Lars Jacobsen is a surf journalist by trade — notebook, board, camera, passport — and WAVES & WOODS is what happens when someone like that decides the world needs a magazine as wide as the horizon line at a beach break. Published out of Hamburg's St. Pauli district and now on its thirty-fourth issue, this German-language quarterly spans 132 oversized pages of surf, outdoor adventure, travel, van life, photography, and art. It weighs nearly a kilogram. Open it flat and it stretches almost half a meter across. This is not a magazine that apologizes for taking up space.
The editorial approach mirrors the format: expansive, unhurried, visually led. A typical issue might pair a profile of French surf photographer César Ancelle Hansen — who splits his time between saving lives and making images — with a bicycle tour from Cuxhaven to Eckernförde, a feature on Japanese photographer Atsushi Sugimoto's philosophy of image-making, and a quiet piece on the forests of Sweden's Småland region. The writing skews personal and atmospheric rather than instructional; this is not a magazine that tells you where to surf so much as one that makes you feel the pull of a coastline you have never visited.
The redesign by Büro von Gottberg — also based in Hamburg — gave the magazine a clean, warm grid system that won multiple International Creative Media Awards while leaving enough room for the kind of full-bleed photography that justifies the oversized format. The paper is thick, natural, soft-coated — chosen to make the physical act of turning pages feel deliberate. It is a design decision that aligns perfectly with a magazine whose readers are, by definition, people who prefer being outside to being online.
WAVES & WOODS occupies a distinctive space in the German indie magazine landscape: too literary for the pure surf crowd, too adventurous for the design-shelf collector, and exactly right for anyone who sees no contradiction between paddling out at dawn and reading a long essay about it afterward. The magazine ships subscription copies free within Germany and Austria, and every issue arrives like a dispatch from a life more vivid than the one you are currently living.
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