Most people who ask me how to get featured in Better Homes and Gardens picture the same thing: a photographer at the front door, a stylist fluffing pillows, and their living room spread across six glossy pages of the print magazine. That picture is why most of them never get in. The print house tour is the smallest, slowest, most crowded door the brand has, and it is shrinking. The pitches that land at BHG almost never start there.
If you want the credibility of the Better Homes & Gardens name, stop treating the magazine as a magazine. Treat it as a 104-year-old content operation in Des Moines with a test garden, a test kitchen, product labs, a shopping desk and a website that dwarfs the print run. Each of those runs on its own intake. Pick the right one and your odds change.
Why the print issue is the wrong first target
Start with the numbers, because they reframe the whole job. In August 2018, when the publisher announced its eighth annual September Stylemaker issue, the press release described Better Homes & Gardens as published 12 times a year with a rate base of 7.6 million, reaching 40 million consumers a month. Wikipedia still lists a 2015 circulation of 7,624,910 and ranks it the sixth most widely circulated magazine in the United States as of September 2025.
Then the floor moved. In 2022, during the paper shortage, the Des Moines Register reported that the company had paused print delivery to about 7% of its subscriber base, and that CEO Neil Vogel had put BHG at roughly 4 million subscribers that May, against about 7.6 million in June 2021. The brand’s current About page, as syndicated on AOL, now describes a magazine published 10 times a year with a rate base of 3 million.
Three million is still a huge print audience. But it means fewer pages, fewer house tours and a longer queue for each slot. The website did not shrink. Semrush estimates that bhg.com ranks for about 1.12 million US organic keywords and pulls roughly 1 million estimated monthly organic visits from Google in the US alone (Semrush domain overview, October 2026). A product mention in a BHG.com roundup that ranks for a buying query can outlive any single print issue.
So the first strategic decision in how to get featured in Better Homes and Gardens is not “how do I get my house in the magazine.” It is “which BHG desk needs what I have, this season.” Sometimes that answer is print. Usually it is not.
Who runs Better Homes & Gardens now, and where it lives
Edwin Meredith founded the title in 1922 as Fruit, Garden and Home and renamed it with the August 1924 issue. For a century it was the flagship of the Meredith Corporation in Des Moines. In 2021 IAC’s Dotdash bought Meredith, creating Dotdash Meredith, and on July 31, 2025 that company renamed itself People Inc., naming Better Homes & Gardens among its brands alongside PEOPLE, Southern Living and Allrecipes. Vogel’s line at the time: “we realized we already had the best name for us, People.”
That rename matters for a boring, practical reason. Old pitch lists still carry meredith.com and dotdash addresses. The current About page lists bhgeditor@people.inc for editor and general inquiries, bhg.press@people.inc for press queries, and a mailing address of 1716 Locust St, Des Moines, IA 50309. If your media database still shows the old domains, fix it before you send anything.
On the masthead: Stephen Orr ran the brand as editor in chief from 2015, and he is the voice quoted in the 2018 and 2019 press releases. Public sources disagree about who holds the title in late 2026, so I am not going to name a successor here, and you should not guess in a pitch either. Address the desk that fits your story (home, garden, food, shopping) and confirm the current editor on the live masthead or bhg.com author pages before you write a name in a subject line.
The About page also tells you how the editors think. It says content is produced without advertiser influence, that fact-checkers verify statistics against reputable sources, that automatically generated AI content is against the guidelines (“produced by humans, for humans”), that the test kitchen tests more than 2,500 recipes a year, and that most products reviewed are bought by BHG, with free samples never traded for a positive review. Read that list as a pitch checklist: anything that smells like a paid placement, an unverifiable claim or AI filler fails before it reaches an editor’s second paragraph.
The Four Doors of Locust Street
I use a simple model with clients, and I call it the Four Doors of Locust Street, after the BHG building address. Every legitimate route into the brand runs through one of four doors. Each has a different gatekeeper, a different proof standard and a different clock. Score your story against all four before you pitch, then pick the one where you are strongest.
Door one is the Reader Door. BHG has always run reader-made projects, and the front-yard contest is the clearest public example. In May 2019 the brand launched America’s Best Front Yard: readers posted photos with #BHGBestFrontYard, editors picked 10 finalists, and the winner took $2,500 plus features in the October print issue and on BHG.com. Orr’s quote that spring: “If anyone is going to have America’s best front yard, it will be one of our readers.” Contests come and go, so check what is open now, but the principle holds. The Reader Door rewards finished, photographed work, and it is the one door a homeowner with no publicist can walk through alone.
