Veranda magazine has been a long-standing design industry staple, covering architecture and luxury interiors trends across the country. In recent years, Editor-in-Chief Steele Marcoux has championed the diversification of the magazine’s coverage, partnering with the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to bring Black architectural and cultural heritage sites to its pages.

This editorial partnership helped inspire the magazine’s first ever preservation-themed issue, released in January, which features the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum and the First Baptist Church-West, both of which are Action Fund-supported projects. To learn more about this exciting collaboration, read the conversation below.

Have you received any feedback from your readers reacting to your coverage of Black heritage sites?

It's been amazing! Far and away the topics that I get the most letters about are preservation and our stories that focus on sites that are extremely important to Black history. I think it's because those stories stir our readers on a more cerebral and emotional level, and that might prompt someone to actually sit down and take the time to write a letter.

I know that the reason they subscribe to Veranda is for beautiful design and decorating inspiration, but it seems to me we’ve struck a chord that is really exciting and will only expand the lens that we're taking. I'm already trying to figure out when our next preservation issue is going to be!

As design trends come and go, there's something that brings people back to materials and heritage and quality. It's really encouraging to see that there's such a positive response to incorporating Black history and craftsmanship into that exclusive “luxury” category as well.

[Our core audience are] folks who intentionally live in an old house or who intentionally shop for decorative items that are preserving artisan traditions that have been around for hundreds of years. That's all well and good, and we still enjoy telling those stories. But we realized that we have a bigger platform to talk about how preservation can influence and define our culture.

It is the beauty and the design elements, but it's not just that. In the feedback I'm getting, people are saying, “these sites have to be interpreted.” I have to credit the National Trust for this, but it really is recognizing the need to tell the full story. Even the design trades and design profession, they want to tell the whole story. We need to know who we are as a people, and if we are omitting huge swaths of our own history, we're not getting the full look at who we are.

Given the success of this recent preservation-themed issue, are there other stories or places that you want to see Veranda cover?

I really want to explore the future of the historic house museum and why it is relevant to today. How should it be thought of? And what does the future look like, in terms of who should be their keepers, owners, and supporters?

Something that's always interested me at Veranda is looking at what is a house really? It's obviously shelter, but it's also a place where creativity can be nurtured so that someone growing up in that house can then go change the world. I'm thinking here of the Nina Simone House, or the John Coltrane House is another fabulous example.

Finally, I’d love to know how you feel about Veranda’s role in bringing Black history and preservation into the design and culture space moving forward?

I feel like the mission of preservation and telling the full story has just become ever more relevant because unfortunately, the information age has given way to the disinformation age, and education and school curricula are becoming hotly contested things. One tiny way to fill those gaps, perhaps, is through [treating] preservation as education.