Architectural Digest at 100: A Century of Interiors, Taste and Design

Few publications have shaped the public image of the designed interior as consistently as Architectural Digest. Published by Abrams in 2019, Architectural Digest at 100 draws on a century of the magazine’s archives to assemble an expansive visual history of rooms, houses, designers, architects, photographers and cultural figures.

The result is more than a collection of beautiful homes. Across 464 pages and 300 colour photographs, the book records changing ideas about privacy, luxury, taste and domestic life. Interiors appear not as static backdrops, but as expressions of their period and of the people who commissioned, designed and inhabited them.

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An Archive of the Designed Interior

Edited from material published across the magazine’s first hundred years, the book moves freely between past and present rather than imposing a simple decade-by-decade survey. That structure encourages unexpected relationships between interiors separated by geography, generation and style. Formal historic rooms sit alongside modernist experiments, celebrity homes and highly personal spaces.

This breadth is one of the book’s principal strengths. Its subjects include the homes of Barack and Michelle Obama, David Bowie, Truman Capote, David Hockney, Michael Kors and Diana Vreeland. Their presence reflects the magazine’s long fascination with the relationship between public identity and private space, but the interiors remain the central evidence: rooms reveal how architecture, furniture, collecting and decoration combine to construct a way of living.

Designers, Architects and Authorship

Architectural Digest at 100 also brings together work by major figures in architecture and interior design. Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Oscar Niemeyer, Elsie de Wolfe, David Hicks, India Mahdavi, Peter Marino, John Fowler, Renzo Mongiardino and Axel Vervoordt are among those represented.

Placed within a single volume, their work demonstrates how many different disciplines contribute to an interior. Architecture establishes volume, proportion and movement; furniture gives the body a place within that structure; lighting shapes atmosphere; textiles soften or intensify surfaces; and objects introduce memory, taste and narrative. The most memorable rooms emerge from the interaction of these decisions rather than from any one object in isolation.

Photography as Design History

The book is equally a history of editorial photography. Its images include work by Bill Cunningham, Horst P. Horst, Simon Upton, François Dischinger, François Halard, Julius Shulman and Oberto Gili. Their photographs do more than document furniture and architecture. Through framing, light, scale and sequencing, they determine how a room is understood and remembered.

This distinction matters because most readers encounter celebrated interiors through images rather than direct experience. A photograph can clarify an architectural idea, heighten a decorative gesture or turn a private room into a cultural reference. The archive therefore records two intertwined histories: the evolution of the interior and the changing visual language used to represent it.

A Century of Changing Taste

Taste is never fixed. What one period treats as refined, daring or modern may be reconsidered by the next. By ranging across a hundred years, the book makes those shifts visible: decoration gives way to restraint and returns in new forms; historical references coexist with technological innovation; and ideas of comfort, status and individuality are repeatedly revised.

The volume is especially useful when read as a comparative source. Rather than searching it only for rooms to imitate, readers can examine how designers build atmosphere, organise collections, balance pattern and colour, or mediate between architecture and daily life. It rewards both casual browsing and closer study.

Who Is This Book For?

Architectural Digest at 100 will appeal to readers interested in interior design, architecture, decorative arts, photography and visual culture. Its large 10-by-13-inch format gives the photographs room to operate, making it suited to a design library or studio as well as to the coffee table.

Amy Astley, editor in chief of Architectural Digest, provides the introduction, while Anna Wintour contributes the foreword. Together with the scale of the archive, these editorial perspectives position the book as a centenary statement from the publication itself: a survey of how interiors both shape and reflect cultural life.

Book Details

• Title: Architectural Digest at 100
• Author: Architectural Digest
• Introduction: Amy Astley
• Foreword: Anna Wintour
• Publisher: Abrams Books
• Publication date: 8 October 2019
• Format: Hardcover, 464 pages, 300 colour photographs
• ISBN: 978-1-4197-3333-8

Sources

• Abrams Books: Architectural Digest at 100
• Amazon product listing: Architectural Digest at 100