A Life By Design

Paige Rense is in her office and on the phone, which is precisely placed on a simple green trestle table that, against the odds, doesn’t have drawers. “I thought it would be good discipline for me,” says the longtime editor of Architectural Digest.

On a shelf behind her sits a miniature French house from the ‘30s, as well as a small antique horse-drawn circus wagon toting a tiny giraffe. “I didn’t want it to be cutesy country,” Rense says of her distinctive environment, “but I wanted the things I liked in it, and I like very simple things.”

Which is why she nudged the planners of Architectural Digest’s Wilshire Boulevard offices into dispensing with nutty colors. “I said, ‘Simple, clean, plain vanilla. It’s a functional office. No design statements. Comfortable. Lots of light. Everybody happy.’ So we got them in touch with reality.”

Of course, reality is not necessarily where admirers of one of the country’s most successful interior design magazines care to dwell. For Rense, reality is a vacation from fantasy, which informs the spectacular environments AD brings to the coffee tables of its 835,000 subscribers.

The monthly has been very much her creation during the quarter century she has ushered it from a 50,000-circulation building trades magazine to the glossy pinnacle of interior design journalism. Her career, among the more extraordinary in magazines, has all the makings of a potboiler--elements of which did in fact find their way into her recent mystery, “Manor House” (Doubleday).

From Horatio Alger-esque beginnings, the former high school dropout climbed to the top of a glamorous field. Even more remarkable, she has stayed there, enjoying longevity in a field known for quick exits, joining the ranks of such legendary long-lived editors as Helen Gurley Brown and William Shawn. She rules today amid a healed economy that has revived people’s interest in feathering their nests and burnished competition among shelter magazines. Recent competitors include a burgeoning Martha Stewart Living and a revived House & Garden, which had been earlier bruised by the battle for primacy with AD.

Rense is unfazed. “There isn’t a magazine in the field that’s a problem in any way,” she says in her disarmingly girlish wisp of a voice. Indeed, September’s AD, featuring the ever-popular designers’ homes, has the most ads of any issue yet. Advertising pages through November this year are at 1,207, an annual increase of 12%, the magazine reports.

En route to the top, Rense has pumped up the fantasy with peeks behind the decorated doors of celebrities from John Wayne to Cher. The unabashed glitz factor and reluctance to embrace startling new design have exposed her to some sniping, but she says the homes featured don’t necessarily reflect her personal taste.

“I think about the reader and is this good for the reader,” says Rense, who is there somewhere behind big glasses and a Connie Stevens pouf of blondness. “When any of us looks at photographs of someone’s home, we think, ‘Oh, I’d never live there,’ or ‘I’d love to live there.’

“So I show homes that I wouldn’t live in, but I think that apartment is a really wonderful example of whatever. The readers pay $5 on the newsstand for each issue, and we try to give them a book with a wide variety of things--something special, unusual, bizarre, whimsical. It can be stark and contemporary, although I don’t show a lot of that unless it has some warmth or some great drama. It’s not a design contest. It’s not a who-has-the-most-expensive house contest.”

And it certainly isn’t a decorate-like-Paige contest. Oddly enough, the grande dame of the gracious home lives in hotels--the Bel-Air when she’s in Los Angeles and the Carlyle in New York. “George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘We’re all caught up in the life stream,’ and a hotel is constant life stream,” she says. “It’s like living in the middle of theater. You’re never ever lonely in a hotel.”

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Rense’s home is in Vermont, which she shares with the prominent color-field painter Kenneth Noland, her husband of more than three years. (She is the widow of journalist Arthur Rense, whom she married twice.) She spends long weekends there, where Noland has a home and studio. “He’s brilliant, funny and very romantic,” she says. “We have a lot in common. I was a great fan of his work before I met him. And it’s fascinating to live with a really great artist.”

Rense still returns to L.A. each month for a working week but spends more time working out of the Noland-adjacent New York office. There she can also keep on eye on the competition--particularly House & Garden, which Conde Nast revived a year ago--and the design world, of which New York is the capital. Her staff, nearly 50 strong, is still based in L.A., communicating with Rense by fax, phone and FedEx.

