It must be a tantalizing opportunity, to have the archives of Architectural Digest at your disposal. Paige Rense’s new book, Private Views, Inside the World’s Greatest Homes, shows the wide geographical and cultural reach of the magazine, unequalled by any other design magazine today.  This is truly an international publication. The next time you travel, visit the newsstands of Sydney, London, Paris, or Jakarta and you'll find the USA edition of Architectural Digest — most likely, it will be the current month’s issue too.

In this book, the range of houses, castles, ranches, and chateaux span the globe, magnificently beginning with the Czar’s private apartments in the Kremlin.  Here, the Imperial suite was designed to showcase Russia’s vast wealth in their natural resources: gold, crystal, jasper, agate, malachite, and rare woods create a dizzying atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century splendor. Then a world away, at David Bowie’s Indonesian-style house on tropical Mustique, entire Javanese housefronts were shipped over to line the veranda. This wooden deck wraps around the lush garden by famed Balinese-based designer Michael White (aka Made Wijaya), who has written many books on tropical landscaping.

Sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle had always dreamed of creating a mythological garden, and in Tuscany she created her own version of the Tarot.  It is sublime folly as Prince Michael of Greece explains her artistic struggle to create a group of multicolored sculptures. And who would expect to see a nineteenth-century Moorish fantasy on the shore of a Norwegian island — built by the violinist, Ole Bull?

Ralph Lauren’s Bedford house had been his home for thirteen years when Architectural Digest photographed it — and it looks exactly how you would expect him to live.  It is richly decorated with dark woods and red tartans, and is both glamorous and comfortable.  Also chosen for the book was the Vanderbilt house in Newport, built by Richard Morris Hunt on an unlimited budget.  This was late nineteenth-century extravagance-American style. Inspiration for the vast white marble façade was from the eighteenth-century Petit Trianon at Versailles and the White House.

Speaking of which, it must have been an irresistibility of AD’s to include Ted Graber’s redecoration of the Reagan White House, where the First Family’s private quarters were restored to an elegance not seen since the days of Jackie Kennedy. Gorgio Armani’s villa in Antigua provides a note of calm; where most people go to resorts, he prefers a chain of his own houses in carefully chosen warm climates. This elegant beach house is big enough to house his entourage, and his Armani Casa Interior Design Studio team gave it the restful color palette that the designer prefers.

Modernism is not neglected, dramatic houses by John Lautner, Wallace Cunningham, Lloyd Wright, and Bart Prince are featured in Private Views, but the focus keeps returning to the culturally spectacular.  Catherine the Great’s Chinese Palace, begun in 1762 and finished six years later, is an exquisite divertissement, and who could resist King Gustav III’s beloved Haga Pavilion in Stockholm?