Apartment Therapy is a lifestyle blogs and publishing company focused on home design and decor. The website was founded in 2004 and is currently led by Maxwell Ryan. A companion blog, The Kitchn, is dedicated to home cooking, kitchen design, and entertaining. Apartment Therapy won the 2020 Webby Award for Lifestyle in the category Social.

History

Early 2000s

Apartment Therapy was founded in 2004 by brothers Maxwell Ryan, an interior designer, and Oliver Ryan, a new media businessperson. Maxwell Ryan, formerly a

Waldorf school Waldorf education, also known as Steiner education, is based on the educational philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Its educational style is holistic, intended to develop pupils' intellectual, artistic, and practical ...

teacher, started a design consultancy business in 2001. Early on, he created a weekly email list offering further decorating ideas to his clients, particularly to help them make their own design decisions. In 2004, Maxwell Ryan joined Oliver Ryan to turn the email list into a daily blog of design advice. Using ApartmentTherapy.com as the URL, their stated objective was to help readers solve problems without extensive professional guidance.

Growth

In the mid-2000s, Apartment Therapy established companion sites focused on more specific topics including a children's division called Ohdeedoh and the ecologically friendly blog Re-Nest. Maxwell Ryan and his then-wife, Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan, a food writer (they have since separated), also started The Kitchn, a page dedicated to recipes and entertaining tips. The diversity of its readership also led Apartment Therapy to launch city-specific blogs for

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, largest city in the U.S. state, state of California and the List of United States cities by population, sec ...

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

, and

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As the site became more widely known, Ryan began making regular appearances on the HGTV programs ''Mission: Organization'' and ''Small Space, Big Style''. Later, Apartment Therapy was named to best-of lists by periodicals including ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...

'' in 2008, ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...

'' in 2009, and ''

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was f ...

'' in 2011.

Consolidation

In early 2012, Apartment Therapy incorporated three of its companion blogs into the main site. Ohdeedoh moved to the "Family channel" on Apartment Therapy.com, Unplggd to the "tech channel," and Re-Nest relocated to the "Green Living" category of the main page. The Kitchn kept its separate URL but was linked from Apartment Therapy's site.

Site features

In addition to sharing design tips, Apartment Therapy features house tours in which readers post pictures of their apartments and solicit suggestions for specific improvements. In 2005, the site held its first annual "Smallest, Coolest Apartment Contest," open only to New Yorkers with a residence of 500 square feet or less. The year following, Apartment Therapy partnered with furniture manufacturer Design Within Reach to expand the pool of participants nationwide, open to those with a home of no more than 650 square feet. To enter, readers submitted photos to one of five categories ranging from "teeny-tiny" to "small." According to a 2006 profile in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', Maxwell Ryan and Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan used the site to blog about renovations to their apartment, which they expanded from 265 square feet to 700 square feet.

The Kitchn

Apartment Therapy's companion site, The Kitchn, is dedicated to cooking, entertaining, and life in the kitchen. The blog's founding editor is Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan. The blog's executive editor is Faith Durand.

Books

Apartment Therapy has published three books of

home improvement The concept of home improvement, home renovation, or remodeling is the process of renovating or making additions to one's home. Home improvement can consist of projects that upgrade an existing home interior (such as electrical and plumbing), ...

advice: ''Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure'' ( Bantam, 2006); ''Apartment Therapy Presents: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Real Design Solutions'' ( Chronicle, 2008); and ''Apartment Therapy's Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces'' (

Clarkson Potter Clarkson Potter (September 19, 1880 – October 4, 1953) was an American golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, un ...

, 2010). In ''Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure'', Ryan compiled his ideas for a healthy

residence A residence is a place (normally a building) used as a home or dwelling, where people reside. Residence may more specifically refer to: * Domicile (law), a legal term for residence * Habitual residence, a civil law term dealing with the status ...

, describing the home as an extension of oneself. ''Apartment Therapy Presents: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Real Design Solutions'' collects 40 of the apartments featured in the site's house tours. Each section includes an introduction of the resident and overview of the home, including

floorplan In architecture and building engineering, a floor plan is a technical drawing to scale, showing a view from above, of the relationships between rooms, spaces, traffic patterns, and other physical features at one level of a structure. Dimensio ...

s and an explanation of how the overall effect was accomplished. ''Apartment Therapy's Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces'' presents 40

household A household consists of two or more persons who live in the same dwelling. It may be of a single family or another type of person group. The household is the basic unit of analysis in many social, microeconomic and government models, and is i ...

examples of how to maximize the use of floor space in small apartments.

References

{{reflist

External links

Apartment Therapy website
Companies based in New York City Websites about food and drink Interior design