omar Souleyman, have you ever heard of him? He's a Syrian musician, kind of electronic mixed with traditional Syrian music, very up-tempo. Because of the war in Syria he was living in a town on the border in Turkey called Sanliurfa. I had no idea of any photographers in Turkey. So, I was frantically looking for photographers in Turkey, and finally I'd just come across this old website of this guy called Serkan Taycan. I liked his vibe, so I wrote an email and I managed to get a response and he finally agreed to do it.

And he was getting on a plane to go from Istanbul to Sanliurfa and then he called me from the place. He's like, “I just got here and there's nothing. There's nothing to photograph. I don't know what to do.” And I was like, "Well, just photograph whatever there is, the house.” And he just sent some photos over email saying, "Look, it's literally like this." But the house—it's hard to explain. It's not about the house. He was actually a bit embarrassed, Souleyman; in Syria, his actual home is completely different. The photographs are very raw in that sense, and it's just the kind of – capturing what reality was – it's beautiful. It's still a beautiful house, very elegant. That's one that sticks in my mind, you know.

I kind of made a deal with Omar that I only really wanted to write articles about people that I know. I’m not a journalist or someone who says, go and write an article about this person. I don't do that. I write these really personal things on people whose environments I think are amazing.

I emailed Apartamento a handful of times trying to get hired to shoot something, hoping to drop the right acquaintance or kind word to get noticed amid the presumably hundreds of unsolicited emails they must’ve been receiving. It was a couple of years before I was finally asked to shoot my first story for them in 2012 for Issue 10. I had never heard of the subject, a furniture expert named Jim Walrod, but I was beyond thrilled and very nervous to do the shoot. Jim’s complicated relationship to the more rarefied world of high design was fascinating to me. He drew his inspiration, curiosity, and influences as much from punk and 60s pop culture as he did from design history. He hated the pretentious, moneyed side of the design world. One of his favorite pieces was a large orange cabinet in the shape of a woman by the artist Nicola L, who Jim was quick to tell you lived at the Chelsea Hotel and shot the Bad Brains’ CBGBs film. I asked if he would stand in front of the cabinet for a few pictures, when suddenly he turned to it, put his hands on the knobs that represented her nipples and pulled the drawers open. That shot ended up as the cover.

Jim quickly became a good friend, as did the Apartamento team. Jim and I would later collaborate on pieces for the magazine on Peter Halley, Gene Krell, & Matt Connors. Several of the people I’ve photographed, or writers who have done their interviews have gone on to become friends. And that’s how Apartamento has been for so many of us—each Apartamento party, at least back when we still had parties to go to, was like a family reunion, a drunken uncle slouched on the sofa, your favorite loud, lipsticked grandmother, a distant cousin you have nothing in common with.

Queer content, 15 years ago, was still taboo, and Apartamento was a place where I was doing stories about queer culture, but putting them in a place that was a little unexpected. From the beginning I was obsessed with Justin Vivian Bond, and they let me do that story. It seems crazy to say now, but at that moment, there weren’t trans people in interior design magazines. Omar and Nacho and Marco have always been very open with my ideas, letting me do what I want and never editing me.

I had done a story on Sheila Heti in Toronto. And at the time, we couldn’t tap into getting a great photographer. We got a photographer and the photos were fine. [The editors] are very—they are sticklers about the images. Because the magazine is very, very much about the visual. It wasn’t necessarily that they didn’t want the photos. It’s just there was something that wasn’t connecting. They couldn’t feel the connection with the interview in the photos. And we really struggled because we didn’t know what to do, the story was ready to be killed. And there was no way I was going to have that happen because the interview was great.

So, again, here’s some synchronicity. I said to them, “I have this great idea. What if we don’t do photographs, and we illustrate it?” There’s an artist named Leanne Shapton from Toronto and she does these great watercolors. And I thought, OK, I’m going to reach out to Leanne Shapton. And then I found out that Leanne Shapton lived in that house. It was her first apartment. And then she gave it to Sheila. So that came full circle. It was just, like, that could have been killed so easily. But we saved it. And that’s also a testament to how trusting they are.

