Martina Mondadori: Cabana Magazine’s High Priestess of Design

TRANSCRIPT

Martina Mondadori: It’s always interiors with a soul. But we’re probably less into Italian Baroque palazzi and more into the little finca in Spain or Scandinavia or American studio artist. Things evolve. Your aesthetic evolves, but always looking for the soul in a place.

Dan Rubinstein: Hi. I’m Dan Rubinstein and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour to the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel. All the elements of a well-lived life. About 10 years ago, a friend of mine, an Italian girl living in New York, told me about a biannual magazine that was a smash success. It was a book about interiors, but instead of chasing all of the usual suspects, it had a very particular point of view. Independent design titles like this come along every once in a decade or so and strike a chord with the culture at large, like the Spanish magazine Apartamento, the modernist loving Dwell, or the now legendary Nest. The new magazine was called Cabana and with its nostalgic eye on traditional Italian interiors, think richly decorated ones, rustic travel getaways and innovative covers covered with real fabric. It heralded an era of design culture that preferred to look backwards in time, rather forwards into some sort of futuristic utopia.

In other words, in the pages of Cabana, Jeff Koons was out and Neoclassical sculpture was in, and it was all just in time for the newly important world of Instagram to devour it all. And the person behind this new must-read magazine is my guest today, editor and founder Martina Mondadori. Not only does Martina hail from a legendary Italian publishing family, she’s been able to center much of her Cabana universe around her parents’ opulent apartment in Milan, which we’ll get to, by the late designer Renzo Mongiardino. Not only has the magazine been a success, but it spurred a booming business in products too. Tabletops, small furniture accessories and more. And Cabana recently opened a physical boutique in Milan, and last month released the book Cabana Anthology: the Anniversary Edition, published by Vendome Press, marking the Brand’s 10th anniversary. I caught up with the always stylish Martina from – where else? – Milano to chat about her upbringing in an important Italian family, how the first issue of the magazine came to be her expansion into the world of products and much more.

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So much of the world of Cabana begins where your own story begins in Milan and the home you grew up in and the world you were surrounded by. I’m just wondering, on a very basic level, I’m curious, what are your earliest memories of life in Milan as a young girl?

A lot of my early memories are in the apartment, my mother’s apartment decorated by Mongiardino that has inspired Cabana. That’s my childhood home. And when I say that nothing has changed, nothing has changed. And I guess as a little girl it was a bit unusual. I was an only child for my mom, and there was a lot of these entertaining space and she would entertain quite a lot. So there was always voices of her friends, but I think it made it a very lively house to grow up in.

And Milan at the time, her apartment is in the very heart of the city and right now we can get to that later, but it has changed a lot. Not very much in its features, architectural features, but very much as the kind of demographics and the shops, et cetera. But at the time it was very much village life. Milan still now is not a big city as opposed to more international capitals or cities around Europe or the US. But even within Italy, it’s not a big city. And at the time around the corner you would have a fishmonger and two fantastic toy shops and then a bookshop and the butcher. And this really made it feel like village life. My school was like a five-minute walk away and those are my memories, a very cozy life.

Were your parents strict? Or was it-

So my parents divorced when I was really young. I don’t even remember them together being together. So my mother being the single parent at home had to be the strict one. My father had an incredible sense of humor and we had a very special relationship. And they both, I have to say, as divorced parents, neither of them ever had a bad word to say about the other parent. And my father was very sweet, very funny, very engaging, and my mom was the one setting the rules, being sure that my school life was in place and she would be the one choosing the schools obviously because she was there the whole time. She knew my friends better than my dad did. So my mom was strict, but she also had a great sense of humor.

And tell me about your father and the world of publishing and how that maybe influenced your future endeavors in publishing and everything like that. Because I know you studied philosophy in school. Tell me about your early career aspirations and how maybe your dad was influential.

My dad was never pushy in any way. He would not be the kind of father who would say, you need to study business or why don’t you go to do art school or whatever. He was very much, even with my half-brothers, he was like, “You choose your path. It’s important to be passionate about what you’re doing and to be focused.” So very early on in my school career, I figured out that maybe maths wasn’t really my thing and I was much more into visual stuff and history. Humanities in general. And so there’s a choice you have to do at school here in Italy when you are 13, you either go a scientific path, what today would be called STEMs or humanities like classics. And I went for the classics. And so after that, at the end of high school, you’ve done five years of ancient Greek, Latin, history of art, history.

