NEW YORK — House & Garden magazine, Conde Nast’s century-old look at beautiful design in homes across the country, will cease publication in December, the title’s second closure.
“This has been a difficult decision to come to, but we feel it is one that must be made at this time,” said Charles H. Townsend, president and CEO of Conde Nast Publications. “With the unexpected departure of the publisher of the magazine, we decided to take a serious look and re-evaluate the title.”
Joe Lagani, the magazine’s publisher, left in October, after three years at the helm, for a position at Glam Media, an online media company that publishes the women’s site .
Conde Nast said its investment in House & Garden, which was first published in 1901, was “substantial” but the company no longer believes it is a viable business investment. Conde Nast shut down the magazine in 1993, but brought it back in 1996. The magazine’s single-copy sales have been steadily declining over the past few years, from 84,558 in 2002 to 50,909 last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, even though overall circulation was more stable.
Samir Husni, chairman of the Journalism Department at University of Mississippi, said the home and garden category remains strong, but general titles such as H&G have lost some readers to more specialized publications, such as local interior design magazines or those that focus on a particular room or look.
“With House & Garden, yes it is 106, 107, years old,” he said. “But at the same time the brand is not as strong of a brand as it used to be mainly because one, when they stopped the magazine and came back, that lost some of that momentum and two, with the more specialized magazines are becoming, to have a general-interest magazine is not as plausible as the specialized titles.”
Successful magazine comebacks are rare, he said. Titles such as Vanity Fair are an exception.
But the closing of House & Garden, and it’s companion website, will leave a hole in the interior decorating magazine business, according to interior decorators.
It was one of the “grand dames of interior decorating magazines,” said Lauri Ward, founder of Use-What-You- Have Interiors and author of “Downsizing Your Home With Style: Living Well In a Smaller Space.”
“While the magazine showcased mostly traditional interiors, it did publish a broad cross-section of homes and successfully represented American interior decorating and design at its best,” said Ward. “This will really create a very big gap for interior design public. There’s really nothing like it.”
Conde Nast is part of Advance Publications Inc., a privately held media company run by S.I. Newhouse Jr. Conde Nast also publishes Vanity Fair, Vogue, the New Yorker and several other magazines.
