Apartment Therapy’s Founder Talks Shop
Photo: Jim Franco: www.jimfranco.com
Talking to Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, co-founder and New York editor of Apartment Therapy, is fascinating. You start to understand why this online community, with its 4 million monthly visitors, is so popular. During the course of the interview Maxwell manages to move seamlessly from a discussion about blogs versus newspapers and his time as a Waldorf teacher to European home offices and what color works best in a living room. Every topic, big or small, is given serious consideration. There is an underlying kindness to Maxwell that permeates the site. As he says “Apartment Therapy isn’t snarky, or edgy or even fast, it’s not the newest latest thing we are covering. The whole goal was to help people with their homes, to get them over the finishing line, most would love help from an interior designer or architect but don’t know where to start.” Apartment Therapy has become a very good place to start.
But, enough from me, here is Maxwell:
On blogs: “My wife is a real magazine reader and there’s so much discussion around the demise of magazines and whether blogs are undermining them. Blogs don’t compete with magazines – we compete with newspapers. You post on a blog and then move onto the next thing, it’s very forward looking, fast. And much closer then to a newspaper model than a magazine model.”
On his years as a Waldorf teacher: “[Those years] very much inform my work – now it’s just a much bigger classroom! After teaching for 5 years at a Waldorf school I could have gone on and taken a new class. But I wanted something else. I wanted to live on a larger plane, schools can be small parochial places. I wanted to be rid of the politics.”
“And I had studied design, my first job out of college was as a designer. And I was still very much interested in design. Waldorf is connected to design right down to the chairs and desk and furniture and the color of the walls through all the grades. Design is central and there is a strong belief that the right design can have a very positive effect.”
“I did home visits and the children who had ‘good’ homes – neat, clean and well organized, did better in my classroom. Not necessarily the smartest – it was the ones with a good home foundation. And I thought a lot about that. I was fascinated with that. Being a teacher you need to live the model life. You have to start where you are.”
On starting Apartment Therapy: “At this time I found myself reading the business section of the newspaper more than any other section. It was that time in America before Bush where there was a real optimism in this country around business – business was creative and practical and honest. I craved that opportunity.”
“So in 2001 I started what turned out to be an early version of Apartment Therapy in the summer and gave myself a year to try it out. If it didn’t work I would go back to teaching.”