“People have different tastes in clothing, music, and movies,” says AD’s global editorial director and US editor in chief, Amy Astley. “Why shouldn’t it be the same with interiors?”
This philosophy—that interiors should be as distinctive as the people who inhabit them—drives Astley’s new book, AD at Home, out this month from Rizzoli. While her previous book, Architectural Digest at 100, had a sweeping historical scope, this volume is intimate, featuring Astley’s personal curation of 69 homes from her nearly decade-long tenure. It’s a portrait not just of extraordinary architecture and decoration, but of the creatives behind them: interior designers, architects, actors, musicians, visual artists, fashion designers, models, and more.
Here, Astley shares how she chose the homes that made the cut, the process of creating the volume, and why personality, not perfection, remains the secret ingredient of an AD-worthy space.
AD PRO: Let’s start with the million-dollar question. How do you choose the houses that get featured in AD?
Amy Astley: People always ask me how we choose them! I look for things that are visually original—something I haven’t seen before, that my editors haven’t seen before, that our audience hasn’t seen before. I always say to the team that we’re looking for best in class. Not every beach cottage or every modern house—but the exceptional, the memorable, the ones that feel like they could only belong to the people living there. Ultimately, what I look for is that a home is very personal. That’s always the secret for any home: a house should feel like it could only belong to that one person.
I’m obsessed with personal style—how people dress, prepare food, decorate, arrange flowers, present their world visually. I find it endlessly interesting. For me, the most fun thing about AD is tracking fascinating people in their houses. AD should make your world feel bigger, expose you to new ideas and places, and delight your senses.
Kaws and Julia Chiang at home in Brooklyn, published in December 2017