And really my father, the only thing he pushed for was college in the US. And the one thing he really transmitted me is this love for American culture. And I think everything I’ve done with Cabana in America, being super grateful for how Americans have welcomed Cabana, but my love for America, I love traveling, coming and hosting things there, and my kids now have a very strong passion for American culture and everything, and I think that definitely comes from him. Now, I didn’t feel like going to the US because he discovered his cancer when I was 16 and we knew it would not have lasted forever. So I felt like I want to be close at home.

And he had done philosophy, he had read philosophy in the same university here in Milan. And when I said to him, “Listen, this is what I want to do.” He said, “Really like me?” And I said, “Well, yes.” And he came back to me two days later with a list of professors I could not have followed courses with. And I said, “Why is that. You’ve always been so liberal? Why all of a sudden?” He said, because these are Mondadori authors and I don’t want you to be favored in any way or disadvantaged because of. And I lived his publishing career and his people, the authors, the way he worked very closely, he was someone who kept his kids very much informed of his work life. We would probably be there for a Sunday lunch and he would have a friend or two who in fact were also authors or foreign publishers.

And in the last period of his life, he used to say that he switched from being a book publisher to being an exhibition publisher, which was not entirely true because he was still doing books, but that meant that what he started doing, and I’m sure had he lived more, he would’ve done much more, was bring great exhibitions to Italy. And amongst these, he brought the Hermitage works of art, the Pushkin from Russia, the Whitney from New York. And through that I got to meet museum directors and get to know that world a bit. And it was a very eclectically cultural world. He loved ancient art, he loved contemporary art. So I remember being with him in New York and visiting Julian Schnabel’s studio. He was a very curious person and he liked to surround himself with interesting people.

And tell me a little bit about the apartment. And so when was it first commissioned and built and all of that?

So it was done in 1978. I’m born in 1981. My parents had been married for a while. They were a young couple. They met each other. They were both 17, they got married six or eight years later. They lived in Verona for the first part of their marriage. And Mongiardino did that apartment too, but they were on a super low budget for the house in Verona. And he would do those things. He was very fond of my mom because his, I think, second clients in his history of decorating had been my grandparents who he met through the Brandolini’s because my grandparents had bought a place in the countryside near Venice, which is where my mom grew up. And they asked Mongiardino to decorate it. And that house is still, my grandmother isn’t there anymore, but my aunt lives there and my uncle, it’s a family home and it’s very much early Mongiardino, very simple, very pared down.

So when it came to moving, when they moved to Milan because of my dad’s job, they found this apartment. And the obvious choice was Mongiardino, he was like the family decorator. And I think I remember, I mean, what my mom told me is they had a conversation where Mongiardino said, “Okay, now this is your grown up house. I think, Paola,” my mom, “I think you’re ready for this and it’s Milan. Your husband is coming here as a publisher and you’ll probably do lots of entertaining.” And so he asked her, he said, “Is there anything you’d like? Any colors, any era inspiration?” She said, well, “I love red, blue, and green. I’d love the house to have that and I love Indian textiles.” And he came back two weeks later with his plan for the house, and he used to do these mock-up rooms that were done by his studio that were incredible because they were like 3D models where you would bring up the sides of a room.

And she saw the plan for the living room, which was, I mean, on paper black. The house, the apartment has this, it’s a beautiful Scagliola-inspired motif, but the walls are black. And she was 31. And she said to me, “I had a heart attack. I had two weeks of sleepless nights. I didn’t know how to tell them that I felt uncomfortable with it.” And then I think that was Mongiardino. He was very good at walking his clients through his ideas. And he was also a father figure to her, and she decided to just go with it and trust him. And that’s how they did it.

And then I also believe, and this is something that Roberto Peregalli, his pupil told me that because of his close friendship with my mom, probably Mongiardino felt very free to express himself in that apartment. And Peregalli thinks that that was like a workshop for him. So he did the faux marquetry in the hall, the Scagliola and the faux marbles in the living room, Persian textiles in the studio, India and Far East in a dining room. There was a bit of everything, all the worlds he loved brought together in this apartment. And that’s how it came together. I think it was a very different apartment for a young couple in Milan. Those were the years, it was 1978-79. The ’70s were a very strong thing in design in Italy.

