THE JOURNAL
Every morning, when Mr Oliver Jahn enters his fifth-floor office in central Munich, he acknowledges a man in a photograph: “Hello, Carlo.” Mr Jahn, the 43-year-old editor-in-chief of the German edition of Architectural Digest, works out of an enviable space that overhangs the city’s Old Botanical Garden, an office busy with items from his extensive personal collection of ceramics. It is the framed poster of Mr Carlo Mollino, however, that commands his special affection. “Mollino was a famous designer in Italy in the 1950s,” explains Mr Jahn. “He’s my personal hero. So super-talented in so many different ways, an architectural designer but also a skiing champion and a pilot. He raced motor cars. He was a very good photographer. He was interested in life in a broad way.”
In his time helming Architectural Digest Mr Jahn has tried to imbue the publication with elements of the same. “Because of the name people tend to think of it as an architecture magazine. Actually it’s not; it’s an interiors magazine, it’s a lifestyle magazine, design, architecture, art, fashion… in the end it has a lot to do with the culture of living in all the different senses of that word.” What better, then, than to be based in an office that was first intended to be a living room? “Before the company moved in,” explains Mr Jahn, “this part of the building was meant to be sold as a penthouse. It’s double-height, really bright, there’s a huge balcony in front of my office. You can feel it was meant to be a living space… Personally? I spend so much time in the office, it needs to feel like home.”
“It’s double-height, really bright… you can feel it was meant to be a living space. It’s nice sitting up here, looking out at the trees”
“I use this tile as a paperweight. It’s from the Berlin-based tile manufacturer Golem, and is a design from the Jugendstil \[Art Nouveau\] era”
“One of my sketch- and notebooks with my favourite rollerball pen (a Starwalker from Montblanc) and a brass ruler I bought in Japan”
Mr Jahn’s background would seem to make him peculiarly well suited to his work. Raised in a small town in southwest Germany, not far from Stuttgart, his father was a keen amateur furniture-maker, his mother a committed subscriber to interior design magazines from around the world. Clumsily, when Mr Jahn was a teenager, these elements collided. “I was 16, and I wanted a new desk. I went through my mother’s magazines that were lying around, to get an idea, spotted one, and told my parents. We went out to try to buy it [locally] and when we couldn’t find it my father said: ‘I’ll get some wood, and you could try to build it.’” There were happy hours spent in his father’s workshop, Mr Jahn recalls, “and I ended up with a desk. Not elegant. Not like the one in the magazine… I actually ordered some books about furniture design so I could see why I ended up with such a shipwreck. I started reading a lot about design from there. I got more and more attracted to it.”
He worked for a time in publishing – his family on his mother’s side were in the book business – and then writing about vintage design, the auction market for vintage design and 20th-century design icons for the Berlin arts magazine Monopol. Mr Jahn joined Condé Nast, which publishes Architectural Digest, eight years ago, initially responsible for the magazine’s architecture and design sections. Of course, he didn’t land the penthouse office right away (Mr Jahn became the editor in 2011) and “at first I was in the basement. Literally,” he says. “We were in another building in Munich and the only place that was empty when I joined was a super-small space underground, by the kitchen.”
Home to the headquarters of several financial and media companies, Munich is one of Germany’s most economically successful and fastest-growing cities. Comparing the two workspaces, upstairs and down, Mr Jahn says that “from a creative point of view, there’s no difference. The space I work in is an add-on. I appreciate it. I like it. But from a creative point of view it’s not really necessary.” He laughs. “Of course, I’m not saying I want to be sent back to the basement. It’s nicer sitting up here, with daylight, looking out at the trees…”
“The framed poster is a print of the cover of Tintin au Pays des Soviets (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets), the first volume of The Adventures of Tintin by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, published in 1930. Since Tintin is a reporter I like to think of him as a patron saint of my work”
“These pieces are from the early 1960s by the Italian designer Aldo Lundi. The series is called Rimini Blue. It always reminds me of days in Italy… I would say I’ve got around 60 pieces of his. I really like the colour. Sometimes I turn on my chair, take one of the pieces into my hands… it gives me a breeze of Italy, if you like”
“I come from a bookselling background, my mother used to have a bookshop, my grandfather was in the business too. The whole office, here, is packed with books. I browse through them every day”
Anyone looking up at you in your office from the street would think you’re a man of leisure in his expensive pad, not the hard-working editor of a magazine.
We share the building with some super-luxury condominiums and a five-star hotel. I feel fortunate when I get into this space every day, but I sometimes feel a bit embarrassed too. It must look as if I’m in my living room or something like that, not working… it’s one of the most highly priced living areas in Munich. The coach of Bayern Munich, Pep Guardiola, lives next door. Downstairs there’s a small deli for all the guys living and working in the building, and maybe once or twice a week Pep shows up there, getting a coffee. Of course all the girls in the office freak out. “Let's go down! Let’s go down!”
It’s some view. What are you looking out on?
We’re right in the centre of Munich. I can see over the Old Botanical Garden, the Palace of Justice, and two very famous churches, including the Frauenkirche. I’m on the fifth floor, a little bit above the trees, so looking out on the gardens gives the feeling of Central Park in New York – a very small Central Park.
