Donghia was taken with her vision and in a major coup for the magazine, he showed his own New York townhouse in AD-a story all of the major shelter magazines were after. “He believed that I would do with the magazine what I said ,” says Rense. While there, she had lunch with Angelo Donghia, then a star on the rise.
The resulting coverage got the attention of designers nationwide, and she traveled to New York on the coattails of that success. Her first big “get” was legendary San Francisco designer Anthony Hail, who agreed to be interviewed and introduced her to other Bay Area talent. So I started interviewing them-and they loved it. “It seemed to me that, given the subject matter, designers were key. “There was no secret formula at all,” she insists, though she single-handedly shepherded the transformation of the Los Angeles quarterly into a glossy international style arbiter. She had just made the final edits to her forthcoming book, Architectural Digest: Autobiography of a Magazine, a retrospective that traces AD’s oeuvre from its founding in 1920 as a large-format regional magazine until her departure from the title in 2010. “Most of what I did seemed obvious,” she says when we sat down for an interview in Rizzoli’s New York offices this summer. She rejects attempts to categorize her meteoric rise as legendary. Today, Rense lives in West Palm Beach, where she continues to write. And as she delivered on that promise again and again, the magazine’s influence-and her own-grew. To do that, she reckoned that she needed the best projects to attract the best work of premier designers, she assured them that their project would be covered by the best photographers and writers. Her unwavering objective was straightforward: to be the best. It’s a simple enough premise-and for Paige Rense, it was the key to success when she joined the Architectural Digest staff in 1970.
This profile of Rense, originally titled “Star Power,” was published in the Fall 2018 issue of BOH. Editor’s note: Rense passed away on January 1, 2021, at her home in West Palm Beach, Florida.