Metropolitan Home

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~ the last words ~

hachette's design monthly ran twenty-eight years under the metropolitan home name and never landed on a turkish newsstand at meaningful scale. i knew elle decor by name from imports at bakırköy kiosks. metropolitan home was the sister title elle decor outlived at hachette. by the time the shutdown announcement came in november 2009 the magazine was on a december holiday issue that was already at the printers.

the title launched in 1969 as apartment life, a meredith monthly targeting urban renters. through the 1970s the format covered small-space design for the same reader that better homes and gardens was serving on the suburban side. meredith rebranded the title as metropolitan home in april 1981 to reflect a wider design-and-interiors positioning.

hachette filipacchi media (later hachette publications) bought the title from meredith in 1992. donna warner ran the editor chair through most of the hachette years. the magazine positioned itself as a high-end modern-design monthly beside elle decor in the same portfolio, with the annual design 100 issue as the flagship number of the year. the two titles operated in parallel through the '90s and 2000s.

the closure came fast. on 9 november 2009 hachette announced metropolitan home would end with the december holiday issue. the reason cited was a decision to concentrate design-portfolio resources on elle decor. donna warner and her staff of thirteen left the company. the digital property went dormant with the print title.

~ the record ~

~ the apartment life era ~

apartment life ran as a meredith title from 1969 to 1981 and never had the profile of the better homes and gardens flagship next to it. the magazine covered small-space design for renters at a moment when the us urban-apartment renter was still an underserved reader for the mainstream shelter monthlies. by the late '70s meredith was pushing the property upmarket toward a more design-conscious urban reader. the april '81 rebrand to metropolitan home dropped the renter-only positioning entirely and opened the title to homeowners with a modernist orientation.

~ the hachette decades ~

hachette filipacchi media bought metropolitan home from meredith in 1992. the title sat alongside elle decor in the hachette design-portfolio and ran as a parallel monthly, with donna warner as editor through most of the run. the annual design 100 issue was the recognized flagship of the year, listing what the magazine judged the year's best design work across furniture, product, architecture and residential interiors. through the 2000s the ad base held, the sub-category held, elle decor was the peer title at the same publisher.

by 2009 the design-magazine ad category had been hit hard by the housing collapse. luxury interior brands were pulling ad spend from print. hachette ran the numbers across its us portfolio in the fall of 2009 and marked metropolitan home for closure to protect the elle decor rate base. the closure hit inside the same quarter that took gourmet at condé nast.

~ what came after ~

hearst bought hachette filipacchi's us magazine portfolio in 2011, which brought elle decor and the metropolitan home archive under the same roof. still, hearst held the metropolitan home name dormant for five years before running a pilot issue in april 2016 under newell turner as editor. the pilot was distributed to 70,000 newsstand copies plus 45,000 mailings to other hearst subscribers. hearst did not follow through with a regular publication schedule. by the early 2020s the name was gone again.

the print magazine that had died in december 2009 stayed dead. metropolitan home was a hachette title in a hachette portfolio, killed to save elle decor at a moment when the entire us print-magazine business was under recession pressure. the 2016 hearst pilot was a separate object under different editorial hands, and it did not stick either.

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