Knock, Knock

First, Marian McEvoy dropped by.

Tom Scheerer hadn’t even peeled the old paper off the walls before the editor in chief of Elle Decor was traipsing through his home in historic Charleston, S.C.

Later, McEvoy wrote a gushy note to Scheerer, a successful New York decorator, about how much she loved the house and how much she’d love to showcase it in her magazine. The same week he heard the same pitch from an editor of Conde Nast House & Garden, which returns this week after a three-year hiatus. She too had to have it.

And so the courting of Tom Scheerer began.

As he knocked down walls and used simple white linen in ways that might surprise formal Charleston, Scheerer was being romanced by editor after editor, all of them calling from high above Manhattan, in corner offices decorated with blond furniture and fresh flowers.

McEvoy sent word through a friend of Scheerer’s that the decorator’s house could appear on Elle Decor’s cover. In a high-circulation fall issue. Whenever and whatever he wanted.

House & Garden, meanwhile, sent another envoy: Senga Mortimer, the legendary garden editor, literally knocked on his door. “She was very flattering,” Scheerer recalls.

Finally, he had to decide and he went with . . . House & Garden.

“I love Marian,” he says, “but I felt all the eyes of the world would be on the first few issues of House & Garden and it would be a feather in my cap to appear.”

If the competition for the best houses and advertisers and readers and chic new ways to paint floors and redo patios has been fierce among glossy magazines up until now, it just became a lot fiercer with a revived House & Garden.

The combination of baby boomers burrowing even deeper into their nests and a rebounding economy has given publishers new confidence to start “shelter books”--the peculiar name given by the industry to 90 or so interior design magazines.

In 1995 alone, 30 new titles appeared, mostly in the how-to category, allowing a man who wants to replaster the bathroom and the mother who wants to glitter her little girl’s curtains to each find advice in specialized books.

Certainly, healthy revenues and increased ad pages in the upscale decorator-driven version of these magazines have set the stage for the reentry of House & Garden, with its more cerebral approach to the home, say Conde Nast executives.

What has kept their hopes high over the last year? Probably that in 1995, Hachette Filapacchi’s Elle Decor was up 35% in ad pages; Conde Nast’s Architectural Digest, the grand dame of this category, was up 11%. And for the first half of this year, as most American magazines suffered through a mini-slump, Martha Stewart Living--with a circulation that soared from 250,000 to 1,449,744 in four years--saw its ad revenues jump 35.1% over last year. House & Garden’s relaunch drew a record 207 ad pages; the next few issues are expected to have 100 each.

During an interview in her office, replete with three vases of red roses and half a dozen gondola mooring poles covered in rich fabrics, McEvoy seems to relish the intensified competition, even if it meant losing the Scheerer house. “We’ll get the next one,” she promises.

“Let’s get real,” she adds, smiling through ruby-red lips. “Dominique is going after our writers, our editors, our decorators, our readers. But she edits from a vastly different point of view and that’s what makes this interesting.”

What McEvoy and every shelter book groupie in New York has been hearing since last year’s announcement of House & Garden’s revival is that its new editor, Dominique Browning, is positioning herself as a sort of intellectual Martha Stewart. With her background as executive editor of Texas Monthly, literary editor of Esquire and features czarina of Newsweek, Browning has vowed to inject more “journalism” and more “intensive knowledge” into this photo-dominated genre.

“I think an intellectual take is limited,” huffs McEvoy, 47, who comes out of fashion magazines. “That’s not why people pick up these magazines.”

But Browning believes that it’s an insult to the reader--the savvy, 30-, 40- or 50-year-old woman who enjoys her “pleasure” reading but also expects real information, even if it’s about hardware.

“Reporting about everyday life doesn’t have to be superficial and dumb,” she says, citing the many Newsweek cover stories on lifestyle she marshaled. “I think shelter magazines are about visuals, but they’re also about writing and thinking and there is nothing incompatible about that.”

*

The new House & Garden’s first issue includes an essay by John Updike about Jasper Johns, a column by former Harper’s Editor Michael Pollan about windows, and an ode to the ladle: “I came late to the ladle,” Cynthia Ozick writes. “For years it lay in a kitchen drawer, a practical cousin’s practical gift, for which I felt no gratitude.”

In addition to its storybook writing, House & Garden makes a bow to such practical-minded magazines as Metropolitan Home--but with a more sophisticated spin in departments like “Dialectical Materialism” (a design debate), “On the Couch” (psychology of lifestyle) and “Hunting / Gathering” (shopping). Elsewhere, a hardware columnist rhapsodizes about square-drive screws. And the newsy opening section, “Domestic Bliss,” begins with an exhaustive, if overwrought, piece on vacuum cleaners.

“People care as much about their vacuum cleaner as they do about their sofa,” says the 40-year-old Browning, whose aesthetic is driven as much by an understanding of her generation’s cravings as by an artistic vision. Thus, catalog-junkie Browning includes a feature on buying a single item--for this issue, daffodils--via mail order. Thus, Browning, the doctor’s daughter, always finds something great at flea markets because, she says, “I have an eye for quality.”

Browning doesn’t see her inexperience in the house and gardening niche as a drawback. Widening her enormous light-blue eyes, she concludes that, like her readers, she is a learner. “I actually think that’s what being a journalist is all about and that’s my approach.”

