Emmanuelle Goutal is a French creative director who spent years building brands for Margaret Howell, COS, Harvey Nichols, and Alexander McQueen at some of London's most influential design studios. In 2021, she channelled all of that into something entirely her own. Objection launched during the pandemic as an oversized, unbound interiors magazine — each issue dedicated to a single room of the house. The first volume was The Living Room, chosen because lockdown had made togetherness feel urgent. The Bathroom followed, then The Kitchen. Six collectible issues are planned in total, with The Bedroom, The Office, and The Garden still to come.
The format is as striking as the concept. Printed just under A3 on heavy silk Fedrigoni paper, the unbound pages cascade across a table like fine art prints. MagCulture called it the perfect riposte to anyone who thinks the interiors magazine is a tired genre. Magalleria described it as the first major player in the interiors space since Cabana. The typography — bespoke inscriptional letterforms based on Carlton for the logotype, Cardinal Fruit for body text, Enduro for captions — was designed to make words feel like objects arranged on a surface.
But Objection is no lifestyle catalogue. The Living Room issue opened with an art-historical essay by Dr John Potvin tracing the room's evolution from a Victorian death parlour to an entertainment hub. Elena Rendina photographed a visual essay imagining a conversation between Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf at Charleston House. Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint contributed. Chris Rhodes documented living rooms with and without their televisions, revealing how the screen dictates everything else in the space. Each issue approaches its room through history, fashion, design, photography, and still life — the kind of multidisciplinary depth that makes the interiors genre feel newly alive.
The name itself is a quiet provocation. It references the root word — object — but the connotation of disagreement is deliberate too: Objection is Goutal's reaction to what other interiors magazines have become. One issue per year, handcrafted and unhurried, is plenty when every page rewards the time you spend with it.
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