A Fresh Perspective: Kelsey Keith on Telling Fascinating Stories About Where People Live

By Julia Gamolina, portrait by Mark Wickens for Curbed

Kelsey Keith joined Vox Media in 2015 as the first editor-in-chief of Curbed. As EIC, Kelsey directs all editorial operations for the digital media outlet, with a special interest in making architecture relatable, cities approachable, streets walkable, rooms beautiful, and buildings useful. She strongly believes that if you love where you live, you should critique it in equal doses as championing it. At Curbed, Kelsey oversees a flagship site, eight local sites, and a bi-weekly newsletter; she is also the executive producer of Curbed's chart-topping podcast, Nice Try! Prior to Vox Media, she was special projects editor at Dwell magazine. She was the founding editor of Architizer, and has contributed to publications such as I.D., Fast Company, AIGA, and Gawker.

Kelsey has interviewed hundreds of designers and architects, with a focus on historical figures who hold contemporary relevance (Sheila Hicks, Jack Lenor Larsen, the designers of the Sea Ranch). In addition to editorial work, she has served on juries for the American Society of Magazine Editors and the James Beard Design Awards and has participated in reviews at Columbia GSAPP, the Cooper Union, Parsons School of Design, and the School at the Art Institute of Chicago. In her interview, Kelsey talks about her mission for the public to buy into the value of architecture and design, advising those just starting their careers to know what came before them.

JG: How did your interest in design and the built environment first develop?

KK: I studied arts management and art history in college, and for the latter, I went to Paris for my junior year abroad, focusing on nineteenth century French art. It’s funny, a lot of people I most admire in design disciplines and especially design media all studied art history - if I were to identify the common trait, I would say interpreting something visual through words, and the study of memorizing objects, places, eras, cultural movements is then a natural segue into being able to easily make connections between periods, movements, and personalities. 

My interest in architecture somewhat predates all of that. As far back as I can remember, instead of doodling in class I would draw floor plans incessantly [laughs]. Something with physical space always resonated emotionally for me - seeing the Pantheon in high school stuck with me more than I expected. In college, I had an architectural history professor named Robert Russell, and his history lectures were so compelling that he would keep lecturing after the class was over and people stayed glued to their seats, myself very much included. Having someone who can color in the black-and-white history of a discipline ingrains in your mind that there’s something of value there. 

Curbed partnered with Herman Miller for an event during NYCxDESIGN in Spring 2019.

What led you to design media?

Right after college, I was securing an internship at a museum in New York, but found out that all such internships were unpaid. My parents basically said, “That’s cute, but how are you going to survive in New York without making any money?” A valid point [laughs]. I had to figure out another means of working, so I  took a job in public relations right out of college, knowing it wasn’t something that I intended to do in any way long term. I do think that you can get something out of any experience, and in this case, what I got out of it was learning about New York media. I was reading a ton and getting familiar with bylines, which publications focused on what. 

I did that for maybe about two years, and was then in the process of applying to graduate schools for architecture. Then Lehman Brothers collapsed, and at that point, I wasn’t sure what to do. I figured it wasn’t the best financial decision for me to get into that much student debt in an unstable job market. Instead, I worked in a restaurant, and while I did that, I started freelance writing. I didn’t have much experience but I did read a lot and was fairly familiar with how publishing worked. This is also when digital media really starting taking off in New York - it was a bit of a new frontier. 

How did you eventually get to Architizer? 

While freelancing for a variety of print publications, I got a deputy editor position for an online publication called Flavorwire. I was writing about general culture, but my interest was more specifically art—and reacquainting myself with architecture, and then later, design. 

What flagged the attention of Marc Kushner, who was starting Architizer, was a post I did for Flavorwire that compared Lady Gaga’s tour costumes to works of contemporary architecture and design. My story was the first time anyone compared Lady Gaga’s fashion choices to architecture, I guess you could say it was an early meme, and the idea was that this broad cultural moment could tie into something considered more esoteric, like contemporary architecture. As one-off and viral as that post was, there’s something salient there in connecting various disciplines and that’s why Marc wanted me to do Architizer. 

“It’s really important to know what came before your time, both from a historical standpoint but also just for you to know enough to form credible opinions of your own.”

Tell me about your time there. 

Architizer was very much a start-up; I was there for just under two years and had an awesome experience. The people who founded Architizer were mostly architects who were in academia, and because of that, I had a lot of facetime and exposure to really serious people who were working in the field. I got to travel—we did a joint program with GSAPP that took me to London, and Berlin, and Tokyo, and that was amazing. 

I was quite young at the time and learning a lot, and that job gave me a lot of freedom. They wanted someone in the job who was young and enthusiastic—bringing a different perspective to covering the stuff that always gets covered in a fairly dry way. 