Conde Nast is making a sizable investment in her education: spending $40 million to resuscitate a magazine it killed a mere three summers ago. The 95-year-old title, called HG at the time, was shuttered after the company acquired the cash-cow Architectural Digest and its editor from Knapp Communications. With the economy still in a slump, Conde Nast decided that the market couldn’t support two similar titles.

“I had fought House & Garden for material for several decades,” says Paige Rense, 62, Architectural Digest’s editor for 27 years. “I was outmanned, out-moneyed, out-partied. God knows, it was David and Goliath.

“I am not going to say I was unhappy when it closed.”

And she is not going to say that she is happy about her publishing group reopening it. Even though this time around H&G; is less focused on rich people, AD’s specialty. Even though its newsstand price has been lowered, for now, from $4 to $2.95. Even though David Carey, H&G;’s publisher, cautiously avoided stealing AD readers and advertisers. Even though . . . Rense still seems wary.

“If I was directing a relaunch I’d go after House Beautiful, Elle Decor and Metropolitan Home,” she says, making it clear that she sees AD, with 834,964 readers and a coterie of haute decorators, in a category all to itself.

Rumors have been ricocheting within design circles that Rense, during a series of lunches this May at 21 to introduce an AD redesign, declared of H&G;: “I killed it once, I’ll kill again.”

Over a recent breakfast at the Carlyle Hotel, her New York residence, Rense peered through blue-tinted lenses and in her little-girl voice admitted, “Yes, I said that.”

But the woman whose singular vision has shaped decorating for almost three decades insists the remark was intended as a humorous response to a question from a member of her advertising staff. Yet at the same time she professes not to be worried about House & Garden, or any competition, she points out that she picked up about 250,000 of HG’s subscribers when it folded.

“My goal always is to protect my magazine,” she says.

The famously territorial Rense, known for shunning decorators if their work appears in other magazines, says demanding loyalty enables her to deliver something unique.

“When you look at my magazine against the others on the newsstand, busy with cover blurbs and all that stuff,” she says, “AD stands out as an island of serenity in a chaotic world.”

*

Actually, the high-end magazines appear similar, like women who live in the same Manhattan neighborhood, with predictable departments and photo angles. On closer inspection, though, the character and taste of their editors emerges.

Just hearing how Rense, Browning and McEvoy might approach the home being built by computer mogul Bill Gates provides insight into not only their varied styles and attitudes but also into how cyber-nerds--a generation of millionaires who’ve spent their youth in apartments sparsely furnished with beanbag chairs and rusty-orange carpeting--might filter into shelter magazines.

Rense heard about Gates’ home outside Seattle from people who had been there. “I might photograph it because it has news value,” she says. “But on the other hand, there are several well-known houses that would have news value that would not make it in Architectural Digest.”

Browning is “dying” to photograph the house. “It’s a very intellectual project,” she says. “He’s really thinking about a new way of living.”

McEvoy actually hired a professional spy to snap black-and-white photographs of the interior. Gates’ standing as a “god to young people” drove her to such a scheme, which she quickly aborted after consulting lawyers.

“I would have been skinned alive,” she says, laughing, “and thrown in jail and they don’t decorate jails very well.” In the future she won’t be photographing just any old “zitty jerk’s bachelor pad,” but intends to keep up with this generation. “Ten years from now these people will be the collectors and we need to follow their progress--or some other magazine will,” she says.

*

In fact, editors have begun to lament the shortage of original ideas and fabulous homes. In any given month, Dominique and Paige and Marian plus Donna (Warner, of Metropolitan Home) and Karen (Saks, of American HomeStyle & Gardening) might be pursuing the same designer for the same story.

“The success of our magazine, the growth almost to a million readers,” Saks says, “is that we not only show the pretty picture but we also tell you where they bought the wrought-iron chair and how to finish it and who made the soaring windows and what company sells the bright red faucet. But we need to start with a pretty picture and finding those homes is getting tougher every month.”

Editors and decorators alike complain that with many of the best decorators dying of AIDS, rich people coveting their privacy and fewer wealthy people displaying good taste, the contest for great homes has become almost absurd.

Yet L.A.’s Michael Smith says he doesn’t feel the pressure, necessarily. Like many top designers, he has learned to appreciate each editor’s “distinctive vision” and offer up work that fits her magazine. Many editors and writers have become friends, he adds, and those relationships also affect which homes turn up where.

“We all share a passion,” says Smith, a 32-year-old with an enviable Hollywood clientele. “The people in this business are generally in it not because they couldn’t get a job at Popular Mechanics but because of that passion.”

Browning, a newcomer to this inner circle, has spent the last year courting its elite. She became an instant “close friend” of Smith’s, he says, after they sat next to each other at a dinner she hosted for West Coast decorators.

Whether there will be enough advertising to support so many new magazines remains uncertain. But many believe the heated-up competition over homes like Scheerer’s brick Federal well serves both the decorating community and readers seeking fantasy and facts.

“I can’t help but think that all the infighting over decorators and competition will force everyone to start looking for new beautiful homes and design concepts in places like Mobile, Ala., and Honolulu and that will open up a whole new world,” Smith says. “That’s great for everybody.”