A lot of their friends had Caccia Dominioni homes and everything was very modern. And even on my father’s side, my grandmother was very much Caccia Dominioni, Gardella and they had this thing and they just went for it. And my mother embraced it fully. And I think she very much felt at home from the very beginning. And she started entertaining a lot at the beginning for my father and his literary world. And then when they split, it was her friends and Mongiardino would come once a week and bring his clients-

And did people, because it was a time of modern and very glam and sexy interiors, were people like, why are you doing this as a young couple living in this grand…?

Yes, yes, yes. Especially I think on my father’s family side. But my mother was a very self-confident person in that respect. I think she loved Mongiardino. Those were a bit of the golden years he had. He had probably just finished doing Rothschild in Paris, and a few years later, he would’ve done Gianni Versace’s house a few blocks away from my mom’s apartment. And very much so, he used again my mom’s apartment to show potential clients what he would do. And so my mom had fun having Gianni Versace for lunch or Lee Radziwill or Nureyev as well. He liked to bring people there and show them what he did.

After school, what were your first jobs out of school? Did you ever consider doing anything more creative? How did that lead into your early career?

So my first internship, I actually thought of going to New York and my first internship was at Random House at Doubleday. I thought at the beginning I would do book publishing. My dad had just died and maybe I thought, you know those things you think, this is what he would’ve wanted. It was a great experience. Those were the years when they had just published The Da Vinci Code. And so they had huge budgets, marketing budgets, which for the book publishing world was unheard of. And I remember Doubleday was one of the first publishing houses to actually establish a marketing department. And it was great fun. And I stayed there for six months or five months, I can’t remember. And then they said, “Well, listen, we’d love to offer you a job. We’ll sponsor your visa.” So I went back to Italy to start all the visa papers.

And in those three months, four, I met my then husband. And so my plans changed. And we married, I was very young. I had two kids, my two boys. And then a third, much later. In the meantime, I moved to London. And when I was living in Milan, I started working for another publishing house as a young married girl. That was a publishing house called Electa. So more visual arts, like Fieden. And that really triggered my passion for more visual publishing and communicating through images, I guess. And that was an incredible experience, and I’m sure it informed a lot of my work at Cabana. I met also authors and I worked in lots of different departments. I learned to lay out and printing, all of the steps of publishing, but I had never actually worked in magazines before. And what happened was I had contributed and been part of this small team that really became a creative hub doing Tar Magazine as a a sidekick-

Tell people what Tar was because it’s this legend… It was a very pivotal.

It was the time when independent contemporary art magazines started to come out. And a friend in Milan, it was really printed by a printing company in Verona. And the family behind it thought as a marketing tool, let’s do this magazine. And I think, I can’t remember who they had hired initially to do it, but then they asked a good friend of mine, Francesco Bonami, who’s an art curator, a contemporary art curator, to edit it, and it would only come out twice a year. And so we put together this fun team in Milan. And part of that team then was the initial team at Cabana. And two of those people are still with me today. So it was like an experiment, but it was much more contemporary art and fashion. It was like the cool things.

Yeah, absolutely. It was very cool. And Cabana itself launched in 2014. So tell me about the years leading up to that. Where were you at the time and how did that…? Or was that original idea?

I had moved to London. My ex-husband was moving there for work, and I had these two young boys who were three and one. So right back then I was contributing to Tar, but really I was like, when I moved to London, I stopped doing that and I focus on the kids. And I’m a very enthusiastic person, so new things excite me, but at the same time, then when you’re there and London can be difficult, it’s a much bigger city. And I guess I started feeling slightly homesick for Italy, the culture, my childhood home, but in a very subtle way. And in the meantime, I was discovering my new adoptive country and visiting stately homes and just rediscovering how passionate I was about interiors. And I remember when I did my London home visiting for obvious reasons to find fabrics, but visiting the Chelsea Design Center quite often.