What did you do next?

After I reached my growth goals for Architizer, I took a job at Curbed New York as co-editor of the site. I only worked there for only five months before getting poached by Dwell [laughs]. The Curbed New York stint was interesting though - it was a different era in internet publishing and very bloggy. My co-editor and I each had a quota of 10-12 posts per day, which sounds insane now. 

Having to write so much and so frequently, just pedal to the metal all day long, knocked every bit of preciousness out of my writing. I learned to write fast, and gained a lot of confidence in not worrying about things so much, which ultimately made me a better writer in the long run. The speed was a good catalyst for learning. 

I've been writing a biweekly newsletter this year (promise it's fun!), which you can subscribe to here.

Kelsey’s living room in Washington DC, where she moved this June after 13 years in New York City.

Tell me then about Dwell. 

Dwell has always been super ambitious and influential for its relatively small staff size. I was hired as a Senior Editor and was there for about four years. The first thing I did was run market pages and front-of-book. For a magazine’s front-of-book you have to be able to distill a lot of ideas into something that’s entertaining, informative, to the point, visually snappy, and do it all in one neat package. I still think that anyone who has worked on that kind of section is incredibly capable of delivering service to readers. 

I was also taking a ton of appointments because I was the only person in New York for Dwell for a while. I got to travel a lot, I got to write a lot, I got to do so many different things there from eventually being second-in-command to the editor-in-chief, to digital content, to doing live programming when we had conferences in New York. My experience at Dwell really ran the gamut.

How did you come back to Curbed?

I would not have left had I not found a newer, bigger challenge, but I did find that! 

In the years I was at Dwell, Vox Media had bought Curbed Network (then Curbed, Eater, and Racked). Curbed had not had an editor-in-chief up to that point. I was approached by Lockhart Steele, the founder, who asked me, “What do you think we should do with Curbed?” Though Curbed was his baby, Lockhart really listened to my ideas, gave me the reins, and wanted me to do well with it. I was able to staff up and structure Curbed in a way that was aligned with my editorial vision for it. 

“Having to write so much and so frequently, just pedal to the metal all day long, knocked every bit of preciousness out of my writing. I learned to write fast, and gained a lot of confidence in not worrying about things so much...The speed was a good catalyst for learning.”

What was your vision for it?

The most interesting thing to me about Curbed is that it’s so relevant, in terms of being located in a bunch of places where people actually live. We have a variety of city-focused sites, like Curbed Atlanta and Curbed Los Angeles, and as well as the more universal flagship one. There is this ability to take authoritative but broadly interesting local stories and serve them to a larger audience, and vice versa. 

We tell a variety of stories—and we are focused on exploring the micro and macro issues surrounding where people live.

What are you focusing on now?

One of the new things I worked on this year for Curbed was our podcast, Nice Try!, which is all about failed utopias. We did it in collaboration with the Vox Media Podcast Network, and hired Avery Trufelman as the host. I had wanted to do a narrative nonfiction podcast for Curbed, because our strength as an editorial brand is in telling fascinating stories about place in really transformational ways to our audience. 

Nice Try! was an exciting challenge: to switch from the written word and photography, to something that’s audio-based and reaches people in different ways. And people love podcasts! In picking what to cover, well, I wanted to prove that our topic area at Curbed is not niche at all, it’s widely and broadly appealing. Pretty much everyone is obsessed with utopias, and it’s really Curbed’s bread and butter to explore different aspects of community, and the psychology of place. The podcast was kind of a hit —we’re talking millions of downloads for seven scripted episodes—and getting to work with a talent like Avery was also huge treat.

Nice Try! is the hit podcast (2+ million downloads for season one!) that Kelsey executive produced this year for Curbed.

A live event for Nice Try! at the 92nd Street Y this summer with host Avery Trufelman, in conversation with Caity Weaver.

Where are you in your career today?

I feel like I’m just getting started. I’m good at what I do now—which is editing, media strategy, and team building— and I’m not certain what I’ll eventually try next. My twenty-year goal though is to reopen Black Mountain College, so please hold me to that [laughs]!

You are also expecting! 

Yes, I’m having a baby any day now. It’s our first child, so I have no idea what to expect, but a lot of my colleagues at Curbed and a lot of people I admire with great careers have children. 

Alexandra Lange is a terrific example: she’s a rigorously trained architectural scholar and mom to two kids, and she doesn’t really need to separate the two. I think her role as a mother makes her work in architecture richer because she’s not just looking through one very narrow perspective. I love that about her, and that’s why she’s Curbed’s architecture critic.