For all the bicoastal back and forth, Rense has steered a steady ship, able to surf the early ‘90s storms that undid several competitors. “It’s been through a very turbulent period and a very competitive field and it’s flourished,” says Michael Webb, who writes for AD. “I’ve written for half a dozen magazines that are no longer publishing, like Angeles and Art & Architecture. I’ve seen the bodies pile up and obviously I’m delighted when one stays around.”

On the other hand, AD has also been the target of criticism from the hard-core design community for being bland and safe. (Many professionals prefer the English glossy World of Interiors for its sophisticated take on new work.) Not that people will pan Rense or the magazine on the record, a testament to the editor’s power.

“It’s glitzy,” says one architecture and arts writer. “It’s about money. You can find a lot of polished chrome in it. It’s very Trump Tower-y. They tend to focus on the kind of homes that reflect taste for people who don’t have it.”

Others consider Rense’s heavy hand to be the magazine’s strength. “I think it’s a really smart, conservative magazine,” says Tim Street-Porter, an architectural photographer who has done shoots for AD for more than two decades. “She’s been running the magazine all this time, she’s firmly at the helm and she knows exactly where she’s going always.”

Rense revels in the magazine’s California base. “One reason Architectural Digest has been successful, I think, is that we’re based in California,” she says. “As a magazine reader, it seemed like every magazine I picked up, whether it was showing a dress, a pair of shoes, a chair, it was always in New York. So when I started the magazine I thought design has to be interesting to anybody anywhere. So I deliberately tried to follow the population centers, including foreign countries. I don’t want it to be just New York, Los Angeles. It’s not easy. I don’t think we have a great visual tradition in this country.”

Rense’s global-mindedness has paid off in clout. “It’s the only shelter magazine that has a real presence overseas,” Street-Porter says. “If you’re an architect or designer in Mexico or elsewhere in the world and you want your house to be featured in an American magazine, the only one that will be of use to you would be Architectural Digest because your colleagues will see the story when it comes out.”

Like another blue chip American magazine, AD is distinguished in another respect--it’s a keeper. The New Yorker’s eternal literary life and Architectural Digest’s lush presentation make them candidates for people’s bookshelves.

And when the time comes for subscribers to redo their own homes, AD becomes a reference work of designers with the magazine’s imprimatur.

“It’s still the No. 1 magazine for designers,” says Beverly Hills Realtor Jeffrey Hyland. “It’s like getting a graduate degree or Phi Beta Kappa. If you can show prospective customers a brochure that says you have three houses in Architectural Digest, that’s a real plus in terms of getting jobs and raising your fees.”

Mindful of that, the magazine has twice published lists of “the AD 100”--top designers with its seal of approval. The first list, which ran a decade ago, was intended to give the field a boost in a bad economy.

“The architects and designers I meet will often hold their work back from others to get it in [AD],” Webb says. It has the largest circulation of the quality shelter magazines [although the somewhat more middle-brow House Beautiful tops it at 1 million], and as a result it’s seen by more people.”

Rense is certainly aware of the magazine’s usefulness to a designer’s career. “It’s an annuity,” she says. “And it goes on and on. Something may have been in the magazine seven years ago and someone walks into a designer’s office with the story paper-clipped.”

It isn’t just designers whose marketability multiplies with exposure in AD--consider the houses themselves. “It’s an absolute plus, and it increases the value,” Hyland says. “Architectural Digest makes you sign an agreement that you will not put your house on the market until at least it comes out in the magazine. Very often, the moment it comes out, the house is on the market. Every time Cher bought a house, it came out in the magazine, and the next month it was for sale.”

Not surprisingly, Rense has long been avidly wooed by AD wannabes. For her part, she says she declines invitations to stay at people’s dream homes in Barbados. “I’ve sort of become a recluse over the past years,” she says. “People think if they invite you to dinner and get to know you that you’ll do something for them.

