Paige Rense: Remembering the Queen of Hearths
When Paige Rense posed for her Kodak moment in 1976, the Architectural Digest editor-in-chief had won the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year. Sadly the Queen of Hearths, as the newspaper dubbed her, passed away on January 1st, 2021, at her home in West Palm Beach. Rense ruled AD from 1975 to 2010, strategically transforming it from a regional trade journal into an international design publication, increasing its circulation from 50,000 to more than 850,000.
Architectural Digest, The Collectors: Michael Taylor in San Francisco, 1977
Architectural Digest, founded in 1920, was originally a quarterly architectural directory based out of Los Angeles. When Rense took it over, it was bi-monthly and directed towards interior design. She soon upgraded the magazine's content to monthly, which coincided with the California design community's rise in the 1970s. The late Randy Arczynski, the co-founder of Randolph & Hein, said of this period, "California designers-and Northern Californians in particular–were the most influential and closely watched designers in the entire international design community. San Francisco had Michael Taylor, John Dickinson, Tony Hail, Billy Gaylord, and Val Arnold."
These design icons all graced the AD pages. Rense added her favorite Los Angeles designers; Sally Sirkin Lewis, Leo Dennis, Jerry Leen, Rose Tarlow, and Kalef Alaton, to name a few. After conquering California, her next challenge was New York, which looked dismissively at Los Angeles as the Wild West. Rense knew once she secured her first East Coast designer, the others would follow, which happened when she published a Manhatten townhouse by Angelo Donghia.
Architectural Digest, Angelo Donghia, January 2000
Over the years, she highlighted the best in interior design, architecture, gardens, historic estates, and celebrity homes. Rense ruthlessly decreed when a project "was not for Architectural Digest, " and dedicated to her craft utilized the finest photographers, writers, editors, and art directors. She summed up her approach, "I was not interested in trends, and certainly not in fads," she said. "I preferred to speak of style, which is really a way of seeing and living creatively in the world."
