Omar Sosa shares his favorite Apartamento Issue

Tell us about your childhood. What memories do you have from that time that you feel were especially formative for you, that are still relevant in the present day?

I was always making tents at home, building little fortresses with pillows, boxes, and any available material. I honestly never really played video games and any sports, but preferred to build things. I remember this one time when my parents bought a big TV, I didn’t care about the TV at all, but instead I loved the box that came with it. I made myself a little house, complete with a tiny color TV my grandmother gave me. I remember spending a long time drawing the inside of it. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been always obsessed about having and creating my own space.

When you were younger, what did you imagine that you would be doing for a living?

I remember that I was extremely serious about being an inventor. I didn’t fully understand what it meant, but if i think about it nowadays, I guess the definition of ‘designer’ fits pretty well.

What were you doing before Apartamento?

I studied Graphic Design because I love it, but also because it’s one of the design disciplines where you can see the results much faster and you need less infrastructure to complete it. After that, I worked in a studio in Barcelona for 3 years before I founded the magazine with Nacho Alegre and Marco Velardi.

Why was Apartamento created? What inspired it?

It was a series of events, but I remember that during the time I was looking for an apartment—it was right before the economic crisis and my dad wanted to help me buy one. After seeing so many places I couldn’t make up my mind and picture myself in any of them. That’s how I got into interior magazines and eventually realized how uninspiring and cookie-cutter most of them were. During that period I was designing magazines and met with my future business partner, Nacho Alegre, who is a photographer. Nacho and I had similar interests, so we put our minds together and decided that we should start a publication that we would personally like to see on the shelves and buy. The irony is that the economic crisis hit hard in 2008 and I never ended up buying an apartment, but the idea for Apartamento was born.

How did that journey to creating the magazine begin?

After looking obsessively at so many magazines and realizing there was almost nothing that fulfilled my interests or tastes, I started looking at pictures of spaces inhabited by friends living abroad as well as other publications. In some of those publications you could see some pictures of these spaces that looked genuinely ‘lived in’ and were untouched by any stylist, which I felt was more real and inspiring than something really formulaic.

Since I was designing magazines already and Nacho was shooting for them, it was pretty natural to just try and make one. Then Marco Velardi, who lived in Milan at the time as a journalist, joined us and helped us to get outside the Barcelona bubble. We worked for a year on putting together some stories, experimenting with the format, finding cheap printer deals and finally launched the first issue in April 2008.

Did you have any experience in the publishing world before starting the magazine?

I knew how to design a magazine for sure and heard bits and pieces from the directors of the magazines I was designing, but the truth is that I knew very little. But the little that I knew about the publication industry worked in my favor, since I wasn’t struck with enough fear or self-doubt to stop myself from dedicating my life to magazines. So let’s just say that it was accidental.