Door two is the Garden Door. The Better Homes & Gardens Test Garden sits next to the Des Moines headquarters, and the About page says it has served gardeners since 1998, holds 22 distinct garden spaces, changes every year and includes plants not yet sold in nurseries. Atlas Obscura notes it doubles as a private photo set and opens to the public on Fridays from noon to 2 p.m., May through September. For breeders, growers and garden brands, this is the most underrated route in American home media. The garden team covers new plants when they reach market, which means your pitch window opens months before your retail launch, not the week it ships.
Door three is the Shopping Door. BHG.com runs product roundups and reviews out of what the About page describes as three testing labs. The standard is clear: products are reviewed only after testing, strengths and weaknesses both get named, and BHG may earn a commission on purchases. If you make a product, your pitch here is a sample offer plus specs, price and retailer availability, with zero expectation of the verdict.
Door four is the Expert Door. This is where designers, chefs, organizers and garden pros live. The September Stylemaker franchise was the high-profile version: the 2018 issue put Ayesha Curry on the cover alongside designers Barrie Benson, Paloma Contreras, Nick Olsen and Grant K. Gibson, and paired the issue with a New York event for more than 80 influencers and tastemakers. You do not apply to be a Stylemaker. You become quotable first, through your own body of published work, so that when an editor needs a source on paint colors or small-space storage, your name is already in their notes.
Scoring is blunt. For each door, ask three questions: do I have finished, high-resolution visuals; do I have a fact an editor can verify; and does my timing match this desk’s calendar. Three yeses on one door beats one yes on all four.
Build a submission an editor can say yes to
Once you know your door, the pitch itself is short. One paragraph on what the project or product is, one sentence on why a BHG reader would care this season, a link to a page with the full story, and an offer of original files. That is it.
The visuals carry the decision. Shelter and garden editors judge a story by the photographs before they read a word, so shoot in daylight, shoot wide and tight, keep 300 dpi originals without watermarks, and document process steps if it is a project. Do this before you pitch, because the follow-up request for files usually comes with a short turnaround.
Timing is the second filter. Print works months ahead, and gardening runs on growing seasons, so a spring garden story pitched in April is already late for the magazine. The website moves faster, which is one more reason to aim the first pitch at a BHG.com desk and let print follow if it fits.
Third, build the trail an editor will check. Every BHG editor who likes your pitch will search your name, and what they find decides whether you look like a reliable source or a risk. This is where earned coverage elsewhere does real work. At Instant Press our catalog spans 1,016 publications plus about 228 Fast Press outlets, and 73 of those publications are lifestyle titles and 13 are real estate titles, which are the categories closest to BHG’s editorial beat. Across the catalog the mean Domain Authority is 62.3 and 96% of placements are Google-indexed, so the coverage actually shows up when an editor searches you. None of that buys a BHG feature, and nobody honest will sell you one. It does make your name look established when a BHG editor runs the search. If you want to see what that groundwork costs, our pricing page lays it out. The blog has more on pitching national titles.
Finally, follow up once. If a week or two passes in silence, send one short note with any new photos or results. Then move on to the next door. Editors at large brands go quiet for weeks and then reply on a random Tuesday morning, which is what happened in the example below.
Erica Van Slyke’s cone pendants, June 2017
The cleanest public account of how to get featured in Better Homes and Gardens through the Reader Door comes from Erica Van Slyke, the interior designer behind the blog Designing Vibes. She was sitting in a doctor’s office reading BHG when she saw a fellow blogger featured, and decided to submit once she had a project worth showing.
That project was a pair of DIY cone light pendants. She sent a link to the blog post with a brief pitch to the magazine’s submissions address. Then nothing happened for a few weeks. One morning, after a rough renovation week, an email arrived from Kit Selzer at BHG. Selzer liked the pendants and asked for high-resolution images with the designingvibes.com watermark removed, explaining she would pass them to the art director and the editor in chief for approval. A few days later the editors confirmed the story for the June 2017 issue, in the magazine’s “I did it!” reader section, with a fair warning that stories sometimes get cut at the last minute. Van Slyke had her copy in hand just before Mother’s Day and wrote up the experience on May 23, 2017.
Notice what she did right, because it maps onto the Four Doors. She chose the Reader Door instead of pitching a full house tour. She had finished work with a public page an editor could check. She had clean original files ready the moment they were requested. And she did not chase. Her post also passes along the most useful line in this whole topic: according to Van Slyke, Selzer told her that most of these features start because bloggers submit their work, not because editors go hunting for them.
That is the whole lesson. BHG is not waiting to discover you. It is waiting for someone to put a finished, well-photographed, verifiable story in front of the right desk at the right time. Pick your door, build the proof first, and send it.