September 2022 Editor’s Letter

In our annual September Style issue, we aim to deliver a feast of creative types, and indeed the energy in these pages is palpable. With such great expectations, I must confess, it is a challenge to make sure we outdo ourselves each year.

So, when AD’s global entertainment director, Dana Mathews, informed me that actor Sienna Miller owns a 16th-century cottage in Buckinghamshire, England, I could not have imagined a more utterly charming house. After leaving the storybook structure pretty much untouched for more than a decade, Miller embarked upon a COVID-era restoration and decoration project with her close friend, director Gaby Dellal. The resulting interiors— warm, cozy, romantic—look and feel completely natural, as if they have always been that way. Says Miller of Dellal’s sensitive handiwork: “I could not believe the transformation… arriving to see this meadow in front of the house planted with wildflowers, I started to cry.”

Emotions run high for other homeowners featured this month, too: Best-selling author and Project Runway judge Elaine Welteroth writes with humor and wisdom about the highs and lows of relocating from the East Coast to the West, undertaking extensive renovation on her dream home, and giving birth—all at the same time, during a pandemic. And while fashion designer Stacey Bendet, founder of Alice + Olivia, lives with her husband and three daughters in palatial grandeur in New York City’s legendary Dakota building, there is nothing stuffy about her ultra-colorful, family-friendly style. “I didn’t want a big apartment that was made for adults and where you couldn’t jump on the sofa,” says Bendet. “My kids do cartwheels and flips in here. I wanted it to feel lived in.” And it does—complete with Venetian chandeliers, heroically scaled artworks by Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente, and three distinctly different children’s rooms, each a tour de force of fiercely individual decorating and full of positive energy.

Challenge met.

-Amy Astley, Editor in Chief, @amyastley