Names sell hurricanes (Sandy) and blizzards (Jonas), so why should the shelter mags be any different? That appears to be the message going through the minds of beautiful house editors these days, as celebs crowd onto covers like the checkout mags.
Domino
Jessica Alba sits pretty on a sofa on the cover of the winter issue of Domino, which features her daughters’ “refreshed” bedrooms. Honor is 7 years old and Haven is 4. Readers may wonder whether they’ll be due for another “refresh” in a few years. Whatever. Their super-mogul mom has good taste, helped by celeb designers Emily Current and Meritt Elliott. Haven graduated from a “crib” to a full-size canopy bed with a mounted unicorn above her bed while Honor traded the girlie pink hues of her “early childhood for cooler mint green.” Domino offers some nuggets for the little people as well like its gift guide with affordable items: a $24.95 book “Where Chefs Eat,” and Orla bath salts for $20.
Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest devotes its March issue entirely to celebrity homes. Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian are on the cover (why not Brad Pitt, who studied architecture?) Khloe poses in her 10,000 square-foot Mediterranean Revival mansion that was previously owned by Justin Bieber. Her master closet looks like a shoe store while Kourtney’s daughter, Penelope, gets an Hermes throw for her bed. Beauty style mogul Frederic Fekkai shares photos of his estate in Provence, France, where even the curtains are inspired by Yves Saint Laurent. Then there’s Marc Anthony’s “compound” in the Dominican Republic — capable of sleeping 24 people. Isn’t that a boutique hotel?
Elle Decor
Scrappy, Brooklyn-born Marisa Tomei is featured on the cover of Elle Decor, where we learn that her Greenwich Village apartment is decorated with finds from New York Housing Works, eBay and flea markets. Turns out her mother dragged her to tag sales in upstate New York. Elle Decor is not for the faint of wallet. It’s aspirational and full of profiles of super wealthy people like a family in San Francisco whose castle-like home features a personal gym with French chandeliers and a master bedroom with a bed that has 18th-century velvet panels and a Murano chandelier above the bed. Don’t we all have that?
Garden & Gun
First let’s take a moment to consider this title, Garden & Gun, published in South Carolina. Oh, now we get it! This intriguing book is about much more than design, including features on Vince Lombardi’s last NFL season, southern literary giant Eudora Welty, and an unknown large Texas family, who has an annual get together with several generations celebrating family recipes and a shared history. Fascinating stuff. As for Buick-loving Matthew McConaughey, we learn in a two-page Q & A that he is drawn to acting roles about Southerners and how he helped rescue patients an animal hospital after hurricane Katrina. Then he decided to buy a home in New Orleans’ Garden District.
New York
We just had to chuckle at the feature on Tory Burch in New York’s latest fashion issue. It declares the preppy label is a “juggernaut,” when Tory Burch’s biggest news lately was The Post’s December scoop that it’s laying off 100 workers. Apparently guided by the Tory Burch PR department, this profile tersely explains that it was “an effort to reorganize its brand with a stronger focus on customer-facing technology” — that is, opening fewer stores. Elsewhere, on equally fabulist footing, Jonathan Chait pitches the argument that Donald Trump would make a better President than any of the other GOP nominees, invoking the precedent of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s leadership over California. If you’re hoping for a single reason to assume the validity of the comparison, go fish.
Time
Time shows a photo of its political columnist, Joe Klein, interviewing Hillary Clinton in some kind of lunchroom in New Hampshire. Apparently, the photo failed to capture Hillary’s Svengali-like gaze as she ensorcelled Klein into publishing one of the puffiest profiles on her that we’ve seen of late. Asserting that her missteps have “been inflated beyond reason,” Klein does Hillary’s whining for her. “She has become so encrusted with notoriety at this point that it’s near impossible for her to get a clean shot to make her argument,” Klein writes, as if she played no role in the encrusting, and as if a genuinely good argument required a “clean shot” to begin with. Indeed, there’s scant discussion of Hillary’s dire vulnerability on the Wall Street question as a sidebar highlights “Hillary’s email danger,” as if to lamely deflect attention toward the smaller stuff.