Trendsetting editor of Architectural Digest dies
Paige Rense, the influential editor of Architectural Digest who transformed it from a local Los Angeles trade journal into a renowned design publication with global reach, died Friday at her home in West Palm Beach, Florida. She was 91.
The cause was a heart-related issue, said Victoria Woodhull, who said she managed Rense’s business and personal affairs.
Over almost 40 years as “the archduchess of decorating,” as she was once called, Rense made Architectural Digest the most popular publication in the shelter market, focusing on the work of interior designers and architects — often making stars out of them — and highlighting the homes of movie stars, world leaders and international power brokers.
With colorful prose and striking photography, the magazine displayed the lavish homes of celebrities like Katharine Hepburn, Elton John, Julia Child, Sen. Edward Kennedy, Barbra Streisand, King Hussein of Jordan and countless others. Celebrities clamored to be featured in the magazine.
An exclusive spread on a visit to the private White House quarters of President Ronald and Nancy Reagan in 1981 set the tone for Rense’s efforts to extend the magazine’s reach and influence.
Her critics, and there were many, saw the magazine’s contents as pretentious and its sensibility as nouveau riche, but faithful readers treasured it, and such criticism only
fueled Rense’s determination.
In “Architectural Digest: Autobiography of a Magazine 1920-2010,” her 2018 book about her tenure, Rense made clear her vision. “I was not interested in trends, and certainly not in fads,” she wrote. “I preferred to speak of style, which is really a way of seeing and living creatively in the world.”
Rense was known as a highly competitive, sometimes spiteful tastemaker who insisted on exclusivity and brooked no pushback from designers she had snubbed. Those who crossed her were often said to be banned forever from the magazine’s pages.
A high school dropout, Rense had no formal training in design, but over time her intuitive judgment was widely recognized, and so was her decisiveness and utter control: Her word was final on every spread in the magazine.
“The absence of give-and-take is awesome,” the Times magazine declared.
In the world of lifestyle magazines, in which journalistic standards can be lax, Rense held to certain principles, refusing, for example, to send editors armed with accessories to act as stylists at photo shoots, as was standard industry practice.
“We report,” she wrote in her final editorial message in 2010. “We do not send producers, stylists or even editors when we photograph a residence.”
Paige Rense was born May 4, 1929, in Des Moines, Iowa, to a mother of Danish descent who gave her up for adoption when the child was a year old. Her adoptive parents, Lloyd Pashong, a custodian in the Des Moines public schools, and his wife, Margaret May Smith, named her Patricia Louise Pashong.
In 1950, she married Richard Gardner, an advertising executive, whom she later divorced. Her marriage to David Thomas in the early 1950s also ended in divorce.
Her editorial career began in the mid-1950 at a skin-diving magazine called Water World, where Arthur Rense, a former sportswriter and the father of three sons, was the managing editor. The two would marry and, over time, divorce and remarry. Arthur Rense died in 1990.
Paige Rense married artist Kenneth Noland in 1994, and they remained together until his death in 2010. He had four children from earlier marriages.
Rense’s survivors include her seven stepchildren: Kirk, Jeff and Rip Rense and William, Samuel, Cady and Lyn Noland.