The cover is decorated with a cup bearing a smile, a kind of child’s drawing far removed from the tempting photos usually published in cooking books. All the Stuff We Cooked, the recipe book by the famous Danish chef Frederik Bille Brahe is, with sixteen thousand copies sold, the best-seller of its publisher, Apartamento.
At the head of the biannual decoration magazine of the same name, a collection of books, a furniture publishing house and a wine bar, this collective has reigned since 2006 on the contemporary art of living. Its founders, the Catalans Nacho Alegre, Omar Sosa, and the Italian Marco Velardi, three curious and lively boys, have always known how to smell the spirit of the times and make choices contrary to what common sense and principles would dictate. marketing studies.
The three forty-year-olds founded the magazine Apartment, distributed today in fifty thousand copies in forty-nine countries, eighteen years ago. “Omar was an artistic director, Nacho a photographer, and I wrote for brands,” remembers Marco Velardi. Initially, their desire to launch a magazine showing private interiors was more of a hobby.
Thumbing up to the press
When Apartment was born, recalls Omar Sosa, “the world was very different culturally. Instagram and Pinterest didn’t exist, there was only Flickr [site de partage de photos en ligne] et MySpace [plate-forme de blogs]we chatted by Skype, we called with BlackBerrys…” However, the idea of joining forces with Marco the Milanese, whom Nacho Alegre had met during a previous project, quickly imposed itself on the people of Barcelona. “We, who had always wanted to be international, were afraid of making a magazine designed by and for the inhabitants of Barcelona,” he explains, specifying that the trio, a pure product of the Erasmus generation, always communicates exclusively in English.
However, there was never any question of choosing a rear base other than the capital of Catalonia: “This city is a fertile environment for magazines, photographers, graphic designers… The cost of living is rather low, the competition is less fierce and the quality of life is much better than in London or New York. It is a metropolis that is both calm and connected to the world, which has allowed us to flourish, to go at our own pace and to have a distanced point of view on our subjects,” says Omar Sosa, who nevertheless tried to live in New York.
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