“A few years ago, Enid Nemy of the New York Times interviewed me and said, ‘If you weren’t on the masthead, how many friends do you think you would lose?’ And I said, ‘95%.’ And she said, ‘I would have thought it would have been closer to 97%.’ ”

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For years, Rense’s “fee” for the fabulous exposure she offered was exclusivity: She wanted AD to be the first magazine to show a property--and the last. Film became the property of AD. Sometimes she would sit on photographs for many months and only then decide she wouldn’t use them, observers say.

One prominent designer whose work has been showcased in other major shelter magazines says he doesn’t offer it to AD because of that policy. “They want you to surrender a project and then agree to an exclusive with them and they won’t give you a publication date, and I’m not interested,” he says.

But Rense says AD fell into line with other Conde Nast publications when the New York-based magazine giant bought its parent, Knapp Communications, which also owned Bon Appetit. Conde Nast bought the two glossies for a reported $175 million in 1993. The magazines claim rights to first publication and release material for other use later. “I want the material first. Absolutely. Not exclusively. First,” Rense says.

Others close to the design industry say she still sometimes requires exclusivity, however. “If you’re a young designer and she has featured one of your projects, then she will very likely tell you, ‘You’re with us now. Don’t give anything to any other magazine.’ And if you try to, she’ll threaten not to publish you again,” says one industry veteran.

“That’s how she keeps her position,” says a well-placed observer. “It’s part of the business of being No. 1.”

But that policy also breeds a conservative approach, some observers say, noting that the pages of AD are often marked by the work of such Rense favorites as designers John Cotrell, Sally Sirkin Lewis and Mario Buatta. Such designers tend to be well established in their field and peers of the 68-year-old Rense.

“She has her clique and it doesn’t deviate,” says the industry observer. “That’s why these other magazines have an open door and become more inventive and creative, but [AD’s] management has prevented that from happening.”

Rense flatly denies the existence of any AD “in” group. “But what is true is that designers rarely are able to accept that their work just isn’t right for the magazine or isn’t good enough for international publication. Most of the people whose work we show I don’t even know.”

What is important to Rense, however, is loyalty. “What she asks from people is loyalty, and when they go back on their word she gets angry,” says Pilar Viladas, home design editor of the New York Times Magazine and a former AD contributing writer. “But I would say she’s about as far from being a diva as you can get.”

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Rense was born in Iowa, but she declines to discuss her beginnings. “It was terrible, and I don’t like to go back there,” she says. She was raised by adoptive parents in Des Moines, who named her Patricia, the New York Times reported some years ago. When she was a preteen, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she dropped out of Hollywood High and changed her name to Paige.

Rense says her life truly began in 1955 when she met the late Arthur Rense, then managing editor of Water World, a skin-diving magazine. He published her first story and married her two years later. “He’s the first person who believed in me,” she says.

She had various jobs in magazines and publicity, but in the late ‘60s she left the business world to become a full-time mother to Rense’s three sons from a previous marriage. The role didn’t take, and in 1970, a friend in Women’s Wear Daily’s L.A. bureau mentioned that Architectural Digest was looking for a writer. “I said, ‘I don’t know anything about architecture,’ ” she says. “He said, ‘Trust me. It won’t matter.’ ”

The Architectural Digest (“the” was later dropped) was founded in 1920 as a trade magazine designed to serve the California building boom. In 1965, the founder’s grandson, Bud Knapp, bought it for $65,000.

In Rense’s interview with the magazine’s editor, James Bradley Little, a few years later, she laid out her impressions of AD: “I said, ‘It’s poorly written. And it’s not a real magazine. It’s amateurish, and the material doesn’t seem very interesting.’ ” He hired her.

When she came on board, the editorial staff numbered four people. When she signed on, anyone who bought an ad would get a story. And when Rense suggested interviewing designers--making them stars, as it turned out--Little replied that they didn’t want to be interviewed.

The memory makes her hoot. “It was just like falling through the looking glass,” she says. “I said, ‘Don’t you think there should be a table of contents?’ I mean, I did all these radical things.”