“Furniture design felt to me, growing up, too boring to talk to my friends about. Like stamp collecting – if you spoke about it it would send them to sleep. So it was a private thing for me; I never thought this was something I could one day make a living out of”
“Some of these ceramics were done by Ted Muehling. The horse head is by Hermès. They’re things I like to look at – and I particularly like the colour combination of the red lacquered small side table and the bright white of the ceramics”
“This is a large print of an image that was published in Architectural Digest a few years ago, as part of an interiors feature”
It’s an average day in your office and you’re in need of inspiration. What’s the first thing you look to?
I have a set of small pieces on my desk, a hand, a foot and an egg, all made of brass, and a stone covered in beautiful smooth leather. They’re part of a set by an Austrian designer called Carl Auböck. There wasn’t just one Carl Auböck – they were a dynasty, a design company that started in, I think, 1912 in Vienna. From father to son, Carl Auböck to Carl Auböck, they passed the business; today, the fourth-generation Auböck is in charge. From a design perspective the second Carl Auböck, from the 1950s, was the most important part of the family. These four pieces are a reedition, not vintage; but they were designed in the 1950s by Carl Auböck II. Sometimes when I’ve got kind of a block, creatively, I love to take up one of these pieces. My personal favourite is the foot. The brass takes on the heat of your hand. It calms me down. I don’t know, it helps free my mind.
There are a lot of objects around your office.
I’m an object guy. I’ve always been that way. I’m a collector. Overall, of course, people are more important to me than things. But things are one important side of making life beautiful.
“These are a set of proofs of an interiors book – I kept them because the quality of the paper is outstanding. Good paper to me is as appealing as the feel of good fabrics in my hands”
"This is a portrait of Carlo Mollino, the renowned Italian designer and a personal hero of mine – not just for the way he worked but also for the way he lived. I greet him every morning as I enter my office"
“There’s a German word for these kind of pieces. You take them in your hand… you like the material… you like the shape… you just want to play with them. We call them Handschmeichler – literally, a ‘hand flatterer’”
When did your interest in things – in interiors – first develop?
My mother used to have a lot of interiors magazines from abroad. And what I liked, when I was child, seven or eight years old, with no idea about design, or even that there were such things as designers, was to browse these magazines. Learning about the way people lived. You know when you’re walking through the streets at night, and there’s a lit window, and you'd really like to look inside? I had that from a young age.
Are you a favourite-chair guy, or will any one do?
The chair that I sit in is very important to me. This is a vintage Rockefeller chair from the late 1950s or early 1960s, designed for the Rockefeller Center in New York. It’s one of the early ones covered in a soft fabric. The reeditions that you get today are covered in leather: too cold. I love that I found one of these vintage pieces.
“I know about these office buildings where people get packed in like they’re in boxes. This is more like a penthouse”
How do you choose the clothes that you wear to work?
I’m interested in touch. I’m very much into fabrics, maybe that comes from my professional background in interiors. I like 1960s colours. I don’t wear – as a lot of architects do – a lot of black. One of my basic colours is navy blue, and then I love to blend in the 1960s colours that you can find, for example, in the current Gucci collection, such as olive green. I decide when I’m standing under the shower in the morning, a decision made in two minutes.
You sit beside a framed poster of one of your heroes, Mr Carlo Mollino. Is that advice you’d give to somebody, when they’re building up a creative workspace – surround yourself with your heroes?
Maybe. Of course, I’m in touch with a lot of creative people in my business. For example, Tomas Maier [the German-born designer who is creative director at Bottega Veneta] – go to one of his offices, the room is almost empty. He loves to be surrounded by white walls, no objects at all. He’s the complete opposite and he’s a very creative guy. There isn’t one way to being creative.
Mr Jahn’s Munich highlights
A day in the German city curated by the design expert
The Lenbachhaus and Museum Brandhorst
“Munich has got maybe the best museum scene in Germany,” says Mr Jahn. “My favourites are the Lenbachhaus, recently restored by Norman Foster, and the Museum Brandhorst, with its building by Sauerbruch Hutton architects.”
The Ruhmeshalle
“Designed by the famous architect Leo von Klenze [for one of the former kings of Bavaria], this tremendously impressive 19th-century building is like a hall of fame, full of statues representing all the big names in Bavarian history. A must-see.”
Ruhmeshalle, Theresienhöhe 16, 80339
Goldene Bar at the Museum Haus der Kunst
“Chic and casual at the same time, this bar is the place to be on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Ideally lounging outside on the terrace with an Aperol spritz in your hand.”
Soda Books
“This small, gallery-like store focuses on style, fashion, architecture, design and lifestyle magazines from Europe as well as the US and Japan. For magazine addicts like me it’s an El Dorado. Spend an hour.”
KOI restaurant
“This Japanese restaurant, one of the best in town, has a great interior by Munich-based designer Nora Witzigmann: a combination of wooden tables, warm green walls, brass, and the traditional Raku pottery they serve the food on.”
Schumann’s Bar
“Like Goldene Bar, an evergreen Munich favourite. Check in late at night – Schumann’s is a famous hub for stylish Munich people. Order a whisky and sit upstairs along a super-huge table, made from one single piece of ancient wood.”