"dwell magazine explores both the interior and exterior of modern home design (for living, working, eating, sleeping, chatting, dressing, reading ...), encouraging readers to envision their own sense of place, and then create it"
When bimonthly dwell Magazine's publisher and founder, Laura Hedberg, was asked why she would want to start a magzine, she recalled being jolted awake in a History of Design class by Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House and the world of Modernism.
Her hopes for dwell, with its first issue now on the stands for October 2000, are that the magazine and web site will "help foster a discussion that has already begun with architects. How can we best build our homes to respond to the cultural changes that take place?"
The premiere issue of the San Francisco-based magazine covers the first installment of a renovation of a teeny, tiny house on Telegraph Hill. The 680 square-foot house is noted on some tourist maps as the "Smallest House in San Francisco" and plans call for increasing the gross living area to almost 900 square feet.
The owner, Susan Dulkinys and the architect, Nilus de Matran, explain how they "reprogrammed" the design of the house to meet her needs and they describe the first meeting with the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Association Planning and Zoning Committee.
Modern design features in the magazine are not limited to housing though, as evidenced by an article on vacuum cleaners with a profile of Sanyo's "Hello Kitty" vacuum cleaner, expert finds' of good design at Home Depot and scads of ads for modern furniture.
For the international reader, there is an interview with Gary Chang, the director of Edge, Ltd. in Hong Kong who lives in a 330 square foot bachelor pad. The award-winning designer who is on the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Hong Kong, tells the readers that his space is a luxury for one person and that a whole family would typically be cramped into the same sized space. Chang's mortgage is only $500 USD per month and he paid $50,000 for the apartment seven years ago -- below market value, he notes. Market value is now $120,000.
Another pictorial entitled "Can This Room Be Saved?" shows the transformation of three roommates 'shared rooms' with expert opinions provided by interior designers and architects. Advice: toss out stuff first, look at the floor plan, and assess the good things the place has going for it. In this case, the apartment has wood floors, interesting molding and a bay window. They chose a bold color for accent chairs -- tangerine -- and a fuschia hanging lamp from Design Within Reach, a Forbes Best of Web site. IKEA's furniture is also recommended as a source for this updating project.
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