They’ll probably come after us for the low-res scan of the business card logo, but we couldn’t resist giving you a tiny glimpse of the new home and garden magazine, Portland Spaces, that is set to launch in January 2008. It’s published by the Vogel empire that brings you Portland Monthly (and Seattle Met and Oregon Bride & Groom). The good news is that Randy Gragg is at the helm. He’s been missed as the architecture/urban planning writer at the Oregonian, and he’s likely to make it smarter-than-your-average H&G mag, but we do wonder if he’s heading it up, does that mean he won’t be doing what he does so well: writing insightfully about Big Picture stuff…helping us to imagine the city we want to live in and calling us all to task to make it so? Regardless, we’ll tune in to look at the pretty pictures that Gragg was overheard referring to as “house porn.”
We don’t know a lot more yet, but here’s a note posted on a listserv calling for interns for the mag in which the mission is described thus:
Mission: Portland Spaces is a magazine about the design of the places we live, work, play and gather. It’s a guide for creating spaces to love from gardens, kitchens and living rooms, to workplaces and neighborhoods to the city and the region as a whole. It is about the opportunities and tradeoffs in balancing sustainability, elegance and value, both when money is no object but also when it is, by necessity or by choice. Spaces will be a magazine, a website and a public discussion series that will inform, provoke, and celebrate the city ‑ the people and spaces that have made Portland into one of the most distinct, creative and dynamic places in the country.
Meanwhile, read Regina Hackett on Portland Spaces. She mainly uses it as a tool to harp on her own pan-Northwest agenda (not a bad thing), but it’s good fun and good info all the same.
WHAT TO DO NOW?