Min Hogg, founding editor of The World of Interiors, gave me a withering look as she took a long drag on a cigarette. ‘You mean you actually care what they think?’ That was her karate-chop response when I, then a starry-eyed New York Times reporter visiting her London flat decades ago, innocently mentioned how a shelter magazine where I had once worked relied on reader surveys to help steer editorial development and, it was hoped, thereby promote greater financial success.
Georgina Rose Hogg, aka Min Hogg, who died in 2019, aged 80, kept her hand firmly on the tiller for 19 years. She didn’t invent WoI in order to please readers with the inoffensive, the easily digestible, the formulaic, the populist, even though that might have pleased the advertising side of the business a bit better. That being said, she actually did care what readers thought or, more accurately, what they would learn to appreciate. ‘She was very schoolmarmish and believed that the magazine had to show the unfamiliar,’ says Rupert Thomas, who succeeded Hogg as editor in chief when she walked out the door of Vogue House in 2000, going on to design wallpapers and write for Milieu, the Turkish magazine Cornucopia and the glossy she herself had launched. ‘At its best, Interiors is something you can open and don’t quite know what you are going to get.’
After graduating from Central School of Art and Design, Min went to work as a typist at Queen, and eventually became chief fashion editor in the 1970s, after it became Harpers & Queen. For a brief period, before Interiors, she was the fashion editor of a hilarious Middle Eastern magazine called Sheba. (The founder of Sheba described its readers as rich women who ‘sit around, change dresses and flip through magazines’.) ‘I believe she got fired,’ Min’s niece Molly Alexander explains. ‘At the very least, she left in a great flurry.’
By championing country houses on the brink of ruin, cottages in Mitteleuropa, attics full of flotsam, African tribal architecture, even a young squatter’s surprisingly stylish digs in an abandoned building, her defiant embrace of the unfashionable ironically made The World of Interiors an influencing publication that has been as envied by fellow shelter-magazine editors as it has created an orgiastic cult of admirers. Aided by a few choice comments made to me by Hogg and her former Condé Nast boss, Sir Nicholas Coleridge, Hogg’s friends, family and colleagues were keen to remember her in all her formidable glory.
‘Interiors really shifted the conversation,’ says Rupert Thomas, WoI editor in chief (2000–21). ‘Min was trying to put something of value into the world, not gimmicky or particularly fashionable. It was a vision, a very personal vision, an unswayed belief that her taste was right. And she, very often, was right. Creative endeavours are about failure as much as they are about success. Min experimented, and sometimes those experiments went very badly, and others were really, really right. It makes your job much easier when you aren’t always striving constantly for what’s always going to work. If something flops, well, it flops; not everything is going to fly. But learning along with the audience is probably what made her want to continue, as long as she and the readers were learning something. That was what was important. Her taste was very, very rigidly set, if you look at the first 19 years of the magazine, but she was very good at including things she didn’t personally like, as long as it was the best of its kind. She was very passionate about what went into the magazine, and could be quite hot-blooded and cross. Everything was slightly on the boil. She wasn’t ambiguous about things or people.’
‘She had proper journalistic training, so she knew how to spot a good story, and even if it wasn’t in her sphere of interest, she would put it in the magazine,’ Rupert continues. ‘Her magazine, that is. Min regarded Interiors as absolutely her magazine, not a magazine owned by Condé Nast. [The company purchased it in 1988.] She knew it wasn’t hers, but when she ruled the roost, it was entirely her piece of work and her absolute focus. She had no interest in scaling the greasy corporate pole. She liked all the trappings, but that’s not why she did it. It was part of it, but it didn’t really drive her. Interiors was her own little kingdom, and she wanted to be entirely left alone with it. And to their credit, Condé Nast let her get on with that.’
‘I learned more at Interiors than my four years at Central School of Art, which I found really unstimulating’, recalls Domenica More Gordon, former WoI promotions art director. ‘The first time I saw the magazine was in the school library, and one image really stuck with me, from the incredible style pages put together by Wendy Harrop, the magazine’s founding creative director: a table where, instead of putting on a normal tablecloth, she had a piece of canvas painted to look like a tablecloth, which gave it a monumental sculptural effect. And on it sat a lamp. Just a single lamp. It was deeply considered, very different, and it blew my mind. I felt about Min the way other people felt about Elvis. When she walked into the office, the effect was instantaneous: you went from semi-relaxed to top gear, immediately. She set the bar very high, and made everyone produce their best work for her. And she was always defending our budget, telling the advertising people that without the editorial, their side wouldn’t exist, that they had to give as much money to our side as they did to their own. For that, I gave her top-notch marks. People don’t buy a magazine because it has lots of ads for kitchens. They buy it because you paint a piece of canvas to look like a tablecloth.’
‘She loved red wine, cigarettes, conversation, English roses, Regency glass and Georgian paste,’ remembers Jessica Hayns, former WoI creative director. ‘Most days she wore smock dresses — something between Marie Antoinette’s chemise, Yves Saint Laurent and a traditional peasant blouse — or Breton stripes to the knee, Manolo Blahnik flats, and wrapped around her head a perfectly chosen scarf or a treasured fragment of textile fashioned into a sort of turban that held up her long hair. There were rumours of an affair with the American movie director John Huston (he certainly painted her portrait), that she refused to sleep with Lucian Freud, and that she had held up a very drunk Mick Jagger as they tried to dance together. All of which I suspect were true.
