Nothing lasts forever, but sometimes I feel it should. And last week was one of those times.

On Thursday, Paige Rense Noland, the longtime editor of Architectural Digest, announced she would retire at the end of August. This is an event no one ever thought would happen -- even though, when I interviewed her for New York Magazine in 1994 (six years before I began writing for AD), she said, "I worked for years on the basis that I might retire the next day." Paige and the magazine she molded over...