Magazines Point Cameras At Themselves

It’s a trend: Feature yourself.

Martha Stewart lets us into her stately, white-frame farmhouse (or at least the dining room) in East Hampton, N.Y., in her magazine’s December/January issue. There’s Martha’s holiday table “decorated in soft pinks and silvers rather than reds and greens.”

Mary Engelbreit, the greeting card lady-turned-interiors person and doyenne of the cutesy look, also exposes herself. She devotes 12 pages in the premiere issue of her magazine, Mary Engelbreit’s Home Companion, to feature just about every nook and cranny of her Georgian-style digs in St. Louis.

OK, we expect the look-at-me tactics from Martha and Mary. After all, their whole schtick is Themselves.

But when the tony House & Garden, which historically has featured the rich and famous, starts pointing the camera on itself, something is up.

Check out H&G’s December issue. Laid out in eight-page splendor is the 10-room, 3,000-square-foot Park Avenue apartment of Suzanne Slesin, the magazine’s design editor. We get a good look, down to her creative display of toilet paper in a powder room.

Should we see this much, know this much about a real journalist within the pages of her own magazine?

“I wouldn’t navel-gaze unless it was of great interest to people who want to know about interior design. I wouldn’t have featured it unless it was as good as it is,” says Dominique Browning, editor of House & Garden, who points out Slesin’s “enormous sense of style” and her authorship of several books on design. “People are interested in how she is living, and it worked in the mix (of stories this month).”