‘Min would work long hours, sitting in an ever-thickening cloud of cigarette smoke, checking proofs, reading texts, going through layouts, looking at transparencies, with an empty film canister nearby as a makeshift ashtray,’ Jessica adds. ‘And on her desk was always a Georgian rummer with a cropped – by her – bunch of roses or carnations. Min’s background certainly helped. She had an incredibly chic mother, Pollie, who informed many aspects of her taste. [Her father, Sir Cecil Hogg, KCVO, was Elizabeth II’s aurist.] There was always an underlying understanding of grand English ways and rules in Min, but equally important was the bohemian world she was a part of in the 1960s and 70s, long before Interiors was thought of. Many of her friends went on to define the age and became tastemakers themselves, Christopher Gibbs and Nicky Haslam to name but two. She brought those two worlds together at Interiors. It is generally accepted that there had never been anything like it before, and it turned the world of decoration and magazines on its head.
‘Min was part antiquarian, part anthropologist. She adored simple vernacular architecture and folk decoration just as much as Europe’s great houses. One thing Min did repeatedly was champion long-forgotten textiles (toile de jouy was a favourite) and forms of decoration, doing her own features about them, often immediately making them the height of style, and making fabric houses very rich in the process.’
Jessica continues: ‘When I started at Interiors, the quest was to find the widest stripes available – and if they didn’t exist, to commission someone to make them. She was the first to feature Scandinavian houses, another passion of hers, which led to endless painted furniture and windowpane checks. Recurring favourites were stars, crescent moons, checks, stripes and ticking – another fashion she started. Something being too fashionable was a terrible insult. When I started at Interiors, Min was still doing very elaborate room sets herself, with a lot of help. One photo shoot I worked on had corrugated cardboard walls and specially commissioned plastic trellis, made because nothing off the peg was quite right. It was all then painted in two tones of lilac pink, the colours matched to the pink on a pigeon’s breast that Min had seen on the window ledge of our King’s Road office. Then we proceeded to hang a 17th-century Spanish mirror with gilt stars on the cardboard walls, which almost pulled the entire thing down. The end results were totally her, something between an early 19th-century doll’s house, an Indian haveli with an English squire, something of the harem and her own Knightsbridge flat.’
‘I remember amazing pink dresses so long that you’d only see her ankle,’ says Ilse Crawford, interior designer and former WoI junior subeditor. ‘Interiors was an otherworldly thing: very arty, super-unusual, more of a journal than a magazine, a collection of extraordinary things. So I applied in 1985 or 1986 for a junior sub-editor position that I’d seen advertised in the Guardian – and I got the job, though I wasn’t remotely qualified.’
‘Min quickly understood your mettle,’ Ilse continues. 'I remember telling her and a few others about this amazing place in the city centre, a derelict house with piles of fruit and oceans of gladioli. There was a deafening silence, and then she asked: ‘Do you really like gladioli?’ I realised that I had to seize the moment and not be cowed, so I said: ‘Yes, and there’s a lot of them.’ After that, she left me to do my own thing. Min gave you your lead or she didn’t. She picked people over skills; you didn’t need a prestigious background. And she thought it was terribly important to take a position and not just do things that people liked. Our job was to have a really lively, exciting, funny and enlightening conversation with the reader. Interiors was originally in Fulham Road, above a florist’s shop. Then it moved to the King’s Road – above a reject shop, oddly enough – opposite Chelsea Town Hall. The first place was tiny, everybody sitting on top of each other. The other space was more palatial, though we shared offices with a business magazine, which was a highly weird combination, with Min and Wendy sitting scarily at one end of the room.’
Ivan Terestchenko, the photographer who had his first shoot published in The World of Interiors in the 1990s, says: ‘I dyed my hair platinum blond once, I don’t know why, and she absolutely disapproved. So much so that she cut me off, and I didn’t get an assignment for nearly six years. I thought she wouldn’t mind my doing something eccentric; after all, she was English. Then it was over, and I came back to court.’
‘For Min, Interiors was a commentary on everything from the effervescent to the silly to the important to the rare. There was humour, and there was awe,’ says Molly Alexander, Min’s grand-niece, antique dealer and decorator. ‘One of Min’s complaints, among the millions of complaints that she always had, was that magazines were moving away from text and just producing image after image after image. The combination of the words and the rooms were very important to her, a symbiosis of text and photography; a magazine shouldn’t just be image-based consumption.’
‘She was tender and brusque,’ Molly adds. ‘All at the same time, a tough old bird and incredibly opinionated. “You must always stretch your eye, darling,” she used to tell me. When I was a child, she was like a wonderful younger grandmother figure, because she was too old for an aunt but too young for a granny. (There are funny age gaps in my family, because of people marrying and remarrying.) Min would take us to the V&A to have a look at one object, just one, like an Islamic tile. Then we’d get an ice cream and discuss the tile. Or we’d go to Cadogan Square to look at a copper beech tree, or to Ham House to look at something very specific, or go back to her flat and make armies out of rice. There was always lots of making of things.’
She once said: ‘Houses have a way of speaking their minds, they can intervene in one’s plans by shouting their disapproval.’ Min may have asked me — at least half-jokingly — if the editors who put together shelter magazines actually care what their readers think. But with The World of Interiors as monthly proof, it was readily apparent that, she did care, quite deeply, using her pages as a pulpit to inform, surprise and shock. Since her glorious and inspiring reign, though, no ashtrays have been thrown, at least to our knowledge.
A version of this article appears in the illustrated A–Z of ‘The World of Interiors’, featured in our 500th issue (June 2024). Learn about our subscription offers
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