Martina Mondadori has print in her DNA. Her great-grandfather founded the Mondadori publishing company in 1907 — today the largest in Italy. She grew up in a Milan apartment decorated by the great Italian decorator Renzo Mongiardino, completed in 1978, a space so richly layered with textile, pattern, and colour that it would later become the beating heart of everything she built. As a child, she travelled Europe and the Middle East with her father Leonardo, exploring antiques fairs and flea markets, developing the eye for craftsmanship and the love of objects that would define her career.
In 2012, Mondadori moved to London with young children and found herself homesick — not just for Italy but for that apartment in particular. She began making mood boards, mixing Italian and English interiors. The mood boards became a magazine. In 2014, together with Christoph Radl and Gianluca Reina, she launched Cabana — a biannual interiors and decorative arts publication with a nostalgic eye on traditional design, each issue conceived as a design object in itself. The covers are wrapped in real fabric, produced in collaboration with partners including Chanel, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Valentino, Loewe, and Tiffany & Co. Anna Wintour has called it her favourite interior design magazine.
What makes Cabana distinctive is not just what it shows but how it sees. The German word gemütlich — conveying warmth, comfort, and a sense of space — encapsulates what Mondadori calls the Cabana Mood. The magazine is interested not in the grand gesture but in the unnoticed intricacies that make a room feel personal: the objects in the corners, the worn surface of a favourite table, the way light falls through a particular window. The photography is given generous room on lavish paper stock, and the writing reads like a personal tour rather than a sales pitch.
A decade in, Cabana has expanded into Casa Cabana, a homeware line of artisanal tableware designed in collaboration with craftspeople around the globe, and published four books including Cabana Anthology: The Anniversary Edition, which won the 2025 Booktique Award for Best Home Interiors Book. Mondadori once said that what she looks for, always, is interiors with a soul. That search — from her Mongiardino childhood to a publishing empire built on pattern, texture, and the conviction that the most important thing about a room is how it feels when you are in it — has not ended. It has simply found its perfect form.
<a href="https://cabanamagazine.com/" target="\_blank">Visit Cabana