Architectural Digest at 100: A Century of Style
Architectural Digest at 100 celebrates the best from the pages of the international design authority. The editors have delved into the archives and culled years of rich material covering a range of subjects. Ranging freely between present and past, the book features the personal spaces of dozens of private celebrities like Barack and Michelle Obama, David Bowie, Truman Capote, David Hockney, Michael Kors, and Diana Vreeland, and includes the work of top designers and architects like Frank Gehry, David Hicks, India Mahdavi, Peter Marino, John Fowler, Renzo Mongiardino, Oscar Niemeyer, Axel Vervoordt, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Elsie de Wolfe. Also included are stunning images from the magazine’s history by photographers such as Bill Cunningham, Horst P. Horst, Simon Upton, Francois Dischinger, Francois Halard, Julius Shulman, and Oberto Gili.
Break out the bubbly! Architectural Digest is 100—and we’re celebrating with a stunning monograph that spotlights a century of the world’s most alluring homes and gardens. The following is an excerpt from the chapter dedicated to the glories of California, AD’s birthplace.
Before the Manhattan penthouses and the Paris pieds-à-terre, and before the superyachts and Balinese pleasure domes came to its attention, Architectural Digest was singularly focused on the glories of California, where the magazine was born, a native Angeleno, in 1920. The young publication elucidated a vision of America’s western frontier as a place of 20th-century innovation and promise, replete with stately Mediterranean-style manses, sun-kissed Italianate gardens, and picturesque reflecting pools. As California became a crucible for the nascent modernist movement, and streamlined houses of glass and steel rose up beside Cotswolds cottages and French châteaux, AD began to revel in the heterogeneity of the Golden State’s landscape.
Photo: Douglas Friedman
The greatest California-based architects of the past century were all championed in AD’s pages. Wallace Neff, who built romantic houses of every stripe for merchant kings and Hollywood stars, was a staple of the magazine’s editorial mix. His remodeling of Pickfair, the storied house that belonged to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, made no fewer than six appearances in AD over several decades. Paul R. Williams, the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects, was another of the magazine’s mainstays, helping to establish an image of California glamour that captivated the world.
From Irving Gill to Cliff May to the stars of the Case Study crowd—Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Craig Ellwood, et al.—AD tracked the advent and blossoming of California modernism. Julius Shulman and other master photographers chronicled their work in elegant images that helped sell the progressive style to a skeptical public weaned on European-inflected traditionalism. In later decades, the progeny of the early modernists, from John Lautner to Frank Gehry, became the new standard-bearers heralded in the magazine’s pages.
Just as California incubated a particular strain of modernist architecture, the state produced a roster of enormously influential interior designers who riffed on the colors and light of Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Francisco, and all points in between. William Haines, the silent-film heartthrob turned decorator, was one of the first design stars in the AD constellation. That groundbreaking society would grow to include Rose Tarlow, Kalef Alaton, Steve Chase, Michael Taylor, Anthony Hail, and Sally Sirkin Lewis. In more recent years, Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Michael S. Smith, Steven Volpe, Kelly Wearstler, and a new generation of talents have picked up the torch of sublime, homegrown California design.
