Bunny Williams: American Decorating Dynamo

TRANSCRIPT

Bunny Williams: You know, I live the way I do because I really live in my house. We entertain. There’s a big table with a bar on it. The drinks are there, the ice bucket. You feel that you could flop down on the sofa. It’s not too precious—and yet there are good things in there. But I think my whole thing is that I do this because I want people to live in these rooms.

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein, and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for nearly 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour to the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well lived life. There are many American living legends when it comes to design, so many domestic gods and goddesses. But my guest today deserves the title in spades. She brings a sensibility that seems truly universal to the American household. Her timeless interiors are always elegant without being fussy, comfortable without being sloppy, and interesting without being a bit much.

The New York Times called her the doyenne of cozy chic. Bunny Williams. Frankly, the only thing more charming than a Bunny Williams interior would be Bunny herself.

She and I have always been chips in the night in the world of design, and I’m so glad that I finally got the chance to sit down with her to experience some of that charm myself. Born in Virginia to what sounds like a picturesque American childhood, Bunny’s senses were awakened when she visited the storied Greenbrier Hotel. More on that later.

She went to Boston to study design and then got her start in New York, first in antiques, but quickly landing the job that would change her life at the iconic design firm, Parish-Hadley. She rose in the ranks there before setting out on her own. And today, after more than 40 years in the business, she runs her design firm, Williams Lawrence, as well as her own longstanding home furnishings business, Bunny Williams Home.

Aside from being a successful and widely published designer for the well-to-do, her concepts and taste and decor have earned her fans far and wide. She’s published eight successful books, one of which, the bestselling An Affair with a House, is being re-released in a special 20th anniversary edition out this month from Abrams, as well as a new box set reprinting three of her other bestsellers. These kinds of reprints are rare in design. After all, there are so many new home books out there every year, why revisit the past? To me, it all speaks to Bunny’s charm and her ability to create homes that people can learn from and identify with.

And as I discovered, her talents make her a fantastic podcast guest to boot. I caught up with Bunny from her office in New York to talk about her pony-filled childhood, what she learned from the iconic Sister Parish, her singular best bit of decorating advice, how she met her husband, the celebrated antiques dealer, John Rosselli, and much more. 

So I wanted to start at the beginning. Obviously, I’ve been such a fan of your work for such a long time, and you’re such a legend in the interiors world, especially here in the States. I read that you grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was wondering what your earliest memory of life growing up there was.

I always think I had the ideal childhood. We lived out in the country. We had a small farm. My father and mother had a small farm. I grew up, my father raised beagles, there were horses, there were dogs all over the place. There were vegetable gardens.

We got up after school, we were outside running around in the summer, we were building forts. And there was just a freedom of living that was magical for a child. And we lived in the country and we had a lot of relatives, family members that lived along the same road. So there were lots of cousins and a very large family where we gathered together for Sunday lunches and picnics and horse shows and all these things.

Something that is sad to me because I think families break away, you know, kids grow up and they move to a different city. And we don’t have that wonderful sense of having lots of family members in your life all the time, which is pretty special.

Yeah, and would you consider that sort of deep South, in Charlottesville?

No, no, I always say Charlottesville is, they think they’re Southern, but it’s, you know, they’re close to Baltimore and Washington. And so it’s a little less deep South, but it’s a pretty sophisticated area of Virginia. I went to Monticello as a child and would go look at beautiful houses with my mother and her sisters and garden club things. So you’re surrounded—whether you know what you’re doing—you’re surrounded by a history of architecture that if your family appreciates it, it’s sort of by osmosis that you begin to appreciate it too.

And I heard that your dad was involved with the world of horses.

Yes.

And your mom was known to enjoy some amateur decorating. 

Yes, she loved it.

Tell me about the horses, first of all, just because I know that you tried to do that as a young girl or what was that like?

Well, I spent my life in the summers on a pony riding around. It was just, you know, it was fun. Actually, the part I liked at the stables was polishing the bridles and brushing the horses. Going around in the ring over and over again to learn to walk, trot and canter, sort of bored me. I think my ADD personality came in. I’m like, “Do I have to do this much longer?” But I loved being around the animals.