And even when I’d finished the house, I would just go there and dive into all these different fabrics and patterns and come home and do mood boards and do mood boards with my mom’s home and stately homes in England. And I guess probably through my fourth or fifth mood board, I thought maybe there’s a book here. So I started putting together ideas of a book. In the meantime, 2013 was a year when the Venice Biennale was very much, it was curated by Massimiliano Gioni, and the theme was memory. And there was this big exhibition at Palazzo Grassi by Rudolf Rudolf Stingel and the art direction had been done by Christoph Radl, who was the art director at Tar and now of Cabana. And I remember walking into that space and all the walls were covered in kilims. And I thought, this is Mongiardino. It’s not contemporary art. It makes Mongiardino feel very sexy again.

And meanwhile, again, also the Salone Week in 2013, I had discovered Dimore Studio, which felt very, very new compared to all the rest because they suddenly were focusing on the atmosphere and not on the objects. And it was about the rooms and the emotional attachment you have to the rooms rather than the functionality of design. And I suddenly thought, this is all that I love. This is all I’m passionate about. This is my language, this is my dress. And so I reached out to Christophe again and the team, meanwhile Tar had closed. And we then thought, okay, rather than a book, why not try a magazine again? And this time let’s make it not really about interiors, but use interiors the same way people were using contemporary art. And it was disruptive for two reasons. The first reason being printing, deciding to print. And the second reason was deciding to really embrace this kind of timeless interiors that at the time felt probably like old or boring and embrace decorative.

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And do you think that maybe because you had to intentionally have the nanny and do all of the stuff that maybe you had to have your culture and your home life and the way that you brought up and the apartment and everything in your head in a way that maybe someone who was just living in Milan normally would not have been so passionate about?

For sure. For sure. And yeah, people in exile in history start feeling much more passionate about their home country. But also the other interesting thing is London is one of those cities where the eccentricity is across the board. And the people I would meet in London, whether English, especially English people, but even the international crowd, the way they would talk about my country, about Italy and the places they were passionate about for a holiday were not the same that Italians were running to. So suddenly you’d see the people, probably people in my world of Cabana, decorators or design aficionados would go crazy for Mantova, Parma, Lecce and all these towns that are the real texture of my country. Italians tend to run to the mountains and the beach. And I’m very grateful for everything I’ve learned and lived in London.

It’s like through a tourist’s eyes almost in a sense, to see your own culture from that reverse lens, I guess.

Yes. Completely. Completely.

And why the title Cabana?

As I said, it was not about doing another interiors magazine, it was more about looking at the intimate side of interiors, the details in the rooms, layered interiors. And so we kept saying it’s about coziness. And Christoph being Austrian used the German word [foreign language 00:27:13]. And I guess, so when it came to finding a name, we wanted to think of a place that would embody that feeling. And so the idea came from actually my good friend, Stephan Janson, the fashion designer, when I was talking to him, he was one of the first few people I talked to about this idea. He came on board quite early, also having Umberto as a husband, Umberto Pasti helps. So he brought all that world and he was showing me on his phone pictures of what he called or are called in Morocco Chabulas, which are like these cabanas, like huts, straw huts in the middle of the countryside. And he kept saying they’re like cabans, cabans, cabans. And that evening I went home and I thought, Cabana. And that was it.

And what was it like putting together that first issue? I mean, and I know you, there’s a lot of-

Well, it was great fun and I’ll tell you why, because, so I was in London, the team was in Milan, the printing happened in Milan. And so we had close to zero budget. I mean, the money was coming in from the advertising, and so we thought of photographing a lot of Milanese homes that we knew, so we had access to, and that hadn’t been shot really. But my point was maybe in that house, those two rooms are worth shooting that cafe or that aperitivo place. And I compiled a list with Christoph as well of all these places, and we thought, okay, let’s blend it into a portfolio. It doesn’t need to be the traditional, we were very free. It was like nobody would ask us why, how. And it could have been a hit or miss. We were launching for Salone, so we had a sponsor for an event during Salone.

And so I called a very, very young photographer at the time, Guido Taroni, who I’d recently met. And I remember we had lunch and he immediately understood what I was talking about. We were speaking the same language. And he also added to that list of places. In the following three weeks, he shot it all. And that’s how it started really.

And it’s been 10 years since the launch. In that time, I’m wondering if there was any feature or editorial moment in the early days where you knew that it was going to work. Was there something where you get it back and you see it and you see it working, you’re like, okay, this is working and this idea was executable?

