In the crowded newsstand of shelter magazines, is there really room for another?
Domino, which debuted nationwide this week, may actually make the cut. The new Conde Nast publication is modeled after the company's shopping mag, Lucky. But Domino has more depth. It replaces a lot of Lucky's "Buy this!" breathlessness with tips on combining furniture and accessories of different styles and prices.
That makes sense. You can banish a trendy T-shirt or ill-fitting sandals to the back of the closet, but there is no discarding a sofa or floor-to-ceiling draperies so easily.
Sure it's a shopping magazine, said Deborah Needleman, the editor in chief of Domino. But she wants to "connect the dots" for readers -- offering not just bits of inspiration and this month's must-haves, but a guide to putting together the things we buy. "In my parent's generation, people bought a suite of furniture for a room and it stayed there for 20 years. Then they redid the whole thing," she said. "That's not the way people live anymore."
Needleman (who, a decade ago, was photo editor of The Washington Post Magazine) said the new publication is geared to readers in their thirties and early forties, a younger group than is targeted by most home magazines. "I don't think there is a really practical yet stylish sourcebook for the home" for that age group, she said.
One great source in Domino: a monthly column on entertaining by Marian McEvoy, a former editor of House Beautiful and Elle Decor. We also liked an article that explained the mystery of design centers, those imposing to-the-trade-only showrooms that typically don't sell directly to the public.
The shopping is just one part of [our] service," Needleman said. "If people don't want to buy it, we tell them how things are put together and we hope the ideas are still useful. I just want people to feel like we're doing this work for them."
