The Nesting instinct: the eclectic design title breaks all the publishing world's rules yet has become the darling of the National Magazine Awards. Now its eccentric founder, Joseph Holtzman, would like to furnish your home

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Feb, 2002 by Greg Lindsay

Just down the hall from Nest's crowded offices in an upper East Side Manhattan apartment building, you'll find the home of its founder and owner, Joseph Holtzman. And if you want to understand what Holtzman is up to with his eccentric and eclectic four-year-old "quarterly of interiors," a look around his one-bedroom apartment is a fine place to start.

At 10 o'clock on a morning in mid-December, Holtzman answers the door looking sleepy with heavy-lidded eyes and his salt-and-pepper hair drooping onto his face. As he pads back into his kitchen, he invites his guest to come in and take a look around. But the profusion of objet and styles makes figuring out just where to look quite a challenge.

Just inside the doorway, the decor performs a credible imitation of a Trader Vic's tiki lounge. But the Polynesian theme soon gives way to ... an aesthetic cornucopia. A red leather couch with mismatched pillows faces metallic-blue leather chairs clad in clashing blankets, curvy metal sculptures resembling miniature mugs rest on sleek glass tables. Under a Rothko sits a doll-house-sized tan couch and matching chair with metal frames. The visual density of his quarters is so crushing that one doesn't doubt Holtzman designed it for effect, but a master plan is indiscernible.

While there may not be a center to the place, there is a centerpiece. Conspicuously placed on the edge of his amoebashaped coffee table is a pair of "Ellies" --Holtzman's trophies for Nest's National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and Design. It's perfectly fitting that the Alexander calder-designed stabiles reside in his home--for Holtzman's nest exemplifies Nest in all its baroque glory.

The idea for Nest was born in another set of rooms that Holtzman, now 45, compulsively decorated. Ten years ago, in his native Baltimore, the designer bought a cavernous apartment where he planned to live while tending to a friend sick with AIDS. He had no grand plans for the place, but nonetheless spent five years designing everything--from the doorknobs to the moldings--ensuring that each room fit together proportionally. "[It] was a serious exploration of design, a laboratory of my design ideas," he says. "It was my equivalent of college."

And shelter magazines were the equivalent of his textbooks, stoking his passion for the decorative arts. He soon began toying with the idea of starting one of his own, and in 1997--using the proceeds from the sale of the apartment and family money--the publishing neophyte "traded in one experiment for another."

Nest can best be described as the anti-shelter shelter magazine. It wittily bucks the formulas of the design magazine establishment, such as Elle Decor and Architectural Digest, preferring to approach the decorative arts as a history lesson or artistic exercise, rather than as a visit to sumptuously appointed abodes-cum-showrooms where the items on display may as well have price tags attached.

Nestsprang from Holtzman's ideas about what rooms should look like, not magazines. Therefore, it gleefully thumbs its nose at certain rules of the business. Holtzman rejects ad pages if they're too ugly, and confines the ones he does run to no more than a third of the book, even though it costs $6 just to get each copy printed and to the newsstand. Holtzman, who is both editor and art director, has yet to hire a full-time employee with any magazine experience. (For example, literary editor Matthew Stadler, who assigns all the stories and line-edits the text, is a novelist, while managing editor and research director Paul B. Franklin has a background in art history.)

And Nest doesn't bother with such magazine traditions as departments or editorial calendars. The subject of any given issue, Holtzman explains from his couch, is simply what's been on his mind lately. He's a little woozy this morning because he'd been experimenting the night before with the properties of a certain herb he'd discovered only in the past year. That experience led to issue 13, the "joint issue," which highlighted a floral wallpaper print based on the plant in question, and included a feature on the interiors of a hydroponics farm. Other genre-defying stories have examined the Unabomber's cabin, a homeless person's cardboard box, and prison inmates decorating their cells.

Despite Holtzman's maverick (or foolhardy) publishing ways, Nest, now with a paid circulation of 65,000, is on the verge of becoming a self-sustaining business after an investment Holtzman estimates to be around "several million" dollars.

"It was going to [turn a profit] in the fall," says COO Patricia Stacom (an accountant before joining Holtzman), "then Joe had this great idea for a plastic book jacket--so that went right out the window. But it was close this year, real close."

Unfortunately for the bottom line, it's Holtzman's wacky ideas (like the plastic slipcover that protected issue 14 and the accompanying CD by DJ Spooky) that have made Nest readers intensely loyal. Readers tend to keep the Nest issues as collector's items and wax rhapsodic about their inventiveness--much like the readers of the legendary Flair and Gentry did about those magazines decades ago. But each innovation only increases the pressure on Holtzman.