Sunset looks for a new home

Time, Inc., the corporate parent of Sunset magazine, announced that it has sold Sunset’s 7-acre campus, located in Menlo Park, California. The campus contained several gardens and midcentury ranch-style buildings designed by Cliff May, considered the father of the California ranch home. Sunset magazine’s rich history traces all the way to 1898 with a sales publication developed by the Southern Pacific Railroad, which wanted to lure people to the West.

In the 1950s, the magazine moved to its current location and became a chronicle of California living from the kitchen to the garden and beyond. Ruth Reichl, former editor of Gourmet magazine, reminisced about the magazine’s impact: “When I moved to Berkeley in 1973, I had all these articles I had been pulling out of Sunset,” she said. “I had one that told you how to build your own bread oven in your backyard. They were so ahead of the curve. They made California seem like the most romantic place on earth.”

Time Inc. will continue to publish Sunset and has started a search for a new home for the magazine’s kitchen, gardens, and offices. The magazine will stay in its current location through 2015. This move is one of many that Time Inc. has undertaken during its spinoff from Time Warner. Earlier this year, Time sold the Alabama property that housed magazines like Southern Living and Cooking Light, but it leased back some of the space, so those magazines didn’t have to move.

Some former Sunset staffers worry that the move will negatively impact the magazine. “It will be hard for Sunset to survive as it represents itself now . . . as a working voice of the West, without the tools for testing and experimenting,” says Jerry Anne Di Vecchio, who worked at Sunset for over 40 years.