• by May 13, 2002

As Americans reexplore the comforts of home and hearth in a subdued time, it would seem there would already be enough shelter books to satisfy every domestic whim. There’s Architectural Digest, Martha Stewart Living, Better Homes & Gardens, Elle Décor…The list, as anyone who spends quality time at a magazine stand knows, seems endless.

Why then would Meredith Corp. want to enter a seemingly crowded field, especially when the industry is still in the process of pulling itself out of one of the worst ad slumps ever?

Like a prospective homebuyer who has found a patch of land in an upscale suburb, Meredith thinks it has found a valuable niche: the legions of twenty- and thirtysomethings who are trying to find their inner interior designer as they enter the nesting stage of their adult lives. Raised in households with some design sense but new to doing it themselves, this group has in aesthetic values what it lacks in experience. “The traditional shelter magazines really don’t talk to them,” says Jerry Kaplan, president of Meredith’s magazine group.

The company plans to launch a test of the new title, called Living Room, this fall, with a subscription test following in 2003. But if the concept sounds familiar, it’s not because it’s an old idea. The not-yet-green-lighted magazine acquired some helpful early buzz because much of the early conceptual work was directed by former Glamour editor Bonnie Fuller. Rumors that she would take the helm of the new book came to an abrupt halt, however, when Ms. Fuller took the top edit post at Jann Wenner’s US Weekly in March.

But a prototype of the potential magazine (pictured here) provided by Meredith to MEDIA shows that it still has plenty of the spark Ms. Fuller was known for at Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and YM, and the early indications of who will be on the publication’s masthead are also encouraging. Meredith has hired Jeanie Pyun, a former top editor at defunct Glamour sister book Mademoiselle, as editor of the test issue, and Sara Ruffin, former lifestyle editor at Glamour, who will serve as creative director. As for the prototype, here’s a peek at some

prospective content: a fashion magazine–like feature on how to get the furniture of the stars at a lower price, a reader Q&A asking such questions as “How could I recreate Sarah Jessica’s apartment in Sex and the City?” and how to build stripes into one’s home décor. The prototype cover promises a Home Makeover of the Month and how to agree with your mate on decorating ideas. Says Kaplan, the idea is for Living Room to be “a fun, edgy type of publication.” In fact, in many ways the prototype seems to apply a fashion magazine sensibility to the task of dressing houses rather than people.

Meredith is aiming for circulation of 750,000-plus, and in contrast with most shelter magazines, the belief and hope is that Living Room will have a higher concentration of newsstand sales than traditional shelter magazines, which tend to be more subscription-based than most consumer magazines. “We want as much trial as possible,” Kaplan says. The newsstand price will be $2.99. However, Kaplan says that the company is taking its spring subscription trial seriously, describing it as a “significant, substantial test.”

And then there’s the advertising. With the optimism typical of magazine executives, Kaplan says, “We should do just fine in terms of ad sales.” While Meredith does, of course, plan to go heavily after the furniture and home decorating category, Kaplan envisions it as only 20% to 25% of the overall mix, alongside beauty, fashion, automotive, and retail advertisers. The test magazine’s publisher is still to be determined, but Michael Brownstein, vice president/publishing director at Meredith, is handling those duties for now.

So Is This a Good Idea? It takes a glass-is-half-full attitude for any magazine launch to be successful, but the numbers tell a more objective story. And those numbers describe a category that much of the time provided ample, well, shelter from the recession storming around it last year.

According to the Publishers Information Bureau, shelter magazines had a mixed year in 2001, largely following the recessionary pattern in which top books in a category do farely well, while the smaller books can see stomach-turning drops. For instance, Martha Stewart Living, certainly a powerhouse, saw a meager 1.8% decline in ad pages but a gain of 6.3% in revenue, topping out at $210 million. Meredith books Better Homes & Gardens, Country Home, and Midwest Living all saw slight increases in revenue on 5%-or-so page declines: BH&G increased ad revenue to $491.3 million from $471.1 million. Midwest Living was up 7.5%. Other books, however, had double-digit revenue declines, including Meredith’s Traditional Home, which went down by 6.4% on a more than 17% decline in pages. Gruner + Jahr’s HomeStyle shuttered in January, following a 2001 revenue decline in ad revenue of more than 29%.

As for the first quarter of this year, there are only faint hints of a turnaround so far. The ad categories Living Room wants to target are all showing declines as compared with the first quarter of last year. Automotive is down by 6.2%, apparel and accessories by 21%, household furnishing and supplies by 12%, retail by 16.8%, and toiletries and cosmetics by 10%.

Better news is that many of the shelter books that survived last year are still following the pattern of slight ad page declines combined with revenue gains, although it looks as though it will be awhile before the tide really turns. Good thing the test of Living Room won’t decorate newsstands until fall.