They had some stories on Japanese artists, so I knew they were interested in the ideas of a Japanese lifestyle, compared to some European country or in the United States. We have such small spaces, you know, and low, low ceilings. I think we have a lot of potential to give some ideas of how we live wisely. With this limited space with limited resources, we can live well. That's the kind of message that I wanted to tell through Apartamento.

I went to [curator Klaus Biesenbach’s] house in Far Rockaway on three separate occasions. I’m happy we did that. I was able to capture the home and Klaus in different moments. One morning, it must’ve been around 7 am, I met Klaus in his backyard, near the very large aviary that housed many beautiful exotic birds. There was a baby bird that had fallen out of the nest and into a pool of water and was struggling to survive. Klaus picked it out of the water and warmed it in his armpit, resuscitating it. That was a really special moment. For our final shoot he invited me to his house to spend the night, along with another one of his guests.

From the beginning there was an understanding that we were working in the same kind of spirit. There was a lot of mutual appreciation, and we really had a camaraderie, and occasionally even a friendly competition. You know, the best competition, the best compliment is always when you see a story and you think, damn, I wish I had done that. That’s definitely happened a few times over a few years—I think their story on Martha Stewart for sure, I loved the way that felt.

My mom used to have these French magazines called 100 Ideas. They were magazines for women in the 1970s; it had recipes, how to knit your sweaters, how to decorate your Christmas tree, but it was hippy, do it yourself. A big mix of things. We thought we need to do DIY stuff in the magazine too. And this was the first one we did, with Max Lamb, the DIY chair, with instructions you could just buy it and do it. I have one. I made one.

They cover a lot of older people, which I think is always interesting. When you think about it, older people have more character in their homes than younger people, right? Older people have more objects that have more stories to tell. A lot of people in life don’t get recognized until they die, and that always bothered me; people who aren’t playing the game of hype and PR and schmooze and all that…the people who do that aren’t necessarily the most talented people. The people who win awards and enter the contests aren't necessarily geniuses. But after other people die, they’re hailed as geniuses. I like to point it out while they’re still around. Ingo Maurer was one of my oldest friends, and I introduced him to Omar before he died. I got to do the Apartamento piece, which was the last piece done about him.

The other thing I try to do is— and the magazine as a whole does this— is we don’t want to hear the same stories. I did one on [Lawrence Weiner]
(https://www.artforum.com/news/lawrence-weiner-1942-2021-87382) who is certainly a
well-known minimalist artist. He’s done a thousand interviews. But we didn’t know— I mean, the general public—didn’t really know that he also lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam in the early years, because it was a cheap and easy way to be an artist, to have a little place in New York but to really live on this houseboat on a canal.

And the other thing about Lawrence is that he’s a grandfather. That was the first question I asked him; I wanted the interview to start in a way that was kind of jarring. It wasn’t an obvious way to get into a conversation with Lawrence. But I wanted to hear from him. When you see Lawrence, he has a kind of intense look. And he looks, I think maybe, very serious, I don’t know, stern. But he's so not that. I wanted to get the soft side of Lawrence—he’s a civil rights activist, he’s a grandfather, he’s a super sweet guy. Again, it’s about the work, but it’s also really about the person.

The intention was keeping it very, very simple. Consistent. Every issue was really clear since the beginning. Because otherwise I would have gotten lost in the design. So, yeah—we kept it the same. And it’s like, OK, maybe people would get bored. Maybe I’m too lazy. Maybe we should change. I mean—Robbie and I—we talk about that many times. Come on, it’s time to change. But I don’t know…I would think of National Geographic. How beautiful it is. It’s pretty much the same.

The thing is with the houses: we don’t really care anymore. Some people, we would just like to talk to them, and it’s a shame that we have to shoot people in their houses. We explain what the magazine is about and they think the house is something important, then they think their house is shit, or it’s not up to their idea of what they should have, maybe sometimes they say no…but we don’t really care. The house could be anything.