And my father was an extraordinary rider and just loved it. I woke up one day and realized I was never gonna be an extraordinary rider. It’s like any athlete, you have to have a passion for it. And I didn’t. And I said to my mother once, “Is there anything in the world besides horses?” And she said, “Yes, there’s lots.”

Was he a horse, like a trader or is he a trainer?

Well, he rode horses and then he was head of the American Horse Shows Association. So, he fox hunted, rode in horse shows, and did eventing and things like that on his own. And then when he was a young man out of college, he rode horses for other people who paid him to ride their horses because he was such a good rider.

And so what was home life like? Was it strict?

No. It was pretty relaxed. I did get in trouble every now and then when I pushed the boundaries, but I had a really loving, really loving family. My father had a great sense of humor. So even if I was naughty, I think he found a lot of humor in it. We were strict in that we had to have good manners. We sat at the table and had dinner with my parents. We learned how to eat at the table. So it wasn’t strict, it was just what you did. And you were corrected if you didn’t stick your hand out and introduce yourself. And I think that’s something that gets lost today. And I’m very glad they gave me that background.

You’ve told the story before of how at 15, you visited the Greenbrier Resort, which had just been redecorated, I think at the time by Dorothy Draper. Can you tell us a little bit about that visit and that place for people that aren’t familiar, especially for those maybe not in the US?

The Greenbrier Hotel was a turn of the century, big summer hotel that was built in West Virginia. Incredible space, big white building. Now it’s very fancy, it’s got many golf courses and it’s very popular. But when I went to see it, it was more modest in its facilities because it was a long time ago. But there was a golf course and tennis courts and spas. There are all these wonderful treatments of salt water, sulfur water. So there was a big spa component to it. And Dorothy Draper, who was this great American decorator, had just refurbished it. And my parents were friends of some of the people who had invested in it. And so they were invited to go to a sort of opening lunch. There were not that many people there. And they took me along.

And I came from a conservative household. My mother loved oriental rugs and it was attractive, but not, let’s say not bright colors. And I was 15 years old and I walk into the Greenbrier Hotel and there were these emerald green walls with white plaster palm trees and black carpets with roses all over. I mean, it was kind of a fantasy dream for a young person who is visual and interested in the arts and colors. And it was just amazing. It was absolute magic for me. And so, that’s when I sort of learned what an interior decorator was or designer was—is that people, this lady, was hired to design, furnish, pick out everything. And I kept thinking, “Ooh, that seems like something that would be fun to do.” I’d had a dollhouse growing up. You know, I was always papering it. I was always playing around with my own dollhouse. I was always wanting to repaint my room a different color. So I had an interest in those kinds of things, but you don’t know how you’re gonna channel them.

And you went to school in Boston, correct?

I went to a junior college in Boston that had an interior design program. I wanted to go to New York to college, to Parsons, but my parents couldn’t imagine me living in New York City with a school that didn’t have a dormitory. So I found a junior college in Boston that had an interior design program.

And what was it like there? What was the curriculum like and going to school in Boston?

Like everything I’ve done in life, it’s pretty loose. We lived in townhouses on Commonwealth Avenue. It was sort of in those days what they call a finishing school. So you had courses. Yes, you had English and history, but then you could take fine art drawing. I took life classes. I could study fashion design. And we lived in these beautiful turn of the century townhouses on Commonwealth Avenue. And one of our jobs, one of the curriculum of being in the school, is that every two weeks, another two of the students had to manage the house.

We had to plan the meals. We had to arrange the budget for running the house, because they thought in those days that they were turning out these ladies who would maybe go on and have a big house of their own. But it was fun. And the curriculum was varied and things that really interested me.

Where was the design aesthetic at the time when you were in school and coming right out of school? Like, what was the popular look? What were they teaching you and what was the prevailing aesthetic?

Well, I think what I was being taught was not a style, but the basics—how to do a floor plan. I think that a good school exposes you to style. I mean, my real education was later when I went to Parish-Hadley at Garland.

