Louis Gropp, 88; led home magazines amid turmoil
Louis Oliver Gropp, a steady shepherd of shelter magazines through decades of turmoil as editor-in-chief of House & Garden, Elle Décor, and House Beautiful, died on Oct. 17 at his home in Greenport, N.Y., his daughter, Lauren Gropp Lowry, said. He was 88.
In 1981, Condé Nast Publications decided to renovate House & Garden, its 80-year-old magazine, and chose Mr. Gropp to be its new editor. Like its competitor, House Beautiful, House & Garden was then a middlebrow publication devoted to recipes, DIY decorating, and handicrafts.
But the culture was shifting. The luxury market — the affluent reader — beckoned. Architectural Digest had begun to chronicle the good life as lived by heads of state and movie stars. House & Garden would do the same.
Mr. Gropp was perhaps not an intuitive choice to oversee the transformation. He was a gracious and practical Midwesterner who collected midcentury modern furniture, admiring the ethos behind those clean, functional lines. He had been editing the House & Garden Guides, singletopic magazines on solar houses, building and renovation, decorating how-to, and home storage.
The new House & Garden, launched in January 1983 as “the magazine of creative living,” looked nothing like its old self. It was very grown up, very highbrow and very elegant. Gone were the jumble of cover lines — “Paint Your Own Fabric Patterns!” — and the pet food and classified ads. There were no stories about decorating in a small space or crocheting towel edges.
Instead, there were features about the nests of cultural lions, including playwright Lanford Wilson’s Manhattan loft, designed by Joseph D’Urso, or fashion designer Bill Blass’s apartment, done up by Mica Ertegun and Chessy Rayner. And there were stories to match, articles by Elizabeth Hardwick, Gore Vidal, and Jan Morris.
Mr. Gropp’s great talent was his ability to adapt to the vision of others, and to support and sell that vision. His editors adored him, and so did the advertisers.
“Lou was incredibly good-natured and open-minded,” said Shelley Wanger, Mr. Gropp’s articles editor, who coaxed many writers from her former employer, The New York Review of Books, to contribute.
In 1984, House & Garden won two National Magazine Awards for design and general excellence. It was the only magazine in its category — with circulations between 400,000 and 1 million — to do so.
By 1987, Alexander Liberman, a Russian-born émigré and artist who was the fearsome editorial director of Condé Nast, and S.I. Newhouse, Condé Nast’s quirky owner, had soured on the magazine, and its editor. The two men had been courting a young British editor named Anna Wintour, whose ambition was to run Vogue. They gave her House & Garden instead.
Mr. Gropp was abruptly — and, in the industry, famously — fired while on vacation with his family in Newport Beach, Calif. His dismissal followed that of William Shawn at The New Yorker and preceded that of Grace Mirabella at Vogue. The firing blitz of these respected editors became part of Condé Nast’s grisly lore as a snake pit.
Mr. Gropp was typically sanguine. He always said he went on to better things, as editor of the American version of Elle Décor, the French decorating magazine, and then House Beautiful, which he ran from 1991 until his retirement in 2000. There, he preserved the magazine’s DNA — accessible design for a wide audience — but broadened its focus and refined its look.
“I always thought of Lou as the Walter Cronkite of the shelter magazine world,” Warren Shoulberg, a design industry consultant, wrote in an email. “I don’t believe anybody else of that era had the credibility and gravitas Lou did.”