Interior Life

It began with photographs of Farrah Fawcett. Raymond Donahue, a young showroom decorator for IKEA, had plastered the walls and ceiling of his bedroom in the small New Jersey bungalow he shared with his mother with black-and-white photocopies of Fawcett’s magazine covers: High Society, Vogue, Good Housekeeping. Nest, a new shelter magazine, sent the photographer Jason Schmidt to capture the room, which made the cover of the debut issue, dated Fall 1997. “I love Warhol’s use of repetition, so I photocopied magazine covers and made wallpaper out of them,” Donahue said to the curator Valerie Steele, who conducted the accompanying interview. “Nest offers its own definitions in celebrating human self-invention at home,” Joseph Holtzman wrote in the issue’s Dear Reader letter. “Our focus will never be on focus groups. We’d love an authentic chunk of your mind, though.”

magazine ran quarterly for twenty-six issues. It was heady, odd, acerbic—sardonic about conformity and corporate America, yet, when it came to decorating, never overly goading or insincere. All tastes