I learned how to do floor plans, elevations, sort of the practical side—and there was a little bit of color theory. I also was taking art—but I don’t feel that they were enforcing a style on me, which I don’t think any educational institution—they should expose you to styles—but what you hope is that you give somebody a creative background to make their own style.

So you graduate and you head off to Manhattan where you’ve always wanted to go, and your first big break was working for Parish-Hadley. What would you say you learned there? And if you could describe, again, it’s kind of like a green buyer, to the people that may not know this sort of legendary firm, like who were they?

Well, in those days, actually my very first job when I was 20 was in an English antique shop called Stair and Company, which was amazing because I got to see all the designers. I got to see all the people that came in. I was the receptionist. So I got to meet Mr. Hadley, Mrs. Parish, Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Brown and McMillen, Billy Baldwin, all the famous designers would come in that era with their clients. And I also got to learn a lot about furniture. I had to write out the descriptions for furniture.

So it was a great training place. And I really knew I wanted to go into interior design. And by having been at Stair, I got to see and feel a little bit about—and I was studying who did what—and I knew that I really wanted to go work at Parish-Hadley. And in those days, Mrs. Parish had started the firm. Albert Hadley actually had been at a competitive firm called McMillen. They were the top design firms at the time. They had very established clients. What was the old money as well as the new money of the—this is in the late ’60s. So it was a different time—but what was amazing is I decided that I loved, from what I could tell, I loved Mrs. Parish and Albert’s approach to design. 

I actually had been in a house that Mrs. Parish had decorated for a man who lived in Virginia who was a friend of my father’s. And what I loved was the warmth and the coziness. It wasn’t academic, there were beautiful things. But you walked into these houses and you felt like, “I could live here.” And so I chose that, if I was gonna work for a design firm, that would be the one I would like to work for.

So one day I walked up and knocked on the door and introduced myself. It was a small little office on 69th Street. And it turned out that Mr. Hadley needed a secretary. And I was willing to do anything. I mean, I think that, you walk in the door, you get into a place you wanna be. And I knew that I had a lot to learn.

And what was extraordinary about the firm was that they were working on the great houses of America, many of them. The Whitney family, Mrs. Astor’s house, the Paley’s, who had these beautiful houses in Long Island. So I even, as a young girl, taking samples or going along to take notes, was seeing interiors, private interiors of the sort of high end of American living.

It was like the creme de la creme, basically.

It was the creme de la creme. I mean, you couldn’t—you’re just overwhelmed by it. It was like going to the Greenbrier, except this was real life. And the fresh flowers in every room and the way these houses were run. And the way they were put together was magic. And as I say, the thing that I love so much about the way Mrs. Parish and Albert approached—they were homes. They were to live in. They may be grand, but there were dogs running around and there was life there. And I think that is very, very important in the end. It’s what it’s all about.

And you were at the firm for how long?

I was there for 20 years. I said that “I went to the University of Parish-Hadley.” And what’s so interesting is that Parish-Hadley in those days, not only did they do interior design, but they had an architectural department.

So we often would go into an apartment or a house and do the drawings to correct a space. So, you learn that you have to look at a room. I mean, Albert said, “Look at the room bare.” What’s good about it? What’s not good about it? What can you correct to make the room better? Raise the doors. If it’s low ceilings, how do you make them seem higher? How do you solve the problems of the space before you think about what color it’s gonna be? And that was amazing.

The other thing that was so astounding is that Albert was really a teacher. He had taught at Parsons School. We would go to his apartment after work and we would just sit. And he would have a couple of martinis and we would talk about design. We talked about every great designer in the world, great houses, great rooms. He had his scrapbooks. I mean, I learned more in those evenings than I’d ever learned in school—designers I’d never heard of. Traditional ones, contemporary ones. It was just an exciting time. And he always, when I moved up and started working on a project, he made me do a scheme and I presented it to him.

And then he’d say, “Well now, what is this for? What is that for?” So he made me think. And it was a discipline that I’m indebted to. And I don’t think enough people have that exposure anymore.