Looking back, what have been the biggest challenges in your career thus far?

I thought about this question a lot, and to be honest, I have had a lot of advantages in my life. I did work to pay my own way in my early twenties when I was living in New York, but always with the support of my family in case anything went awry, and I also had no student debt. I am well aware that the “luck” factor is dependent on those things. And the work I’ve done—even when it’s hard has been enjoyable to me, so I feel very lucky in that regard as well. 

Thinking about it now, there are times where I could have been more assertive and outspoken, and certainly those are qualities that I admire in others. And public speaking still makes me sweat. A lot of women experience a binary when navigating certain workplace situations - either you’re humble, diligent, and working within the system, or you’re speaking out in a way that’s not received well. 

“A lot of women experience a binary when navigating certain workplace situations - either you’re humble, diligent, and working within the system, or you’re speaking out in a way that’s not received well.”

I’ve certainly lived through both sides of that. On the flipside, what have been the biggest highlights? 

The highlights have definitely been the travel that comes along with this particular area of coverage (places and spaces). I mentioned going to Tokyo with GSAPP and Architizer; I was there for ten days, and spent a lot of time with architects who were eager to show off parts of the city and culture in Tokyo that you wouldn’t otherwise see. I go to Milan almost every year for the furniture fair, and I’ve also gotten to do a ton of travel around the United States, everywhere from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Columbus, Indiana, to Tucson, Arizona.. I’m very observant and feel pretty capable of finding something interesting everywhere. Traveling is my continuing education in the built environment. 

United States travel is very underrated. Gloria Steinem talks about how whenever she would tell people she was traveling internationally, they would get all excited, and when she told them she was going to Arizona or something within the United States, they would say something like, “What a drag that you have to go out there.”

Exactly. And Arizona, specifically, is underrated. 

Another highlight is an excuse to make publishable work out of personal obsessions. Earlier this year, I published a 13,000-word oral history of the Sea Ranch, which actually had a pretty big readership and kept gaining new life. My husband is from Berkeley, and I had gotten really into the work of Charles Moore, who was dean at UC Berkeley for a time in the early 1960s, and from there helped design the Sea Ranch.

The third highlight, especially in running digital publications, is getting to hire and work with people that I respect a lot. Curbed has some of the best talent in the business, like our urbanism editor Alissa Walker, our senior story producer Diana Budds, and of course Karrie Jacobs, Alexandra Lange, and Avery Trufelman. Our leadership team at Curbed is also amazing: my executive editor Mercedes Kraus, our managing editor Mariam Aldhahi, and our general manager Jill Dehnert. Being surrounded by people you really respect, like working with, and like reading their work—it’s a pretty cozy place to be. 

One of Kelsey’s big projects for 2019: published a 13,000-word oral history of The Sea Ranch in Northern California after interviewing scores of octogenarians over a period of six months.

Kelsey can't resist taking bathroom selfies in architect's houses. Luis Barragan home, 2015, and Russel Wright's Manitoga, 2016.

Who are you admiring right now?

I admire those who have achieved success in their careers while crediting the work of their teams. The fact is, no one has gotten where they are without the help of mentors, colleagues, and partners along the way, and we are getting to a place in culture where I think it’s starting to be understood that no one creates or achieves anything in a vacuum. 

For people in general, I value intelligence, ambition, commitment, and humor. In media: Margaret Sullivan, Kara Swisher, Mimi Zeiger, Nikole Hannah-Jones. In architecture/design: Natasha Jen, Zena Howard, Cornelia Oberlander, Harriet Pattison, Amanda Williams, Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Meaghan Roddy, Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Amy Auscherman, Matylda Krzykowski.

“I admire those who have achieved success in their careers while crediting the work of their teams...we are getting to a place in culture where I think it’s starting to be understood that no one creates or achieves anything in a vacuum.”

What is your core mission with what you do in design media? Where did your drive to transform Curbed come from? 

The throughline to my career is my mission to get the general public, and the people who are more broadly interested in culture, to buy into the value of architecture and design. I don’t think you can do that if architecture is completely remote, niche, and inaccessible. I feel that my role as editor and writer is to be an interpreter between the practitioners of architecture - I really respect what they do - and the public, in a way that excites, entertains, and informs them, and does that in a way that’s not completely removed from the more relevant aspects of culture. 

Curbed is a unique publication because  it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. That was really interesting to me, as a place to explore these ideas of getting people up to speed and getting them to buy into the value of street design, landscape architecture, how our cities could be more resilient, all that. 

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their careers?

Keep reading books. There is only so much you can wring out of the Internet. It’s really important to know what came before your time, both from a historical standpoint but also just for you to know enough to form credible opinions of your own.