Personally, on a personal level, the moment I had the first issue in my hands, I thought, I like this. I like this, I believe in this, but truly believe in this. And immediately I thought, this can become lots of different things, but I guess really… Well, I think editorially, the turning point was when it was held by Instagram. Instagram was really starting at that time. We didn’t start immediately on Instagram. I wasn’t on Instagram, but I think we started after issue two probably, and that helped tremendously to build a community of like-minded people around the magazine. The algorithm was very different as we know, and it was really a tool to scout talents to find like-minded people.

And I guess the kind of aesthetic we had was perfect for Instagram. And so people started posting, tagging, and that just brought us to the next level. It helped with the advertising. And then shortly after I had this idea of branching out into product offerings, retail experience. We didn’t have the resources to build our own website. And so we reached out to 1stdibs and they believed in us, and that helped open the American market and the American audience for the magazine. And then that started rolling.

It was a fairly easy way to test product because they were providing all the technicalities, the platform, the technology, and we were providing the content. So the items, which at the time were things I would find on travels or at flea markets in England where I would go relentlessly. But what it did, it really brought Cabana out in America, but also as a shopping destination. We would pop up twice a year when the magazine would come out. And I remember this big moment, which was one of our early cover partners for the magazine was Gucci at a time when Alessandro Michele had just come on board. He had been there for a year. I had been following his Instagram thinking, gosh, this is so aligned with us and I’d love to meet him. And at some point the PR gets in touch with the Cabana office saying, “Alessandro doesn’t have issue one. He uses it for his mood boards, and by the way, we’d love to get together and think about stuff we could do.”

And when we started talking about the cover partner and meeting with Alessandro, I remember it was meant to be just an editorial project. And I looked at him and I said, “Listen, your show three months ago, there were these beautiful poster chairs and screens. What happened to those? Where are they?” And he said, “Well, I think they’re in some warehouse.” Gucci warehouse. And I said, “Do you think for our next pop-up on [inaudible 00:33:18], we could have a few of those?” He got super excited because he’s so passionate about interiors, and he reupholstered five chairs, each one with a different embroidery. So they were effectively one of a kind pieces. And obviously [inaudible 00:33:33] was like, “We need to give a preview, pre-order window to our top customers.” And obviously those six chairs didn’t make the actual sale. They sold out within a few hours, and that was another big moment for us.

And Miguel Flores-Vianna has been a big part of the magazine with his eye. And I’m curious how the two of you met.

We met at a wedding and we were introduced by a mutual friend who’s also part of this world, who is Idarica Gazzoni, who does Arjumand’s World, the fabrics, and she has an amazing eye and she’s been a mentor also for me and passionate about the Cabana world. And at this wedding, at the party, I remember she came to fetch me and she said, “Listen, I need you to meet someone. I just had a flat, you need to meet this friend of mine.” And she introduced me to Miguel. And Miguel came to see me at home in London the following week, and we started talking and the first thing we did together was a portfolio in Lisbon, which I still remember. So we went together, we shot different things in Lisbon, and that’s where the bond happened.

And the fabric covers are such a big heart now of the identity of Cabana. How did that start? Was it from the beginning?

It was from the beginning. I mean it was Christoph’s idea, genius idea, and then we needed to find the fabrics. And so we reached out to Pierre Frey, the young-

The famous-

Pierre.

Well, also, okay, well the brand-

A very famous French brand. And they believed in us immediately. They were like, listen, we can’t give you the the exact same fabric for the yard that you need, but we’ll just tap into the archive and give you different ones. Which started this great thing about having different prints for the same issue, which turned it a bit into a collectible item.

Did some printer say that you were crazy for doing that?

Yes, but again, it was Nava printers who are amazing and they weren’t scared. They said, “We can do it.” And they thought it was also great advertising for them. We used lots of different papers inside. Listen, it was fun. It is fun.

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And at a certain point there was a shift and you started making your own products, and I think perhaps it was when I had done a story on you and the magazine for Departures years ago, and when did you decide I need to start making my own glassware and napkins?