And by the time you left, you were maybe in the last couple of years of working there, like what position were you in and were you handling your own projects?

Yes. I was handling a number of projects. And as a matter of fact, I had tried to talk to them about a partnership and it was very difficult because I think Mrs. Parish, you know, it was her firm. Sometimes you have people who just—it’s me or that’s it.

I’ve noticed you still call her Mrs. Parish.

I call her Mrs. Parish. I’ve called her Mrs. Parish till she died. I always think it’s funny when people call her Sister and I’m like, really?

And I’d call Albert, Albert. And yet I was very close to her, but I think I was just brought up that you call her Mrs. Parish, and she was always Mrs. Parish to me.

Yeah, I mean, to me, she’s just a photograph that—when I was back in my days as an assistant at House and Garden—she was just a photo of a legendary person and that was it.

I mean, I had great fun with her. I mean, we would travel, I’d drive to Maine with her because she didn’t like to fly. So we’d take these long jaunts to go to Maine. We’d be in the car talking. And she was fun. And it was interesting. I learned a lot. I think that the thing I find interesting about working for the two of them is that Albert was a real academic designer. He knew everything. And he could do a Victorian room, a French room, a modern room. He was, he just was so versatile in his approach to design.

Mrs. Parish was looser. And so Albert tended to be more studied. He did a floor plan and it stayed that way. Mrs. Parish was a little bit—she liked to move things around, throw something over a sofa. Even though you had a floor plan, she’d always go in and mess it up and kind of move it around. So it was watching these two people work together that was really stimulating.

I always think in the end, I’m somewhere in between the two of them. I mean, I hear Albert in my head all the time. And then I have the fun of doing exactly what she did by just layering things and taking away the edge of—sometimes design can be so austere in plan that you’re afraid to move anything. And that doesn’t always make for a comfortable room.

What year did you leave around?

I started my business in 1988.

Okay. And so at that point, that kind of mid-century modern period had completely passed through. It was kind of coming into a new era of the ’90s and postmodernism had its day. And there was that—the very beginnings, I guess you could say, of a rediscovery of traditional aesthetics, right? Is that how you would describe the scene and where you thought you fit into it at the time?

Well, I think that obviously, I came from a traditional background. I grew up in a traditional thing. So my interest is traditional. I think that if you grow up in a modern house with parents who collect modern art, your whole sensibility is gonna be different. So a lot of our soul about what we do, I do think comes back to that childhood that you’re talking about. 

I think the thing that I loved about Parish Hadley, and it’s what I hope that we do, if you look at their work, if you really study it, yes, it was traditional, but it was also incredibly inventive. I mean, Albert Hadley was the first one to do, you know, black and white herringbone stencil floors. He was doing this when everybody was still doing wood floors with oriental rugs.

Albert was always looking, it was a traditionally based plan, but, you know, there was just something—the two of them were always wanting to do something creative. I remember Mrs. Parish got very involved with women in America that made patchwork quilts. We had been working on a house for Jay and Sharon Rockefeller, and Sharon Rockefeller was supporting these quilting bees across America.

Well, Mrs. Parish loved that. So we went down and we had fabric made to make curtains out of, made by the women who made these patchwork quilts. So there was always this inventive, looking for something out of the ordinary. But those patchwork quilt curtains went in a traditional room with English furniture, which was always what made it fun and exciting.

(SPONSOR BREAK)

What was your first big break once you got set out on your own? Is there a project that sticks out in your mind?

Well, I was very lucky. As I say, I walked out with a number of clients who—one of the things I was very afraid to leave was, would they go with me or would they wanna stay? Because I’ve worked for this firm with such a big name and did they have to have that name attached to what they were doing?—And when I approached the clients I was working on, they all said, “Oh, of course, we’re with you. We wanna help you in any way we can.”

So one of my clients, I had done their apartment in the city and they had bought a beautiful house in Florida, in Palm Beach, this was years ago. And it was an old house that needed a tremendous amount of renovation because it hadn’t really been touched, but it was a Wyeth house. But it needed air conditioning. It needed to be brought up to the 21st century. And I worked with these clients and with Mark Ferguson, who’s a very successful architect, who I had worked with at Parish Hadley and got them started in their business. So it was sort of like all of us coming together to work on this project.

