About Home Journal

Home Journal

Home Journal is a Hong Kong interiors and design magazine launched in 1980. Published as a bilingual English and Chinese monthly, it has endured for more than four decades as one of Hong Kong's oldest interiors publications and, in the words of industry coverage of its thirty-fifth anniversary, a leader in its market today. In a city where homes are famously compact and property is famously prized, a magazine devoted to how those homes are designed, furnished and lived in found a durable subject — and Home Journal has documented Hong Kong domestic design from the 1980s to its forty-fifth anniversary in 2025.

Founding in 1980 and a bilingual identity

Home Journal was launched in 1980. Its own forty-fifth anniversary account, published in 2025, described the magazine as Hong Kong's definitive voice in design since that year, documenting the evolution of interior design and exploring how spaces shape lives. The anniversary exhibition displayed red-bound volumes of back issues from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, and those volumes captured an important part of the title's development: its transition from an English-only magazine to a comprehensive bilingual one. That shift mirrored Hong Kong publishing itself, as English-language titles serving expatriate and professional readers broadened into Chinese to reach the city's wider design-conscious public. Publishing in both languages placed Home Journal between two audiences — international designers and brands working in Hong Kong, and local homeowners and practitioners — and it has remained a monthly bilingual publication.

What the magazine covers

Marketing magazine's benchmarking of Hong Kong media summarised Home Journal's remit as interiors, the latest products and design trends, creative people, trade secrets, design fairs and ideas for décor, together with a directory of home stores and designers. Library and digital-edition descriptions of the magazine add beautifully photographed travel, food and entertaining features alongside its core interiors, design and decoration coverage, presenting it as a design and lifestyle title rather than a narrow trade journal. Its self-description — "where inspiration lives" — captures that mix: standout homes and spaces to aspire to, practical intelligence about products and suppliers, and profiles of the creative people shaping how Hong Kong and Asia live.

Hong Kong's design scene in its pages

Hong Kong's particular conditions run through the magazine's subject matter. The city combines very small flats with some of the world's most expensive luxury homes, a dense stock of converted industrial and commercial buildings, and a constant cycle of renovation. Home Journal's decades of issues form a visual record of how those conditions were answered over time — from 1980s interiors through the polished contemporary apartments and houses it features today. Designers who appear in its pages have themselves testified to that long relationship: at the thirty-fifth anniversary, editor Kissa Castañeda noted that designers featured by the magazine fondly recalled it as their source of inspiration when they were still studying, a form of engagement, she said, that does not happen overnight and that had been nurtured for over three decades.

Anniversaries and exhibitions

The magazine has marked its milestones publicly, in the manner of a title that treats design as a civic culture. For its thirty-fifth anniversary in October 2015 it staged "At Home in Hong Kong", an industry event and three-day exhibition held at the Liang Yi Museum in Sheung Wan, emphasising its role as an influencer within the industry. Ten years later, to mark forty-five years, it presented the special exhibition "Home is Where the Art Is", celebrating meaningful design in the home, with the red-bound archive volumes on display alongside. Such exhibitions extend the magazine beyond the page: they gather the designers, brands and readers who form its community, and they underline the claim, made at the forty-fifth anniversary, that for forty-five years the magazine inspired Hong Kong — and beyond — to reimagine the art of living.

Industry recognition

Home Journal's standing among advertisers and marketers has been measured in Marketing magazine's Hong Kong Magazine of the Year research, a benchmarking survey of the preferences of Hong Kong's top marketers. In the 2014 results the magazine was named winner of gold in the Interior category for the second consecutive year, ahead of other interiors titles in the market. It has also been described in media surveys as Hong Kong's top interior magazine. That recognition matters for a specialist title: interiors magazines depend on a close relationship with furniture, kitchen, bathroom, lighting and property advertisers, and repeated category wins signalled that Home Journal held the attention of the industry it served as well as of readers.

Publisher and the Tatler Asia group

In its recent history Home Journal has sat within the Edipresse media stable in Asia, alongside Tatler titles and other luxury brands. When Edipresse Media Asia announced in 2019 that it would rebrand as the Tatler Asia Group, Home Journal was listed among its award-winning international brands, in a portfolio published across eight Asian markets. Edipresse's own descriptions of its Asian portfolio likewise counted Home Journal and its website among the group's luxury lifestyle magazines and digital properties. That ownership placed a specialist interiors title inside a group aimed at Asia's affluent audiences — a logical home, given the overlap between high-end property, luxury retail and design readerships in Hong Kong.

Digital and international editions

Like other long-lived Hong Kong magazines, Home Journal developed a life beyond Hong Kong newsstands. Its website, homejournal.com, carries its design coverage online, and its issues are distributed internationally in digital form through magazine platforms such as Zinio, where it is sold alongside other Hong Kong and international design titles and described as a leading design and lifestyle magazine in Hong Kong with more than thirty-five years of history. Digital distribution gave its Hong Kong-centred content a second readership among overseas followers of Asian design — former residents, designers working on Hong Kong projects, and readers in markets where the print edition was never sold.

Content in practice

A typical issue, as sampled in its digital editions, mixes a substantial home or apartment feature — photographed room by room, with the designers explaining their choices — with product pages, trend reporting, interviews and the service journalism of where to buy. Its themed issues have included an annual art focus, timed to Hong Kong's major art events. The magazine's voice, in its own editorial introductions, is that of an enthusiast for the city: issues have reflected on Hong Kong's resilience in difficult periods while continuing to celebrate the creativity of its homes and designers. That combination of the aspirational and the local is characteristic of Hong Kong lifestyle publishing at its most durable.

Place in Hong Kong publishing

Hong Kong has supported many interiors and shelter titles, local and imported, but few have lasted as long as Home Journal. Launched before Hong Kong's 1997 handover, it published through the Asian financial crisis, the SARS period, the growth of the city's art and design calendar and the digital disruption of magazine publishing, adjusting its language mix, its platforms and its events while keeping its monthly print core. Its longevity makes its archive a resource in itself: forty-five years of Hong Kong interiors, preserved in the bound volumes it displayed at its anniversary, are a primary record of how the city's domestic tastes, materials and ambitions changed.

Home Journal today

Home Journal continues as Hong Kong's long-running bilingual interiors monthly, published from Hong Kong for readers in the city and, digitally, around the world. Its forty-fifth anniversary in 2025 — marked by exhibition as well as by print — confirmed a title still active in its fifth decade. For WorldNM's directory of Chinese magazines it represents a distinct category: not a national title from the mainland, but a Hong Kong specialist magazine whose subject is the designed home, and whose history is inseparable from the city whose homes it has chronicled since 1980.