Each month, we’re inviting leading tastemakers from the design world and beyond to explore the vast Architectural Digest archive—more than a century of extraordinary homes, innovative designs, and cultural landmarks dating back to 1922.
Deliberately undone florals, moody tabletop arrangements, warm splashes of natural light—interior stylist Colin King’s lived-in flourishes have become fixtures in design photography. Initially from Ohio and trained as a dancer in New York, King, who has styled over 60 projects for AD, brings an organic, almost choreographed sensibility to his shoots. Everything he touches “is with gentle hands and a sunny, collaborative disposition,” says AD’s Global Visuals Director Michael Shome.
King is also a bestselling author (Arranging Things), an editor at large for Cultured magazine, and a prolific Substacker who has opined on everything from big blankets (yea) to potted plants (nay). So when AD PRO asked him to choose his favorite projects from the archive, we weren't surprised by his knack for spinning poetic narratives from his observations. “These rooms are not just iconic—they are companions, teachers,” he wrote. "They found me when I needed to remember what beauty feels like, not just what it looks like. I don't return to them for reference. I return to them the way you return to a favorite sentence in a book, just to feel it again."
JUNE 1980
Jacques Grange speaks in a language I’ve always wanted to learn. I remember seeing this Paris apartment project early in my career, when I was still trying to understand how comfort could coexist with discipline. This apartment doesn’t shout “Paris”—it murmurs it. You feel the tension between centuries and styles, but somehow nothing feels like a fight. The staircases wind like thought, a quiet labyrinth. Those grids of sycamore in the dining room’s mirrored walls still stop me; it’s geometry made tender.
MAY 1983
Armani’s Tuscan home taught me about confidence, the kind that doesn’t need to explain itself. The designer once said antique furniture should be used sparingly; I think he meant to let quiet speak. He uses negative space here like a material, so the quiet somehow has texture. The white Josef Hoffmann writing desk and chair kills me—monolithic, unadorned, no lamp, no clutter. Just presence.
SEPTEMBER 1984
I haven’t been to the High Museum, but I love how this installation holds ornate pieces with such clarity. It’s not easy to make history feel fresh, but this room feels like a skeleton made gentle: It has structure, clarity, and rules, but the light softens everything. It’s a room with a spine and a soul. Meier reminds me that boundaries are a form of care and that the simplest gesture—the placement of a vase, a beam of light—can carry as much meaning as any ornament. When a museum gets this right, it’s a small miracle.
DECEMBER 1986
Joe D’Urso’s work is classical but never stiff, functional with a kind of meditative tension. In this Palm Beach house, black granite meets a curved plaster wall, and something ship-like happens: it’s movement contained by discipline. Everything is intentional, but nothing feels forced. This feels like a room that has already made peace with itself. D’Urso once said, “I like to have a space unfold—you don’t see it all at once.” That line has stayed with me.
JANUARY 1994
You can feel the dust and the devotion in every imported fragment: the 17th-century Neapolitan paintings, the fresco panels from Rome, the 16th-century fireplace from northern Italy. This is craftsmanship that aches through plaster, velvet, layers of color like pages in a book that’s been handled often. The whole thing hums with the kind of history you can’t fake. Mongiardino and Peregalli gave me permission to love detail. They reminded me that memory lives in materials.
MARCH 2000
This is a Regency-revival building near Central Park hung with an almost impossible art collection. Peter Marino’s spaces are layered like stories. You can feel the “now” and the “then” sitting side by side, neither one apologizing for being there. His genius is in this friction, modern against antique, polish against patina. It shouldn’t work, but it does. This home feels it belongs to someone who’s lived, who’s changed, who remembers the ’70s but lives in 2000.
SEPTEMBER 2016
Paul Fortune’s rooms are the ones I think about when I want to feel held. The art in Marc Jacobs’s home hits first: Currin, Richter, Prince, Kelly, the Lelannes. Every wall feels like a conversation between nerve and nostalgia. There’s grace here, and humor, and a deep sense of self. I love how unapologetically personal it is: maximal but intelligent, like Marc himself. Whether in clothes or in rooms, he edits chaos into poetry (and he trusts Fortune’s edit).
NOVEMBER 2016
This is the archetypal SoHo loft, the one you imagine before you see it. It’s what happens when design grows up, but doesn’t get boring. Black threads through every room in layers that feel accumulated, not styled. This feature proves that warmth and sophistication can be best friends. Rooms, like people, don’t need to be fixed. They just need to be understood. And that kitchen, honestly, swoon! It’s the kind of space that makes you want to cook something slow and stay up late, talking.