Our top customer for those 1stdibs pop-ups was Lauren Santo Domingo. She would want everything with pre-order, and she already had Moda Operandi. And one day she reached out to me and she said, “I want to start Home on Moda and I want to do it with Cabana, but this means that you need to get organized with production and volumes. We need a proper collection.” And I guess we were ready for that. And we put together artisans and suppliers. And that was one of the most fun periods of the Cabana life for me, because I went to visit each and every single one of them around Tuscany, Puglia, Morocco, one in Portugal, Murano for glass.

And we put together this first tabletop collection. So it was a whole table. And the idea behind it, and still to date with Casa Cabana, the collections, is it’s one collection and you should have fun with the table and the accessories the same way you have fun with fashion. It’s like, rather than the bag, the tablecloth and rather than the shoes. And at the time there wasn’t much out there. It was like obviously our first customers were the Upper East Side in New York because that was Moda’s audience and they had Hermes Home or Dior Home or a few French brands, but it was very formal. And it was always the same thing. And I think we introduced [inaudible 00:39:52] on the tablecloths and paisley and flowers and as I say, always mix it with vintage and it doesn’t all have to match. Then sometimes you can be less formal, more formal, you can play with it.

Was there a product that was really a bestseller or that did really well that you thought this needs to become a bigger part of what we do?

It’s still our bestseller, which is the Ginori plates. The floral plates we designed and Ginori produced. And nowadays, it’s a big family of products. You have six different colors and all the shapes, et cetera. But at the time it was a capsule, but it did so well on the Trunkshow on Moda. And then we launched our website Cabanamagazine.com in 2018. Finally, there was also a destination to find the magazine. We ship worldwide, and it’s the way you subscribe to the magazine as well. And then plus all the e-commerce and that today is the fastest growing side of our business. So it’s a huge part of it. We launch two big collections a year.

We anchor these collections to an editorial theme, which is also part of the magazine. And so what’s coming up now, it’s a collection inspired by the Silk Road, which is I think we’ll have as a theme quite a big moment in this fall because there will be a big exhibition at the British Museum in London on the Silk Road. And what we did on the magazine, we’ll have this beautiful portfolio which Miguel shot in Uzbekistan, and all of this inspired the collection we’re launching.

And last year we did, around this time of year, we launched a collection in collaboration with the Benaki Museum in Athens, and part of the proceeds went to the museum. So we worked with different stories and then translate those into an inspiration for tabletop and home accessories.

And now you have a boutique also in Milan, like a physical store. That’s a big step. And where is it in Milan and tell people about it.

So our first Cabana store, retail store, is in Milan. It’s right off Via Monte Napoleone, which is the equivalent of Madison Avenue, New York. And it’s next door to Bice, which is one of Milan’s historical restaurants with great Tuscan food. And it’s a small store, but it’s like a little cabinet of curiosities where we have all our collections, a bit of lifestyle accessories, and also what I call offline pieces, especially vintage pieces. So things you would only find at the store and not online. It’s been an incredibly exciting adventure to open a store. I just love being a shopkeeper. I try to go as much as possible.

And so with the store, is there anything that surprised you? Once you have a physical store, there’s something different and something organic, and obviously you’re selling unique piece offline that only exists there. Has anything surprised you now that you’ve been able to meet people face to face?

Yes. First of all, how they know the brand. Obviously some people just walk in, they don’t know anything about Cabana. Some other people walk in and they know the product. Some other people know the magazine, don’t know about the product, and it’s a very eclectic landscape. But what’s also incredible is how no matter how much attention you put in photographing something for the e-commerce, and this is obviously true about clothes I’m sure, but with clothes, you can show things and the technology it’s getting better and better as you have short videos on websites and you can see the flow on someone’s body. But with objects it’s slightly different.

And so to see people’s love of actual touch and feel has been incredible. And also the bestseller so far is what we call the Majorelle bag, which is a bag that is made by Artisans Morocco that was initially done by Yves Saint Laurent. It’s sold exclusively at the Saint Laurent Museum at the Majorelle Foundation in Marrakech. And a year ago we started selling it online and it did super well. And then we just brought it at the store thinking, let’s keep it here. Who knows? So many girls walk in and it’s the perfect gift. It’s probably like a reminder of Marrakech, of Saint Laurent. So it’s very much this spirit of discovery, I think.

