Dezeen, the online design magazine, was launched in 2006 by Marcus Fairs and his wife, Rupinder Bhogal. The Dezeen Awards followed in 2019.
By Thomas Shess, publisher of PillaartoPost.org online magazine and retired Design Editor at San Diego magazine and San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyle magazine--A house made of earth. A chair grown from mushrooms. A proposed stadium with a roof that seems to float above the crowd. Open Dezeen on a given morning and any of them might be waiting for you. The London-based online magazine has made architecture, interiors and design into a daily news habit for readers far beyond the professions that produce them.
Marcus Fairs launched Dezeen in November 2006, working from a spare room. He had previously been the founding editor of the British architecture and design magazine Icon. At Dezeen, he saw what the web could offer: photographs could carry a story around the world immediately, and a small editorial staff could put a new building in Tokyo beside an experimental lamp in Milan on the same day. His wife, Rupinder Bhogal, helped build the company and remained a senior figure as it grew.
The name itself looks like a pronunciation tip for design. The magazine’s stated mission is to set the agenda for the global architecture and design community through a carefully edited selection of projects and news. It covers completed buildings and objects, but also proposals, disputes, materials and ideas that may never leave the drawing board. That mixture gives Dezeen its appeal: a reader can arrive for a handsome room and leave thinking about how a city ought to be built.
So who sits on the throne today?
*Tom Ravenscroft is Dezeen’s editor, responsible for the publication readers see. The business is led by co-CEOs Benedict Hobson and Wai Shin Li, longtime colleagues of Fairs who were appointed after his death in 2022. Bhogal remains part of the company’s leadership story; reducing her to a footnote in her husband’s biography would miss how the enterprise was built.
The power behind the throne, in the ownership sense, is JP/Politiken Media Group. The Danish company bought Dezeen in 2021. At the time, the announcement said the magazine would retain its editorial independence and its senior management team. That is the ownership structure; it does not tell us that a Danish executive chooses the buildings on tomorrow’s homepage.
Fairs died unexpectedly in June 2022, leaving a publication that had long since outgrown its spare room. Architectural Digest, reporting his death, credited him with helping bring design journalism into the digital age. It noted that his influence extended through conferences, broadcasting and books as well as Dezeen itself. His achievement was partly editorial and partly entrepreneurial: he gave design news an international audience that could encounter it every day. Other media offer a useful measure of that reach. The Guardian, writing about Australian architecture in 2024, treated a place on Dezeen’s list of the year’s best home extensions as a significant distinction for a small Tasmanian practice.
In a different architecture essay, the paper referred casually to a design trend filling Dezeen’s pages, assuming its readers would know the site. Coverage in Dezeen has become a way for projects to travel beyond their home cities. There is a caution in that success. Architecture photographs can make a building irresistible on a screen. They cannot tell a reader whether the roof leaks, the public can enter, the apartments are affordable or the place feels good to occupy in August.
A design publication must decide when the beautiful image is the beginning of the story and when it is merely the sales pitch.
Dezeen’s speed and appetite for striking work make that question especially interesting. Still, I return to it. Dezeen gives a curious reader permission to take a new idea seriously for a few minutes, whether it comes from an established architect or a designer making a first public impression.
Nearly twenty years after Fairs opened the site, that daily invitation remains its best feature.
*Tom Ravencroft, Dezeen Editor (above). holds masters in architectural history from both Edinburgh and The Bartlett, where his writing focused on the architecture of data centres. Image shows him holding one of the many awards Dezeen has earned for its journalism over the years. Tom has worked for several publications in architecture and construction, including the Architects' Journal and Construction Manager. He has also contributed to RIBA Journal, Icon, BD, City Metric, Architectural Review and ArchDaily. Videos on the built environment featuring Tom have had over five million views on YouTube. Follow Tom on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
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