ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

As you may have noticed, things have been quiet around here lately. Tumbleweed, pin-drop quiet.

Underneath the silent surface, though, it’s been a time of tremendous change for ReadyMade.

First, the Berkeley-born magazine made a big move East. Our editorial operations are now going to be based in Des Moines, Iowa with outposts in New York City. Second, there are a lot of new faces around here; see below for our self-introductions.

Now, plenty of people’s heads cock in confusion when they hear the words Iowa and ReadyMade in the same sentence. Though the move makes perfect logistical sense since Meredith—the publisher who bought ReadyMade in 2006—is based in Des Moines (with outposts in New York City), questions are to be expected. We wanted to answer some of those so we thought we’d give you a brief tour of what we’ve come to term a true “Field of Dreams” for makers of all stripes, Meredith HQ.

I first heard about the Meredith offices when I met Andrew Wagner, ReadyMade’s new editor-in-chief. We got together for a drink a few weeks ago to talk about ReadyMade: what the magazine meant to us, what had drawn us to it in the first place and what we hoped for its future. Andrew had just come back from Des Moines and was raving about the facilities there—test kitchens, a test garden, an enormous wood shop, photo facilities—and the possibilities that this turbo-charged infrastructure could represent for a magazine like ReadyMade.

A couple weeks later, I got to see it for myself.

Last Sunday, I rode in a 30-seat plane that touched down in Des Moines during a pounding rainstorm. The dark and the wet made it impossible to see much of anything on the taxi ride to the hotel. I went to sleep still very curious about the place I would wake up in…

One of the first sights that greeted me as I looked East down Locust Street was the gold dome of the Iowa state capitol building. Between me and it, a neighborhood of commercial buildings converted into lofts and restaurants, called the East Village (yes, Des Moines has an East Village, too). To my West, on the other side of downtown, was my destination.

Andrew wasn’t kidding. Inside of the Meredith complex (two buildings, Locust North and Locust South, joined by a skywalk) is a veritable Wonka factory of facilities for people who like to make things.

I joined up with a group of college students studying graphic design who were getting a tour. We started by winding through Meredith’s many test kitchens—from a fancy marble ’show kitchen’ worthy of Nigella Lawson, to a more businesslike kitchen in the basement (below) where recipes are researched and products sampled for Meredith’s myriad of publications. A pot of coffee was on the brew, a photo shoot was going on in one corner and I felt more than a moment of envy for the food preppers’ jobs.

There were great little details all over the place, like shelves housing a century’s worth of glassware, a plate of canapés under hot studio lights and industrial-sized supplies of everything.

At the far right, a liquor cabinet next to a rack of baking pans in the upstairs kitchen.

At the near right, the correct rolling pin for the job is always just a step away…

Downstairs, a plate of food was ready for its close-up.

The basement of the South building branches out along an industrial hallway. (Check out the steel-reinforced flooring, a throwback to the days when this level housed impossibly heavy printing machines.) Down here are the places where stuff gets done: the mailroom, kitchen area, supply cages, photo studios, white room and wood shop.

All kinds of props line the walls. At left, ReadyMade’s very own prop cage.

The central area of the basement feels like several well-built stage sets sitting back to back. Rooms and structures are constructed and torn down as needed for every shoot.

A wall surface to meet your every need…

It all made me want to grab a hammer and help out.

Around the corner, there’s an incredible wood shop. Furniture made here is displayed throughout the buildings.

It was a little drizzly that afternoon, but not wet enough to forgo a visit to the test garden. With a fountain in the middle, and good-looking plantings of daffodils, shrubs and flowering fruit trees all around, the garden is a setting for parties and dinners during the summer months, but I was drawn immediately to one scruffy corner where a gardener tests vegetable varieties.

So now you’ve seen just a bit of the place. Though I could have spent days exploring I passed much of the week in ReadyMade’s wing in Locust North, writing, proofing and helping the interim team to put the June/July issue to bed. (It looks great, by the way, and expect to see related content here very soon.) The area was happily project-strewn…

…and was, in short, the kind of place I could imagine feeling very at home.

Along with the new digs come some new sets of hands on the wheel. Here’s a little sketch of who we are. We’re all looking forward to getting to know you better over the coming months.

Editor-in-Chief Andrew Wagner got started in magazines after completing an undergraduate degree in environmental psychology and playing guitar in the now long-defunct Lucky Pierre. Both experiences left him deeply curious about how people interact with places and how place affects people. He became the founding editor of Dodge City Journal, a magazine that sent correspondents to far-flung locations to mingle with the locals and report on everyday life. From there, Andrew moved on to the art and design magazine Limn and in 2000 became one of the founding editors of Dwell. For the last two-and-a-half years he’s been the editor-in-chief of American Craft, seeing the 67-year-old magazine through a major redesign. When he’s not thinking about architecture, design, art, music or where to find the best granola and yogurt combo, you’ll likely find him hanging out with his wife, author Heather Wagner or playing baseball throughout New York City with the Downtown Bulls. His hero is Ettore Sottsass.