And I would say daily Italian life and culture that you’re describing, the experience has been so popular lately in American culture. And you’ve mentioned how Cabana’s really struck a nerve with that Upper East Side clientele and the American wealth. And when you’re talking to Americans or Brits that are huge Cabana fans, what do you think is their number one misconception of this Italian sprezzatura?

I think that Italy is not this postcard, that the real Italian experience is not the aperitivo in the Instagrammable place. The real Italian experience is you turn the corner and you go where the locals are. And the food, there’s no better food than a panino at the bar or literally a panino on the highway, on the motorway, on the autogrill. That’s where the essence is. Don’t forget the best coffees are from those coffee machines that have been working a lot. So if you go on the coffee shops on the motorway, they’ve been used so much. Even if you go there at 09:00 am because drivers have been going on all night, that the coffee will be delicious. And the gelato, all that, I mean obviously these are cliches, but the pizza.

But I would say don’t ask your concierge at the hotel, but ask a local on the street where to go and what to do. I think the first ones to own this cliché of Italian lifestyle is probably Dolce Gabbana. It was true when they did it, but it was like it’s become a cliché to go to the south of Italy and imagine the pretty girl with a huge basket of lemons. I mean, it’s-

Now that you’re celebrating the 10th year of the magazine and of the business, what does the next 10 years look like?

Well, I think the magazine will, I hope, continue to… And we’ve evolved. We’ve evolved in the aesthetic. At some point, I remember I wrote an editor’s letter four or five issues ago, and I said, “This is the issue that celebrates going from Mongiardino to Saitrombli.” But it’s always interiors with a soul but were probably less into Italian Baroque palazzi and more into the little finca in Spain or the Hut somewhere else, or Scandinavia or American studio artist. Things evolve. Your aesthetic evolves, but always looking for the soul in a place.

And then as a business, I think the shop is just the first one. And obviously the retail landscape is very hard to navigate. I think I’m a strong believer in one step at a time, and it’s very important to know where your customer is and where you can intercept that customer. So what might be true for others maybe isn’t the same for you. So don’t follow a formula, but follow your… I mean, I’ve been following my gut instinct and also hearing advisors as in people I trust and their point of views. And I think it’s trying to innovate and disrupt as much as possible. But for sure the expansion of the retail side of the business and possibly also home fragrance line one day. But it’s building the brand more and more.

And you’ve got this amazing book coming out that celebrates the 10th anniversary. It’ll be out somewhere around the time that this episode airs. And tell me about when you looked at it all together, which is always for any editor is a really painful thing to do, is to kill your darlings and you want it to be a thousand pages, but you can’t make it. Now that you’ve looked at it all together, what was that experience like? Was there anything that you were like, oh, this has to be in? Or-

Yes, and I kept changing my mind and I just couldn’t believe that I had to keep editing. Barbara, who’s our editorial director has been with me literally from day zero, and she was like, “We need to cut two more stories.” I’m like, “Two more. This can’t be, I can’t kill this baby. Please can I have one of these?” But it’s a great exercise, I think for everyone. You get to the core of it.

And I think for this book in particular, which we call the Cabana Anthology: the Anniversary Edition, because we had a first anthology when the 10th issue came out. And this feels like it’s the best of these last 10 years, but it’s very much a spirit of discovery. There’s a lot of portfolio in distant places and cultures, and I think Cabana comes out very much as that, as discovery and eccentricity. And I’m very, very, very grateful to Deeda Blair. She wrote the foreword. The moment I asked her, she had an enthusiastic yes. And for me, I must say having lunch at her place in New York is one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had. And there’s like-

It’s one thing I could say I’ve actually done. She was a guest in the podcast and I had lunch and it was to me, and I’m sure you probably felt the same way, even though you’re the consummate entertainer, it was an intimidating experience, I will say, to have lunch with just her.

It’s like the details-

Yeah.

Of everything. I mean, it’s unbelievable. And she’s seen it all. She knows so many people. I remember I was talking to her and obviously you would imagine decorators or, but gosh, she has all this community of scientists and PhDs and David Remnick and I mean, it’s so vast. So I’m very grateful to have her write my foreword to that book.

That’s incredible. And I was wondering if you could describe the world of Cabana in three words, what would those three words be?

Spirit of discovery.

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Thank you to my guest Martina, as well as to Kareem Rashed for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net, and follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. And don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen and leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Ciao, ciao.

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