In 1971, Little was shot dead by robbers outside Club John on La Cienega Boulevard. The crime inspired “Manor House,” published recently to mixed reviews. In the novel, the managing editor who really does the work replaces the fallen editor, much like Rense did in real life. “It certainly wouldn’t have happened that fast and, who knows, it might not have happened at all,” she says. “But there wasn’t a line around the block for this job. There just wasn’t.”

Rense navigated her new world with the help of designers Anthony Hall in San Francisco and the late Angelo Donghia in New York. All along, she was developing her eye--”I didn’t know I had one,” she says--by combing antique shops, although she says her heart belongs to magazines. “To this day, I’m more interested in magazines than in decorating,” she says. “I’d like to think I could do a motorcycle magazine.” When Knapp acquired Bon Appetit in 1975 and the American edition of Geo in 1981, Rense took the reins of each for a time.

Architectural Digest itself had started on a shoestring--it didn’t even have a photo budget until 1977. And today the photographer rules. Editors and stylists are not permitted on site. “I want the photographer’s eye because that’s what the reader is going to see and we don’t change anything,” Rense says. “The photographer can move a chair or a plant to get a better angle, but we don’t redecorate. We don’t bring in 8,000 flower arrangements. It’s a point of integrity. It should be real.”

(The magazine hotly denied a recent New York Times article accusing AD of being among chic home-design magazines that share the “dirty little secret . . . of bringing homes into a state of photogenic grace by importing everything from a chenille throw to the latest French 1950s furniture. . . .”)

The ‘80s turned out to be the hothouse decade for shelter magazines, which lauded conspicuous consumption. And when Conde Nast launched HG, a retooled House & Garden, in 1983, Rense went ballistic. “They absolutely ripped off our format,” showing portfolios of homes, she says. “I’m not outspoken about House & Garden now. I’m not outspoken about House Beautiful now or Elle Decor or any of the other magazines, because that to me was a completely different situation. That was a direct attack. I mean, they were out to kill us.”

Rense responded by publishing issues with country and international themes, and by enlisting serious writers like John Updike and Susan Cheever. Writers still praise AD as a great place to work. “I’ve never been paid as well elsewhere,” says former HG Features Editor Peter Haldeman. “I’ve never been paid as promptly, and all of the logistics from getting color Xeroxes sent to final fact-checking is more orderly and methodical than any place.”

Ultimately, Rense won the war. HG folded in 1993. “She very likely had a hand in killing the old HG because [Conde Nast owner] Si Newhouse always loved Architectural Digest,” says a shelter magazine insider.

“When the old House and Garden and HG were still in existence, whenever Si Newhouse would visit the art department he’d say, ‘Why don’t you make it more like Architectural Digest?’ He always wanted to be able to have it, and when it came on the market, he was happy to pay a high price for it.”

That is, after Rense assured him she would be staying on, she says. She returns the compliment, applauding Conde Nast for not interfering in her running of the magazine, another benefit of AD’s distant base in California.

If AD is Paige Rense, whither both?

Says Rense: “I have always had my hand on the door. What if someone suddenly said, ‘Let’s cheapen the paper?’ I certainly would not want to stand by and watch the magazine deteriorate. I’ll stay as long as I’m happy and productive and enthused. Twenty-seven years--it doesn’t seem like a long time.”

Into the Millennium

Paige Rense on design at the millennium:

“The millennium is just another year. It’s going to be a media creation. Sofas are not going to fly. Chairs are not going to become automated. Everything is going to evolve just as it always has because people have real homes, real houses and real apartments.

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“People are much more concerned with their comfort and the way they really live as opposed to how people used to feel--much more concerned about how people thought they lived. Now they’re really not.

“I think it translates wonderfully, because that I’m-going-to-decorate-every-inch-and-hit- you-in-the-face-with-it is largely gone. There’s much more concern about ‘let’s have one wonderful painting instead of three or four, which are not really first-rate examples of the artist’s work. Let’s have really comfortable upholstered furniture and one or two antique pieces.’

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“People just have a different feeling about it, and I think decorators do too. They’re now dealing with people who are much more sophisticated and have definite ideas about what they want. They’re really not intimidated by interior decorators as they were a few years ago.”