Deputy editor Amy Palanjian started her career in magazines as an intern in the Los Angeles offices of InStyle while getting her degree in American Lit from UCLA. After graduation she headed to Durham, North Carolina to be an AmeriCorps member with the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate. She spent a year on a muddy construction site and learned how to wield a hammer and a skill saw, hang drywall and siding, and motivate volunteer groups, homeowners and herself to paint on Saturday mornings. She moved to NYC to take a job with Organic Style magazine. She joined the launch team of Hallmark magazine in 2006 and spent the next three years producing, editing and writing craft, entertaining and home features as the lifestyle editor. Among her biggest achievements at the magazine was writing a poem about pumpkins and convincing friends to let a 12-person photo crew shoot their actual Thanksgiving dinner. Amy’s also written for The Wall Street Journal, Modern Bride, Best Life and Women’s Health. Originally from a mile-wide town in southern New Jersey that boasts 28 lakes, Amy is proud to support her town’s yearly Canoe Carnival. She quilts, bakes a lot of granola, enjoys hiking and climbing the occasional mountain. She loves when Outside, Saveur and ReadyMade arrive in her mailbox and is constantly checking her Google Reader for updates from Abby Try Again, Orangette, Poppytalk, Smitten Kitchen and Modish, among others. Amy is about to relocate from Harlem to Des Moines and is looking forward to growing vegetables and herbs on the deck of her new apartment. She also blogs about artists, artisans and crafters (and shares her own projects) over at Things We Make.

Art director Stephen Perfetto is a seasoned designer by education and experience. He holds interior design and architecture degrees and has held former art, design and style direction positions at Country Home magazine, Better Homes and Gardens magazine and its properties and Rockport publishers. He has lived in Des Moines for eight years but landed there via New England and after growing up in the South. A collector and DIY-er by nature, he is in love with American design from the past and present. At the moment, he’s hand-distressing about 20 yards of denim to re-cover two club chairs in his living room. He’s also planning on covering a dresser in thousands of golf tees glued in a tramp-art style pattern. His favorite blogs right now are Denim News (when he needs to geek out about denim, of course), and A Continuous Lean (about all things classic-American). His favorite indulgence is comfort food like meatloaf and chicken pot pie. He dreams about owining a wee house ( www.weehouse.com) dropped in Northern Iowa and completely surrounded by corn fields. He also dreams of owning any of the rare and amazing turn of the century Indian trade blankets featured on the website barryfriedmanblankets.com. He is a collector and finds design inspiration in their colors and patterns.

An East Coaster by birth, online editor Katherine Sharpe (who is now writing about herself in the third person) left a piece of her heart in Portland, Oregon, where she attended college, and interned at Portland’s alternative weekly newspaper. The remainder of her heart came with her to New York City. She worked at a bakery, moved upstate and earned a master’s degree in English literature from Cornell University, founded a literary magazine called 400 Words, interned at ReadyMade in Berkeley (a magazine she’d loved since discovering the first issue the disorienting month she graduated from college), and then returned to New York to work as the editor and community manager of Seed Media Group’s ScienceBlogs.com. Her two great loves are literature and a good project. Describing her attraction to ReadyMade, she usually cites long childhood afternoons spent poring over the original Stewart Brand Whole Earth Catalogs in her parents’ basement. In addition to ReadyMade, her work has appeared in GOOD magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, the Washington Post magazine, Seed magazine and in Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney’s Book of Lists. She’s an inveterate reader of The New Yorker, and online, very much enjoys Chow, The Morning News, Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG, VVork and real-estate pornography in most of its forms; historichomes.com is a good one.

A new home, a new staff: it’s a lot of change to assimilate all at once. Personally, we’re still learning where everybody’s office is, thinking about bringing in some things to decorate our workspaces and trying to memorize our telephone extensions. Looking ahead, though, we’re excited to rip into the challenge of taking ReadyMade in hand, doing our best to preserve the things that have made the magazine unique and beloved, while also innovating, making things fresh and taking advantage of the awesome resources that exist for us in Des Moines.

Keep an eye on the magazine and on this site. We’re working toward a re-design of both, and we’ll want to know what you think along the way. Join us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, send us email, and of course, check back here for frequent posts and updates. Quiet time is over…