And I didn’t have an office. I remember showing them the first plans and schemes for the house in my apartment, when I wasn’t supposed to have an office in the apartment, but I had to work out of the apartment till I found an office. And that project appeared in Architectural Digest. So it was pretty exciting.

And so as you left—in the 90s and that first sort of decade of you being out on your own—how did your aesthetic evolve? Or once you were out on your own, did you kind of start doing things differently and march to the beat of your own drum?

Well, I think even when I was there, if you’re creative, you’re marching. I don’t change. I mean, if you look at my work, I think it’s the same thing I find about Parish Hadley’s work. In a way, it’s not dated. It can be traditional, but even the traditional isn’t dated. I mean, why should we have traditional leanings and say, “Oh, that’s dated?” What’s dated is when you’re not true to yourself. And to me, the fun today is mixing it all up. I mean, I love mid-century furniture with English furniture, with contemporary art. Make it be so classic that you can’t pinhole it. You can’t put a time on it. And I think that anything that is of a period, I don’t care if it’s English, if it’s federal, if it’s French, if it’s deco—if you have an all-deco room, you’re not gonna see it. It all begins to mush together. But you take a great deco cabinet and you put it with something not related to it, it’s harder to do that, but you get this yin and yang that I think makes for exciting interiors.

And how did you meet John? Where does he sort of enter into your life?

I’ve known John since I was probably in my… I was working at Parish Hadley and John had a shop and Mrs. Parish needed some accessories and things for the shop and I was helping her and she said, “Well, go to John Rosselli’s, he has wonderful objects and accessories.” And so I went into his shop and I met him and we just hit it off. And then we were chatting, and I was in there one day and they were ordering wholesale bulbs and I had bought the house in the country and he said, “Would you like to add on to this order for the wholesale daffodil bulbs?” And I said, “Oh yes.”

So anyway, we ordered the bulbs, and I would just go in and see him in the shop. And then many years later, I was in there one time and we were talking, I said, you know, “I’ve never been to the Chelsea Flower Show.” And he said, “Well, I haven’t been either, let’s go.” And I was married at the time, not in a successful marriage, but I was still married. And so John and I went off to the Chelsea Flower Show together, which was the beginning.

I said, we decided to open a shop. We came back and we opened a great garden shop called Treillage, which we had for a number of years that was historic in its fantasy, it was in an old blacksmith shop.

And in those days, nobody had a garden shop. 

Where was the shop exactly?

It was on 75th Street between York and First Avenue. In what was a building that was the carriage house for the big townhouses on the East Side. So it had these big carriage house doors and brick walls. And it was a magic place. The whole thing was filled with garden things inside, outside, just things that John and I love to buy. And I always say we had the baby first and that was Treillage. And then obviously it started our relationship together, which, we’re two peas in a pod. I always say, “If you look at a bookshelf and we’re the bookends, every book in between we share in common.”

Oh, that’s nice. And you know, it’s funny because there are certain designers over time—maybe not so much anymore but just because New York has changed and it’s impossible to find a carriage house that can be turned into a shop for gardens or accessories and things like that—but do you think that having a retail part of your business with a store and people coming in the door, do you think that that kind of helped you in your career? Obviously beside the financial element of it.

It never made a lot of money. The problem is that if you have money in the bank, you go off to Paris or you go to the flea markets and you spend it in two seconds and you come back and you’re like, “Oh, we don’t have any money again.” Cause you just want to buy beautiful things. I think the fact that I’d established a decorating career, and John obviously was well-known because he had his own antique shop, brought people to the shop.

I think that it’s interesting in America, which is very different from England. In England, all the decorators had shops. You know, Colefax and Fowler, Robert Kime, all the great English decorators, Nina Campbell, they had a shop and that’s how people got to know them. That was not the case in New York.

And I think it’s funny because we are such a decorating-centric country. Europe is not, I mean, every European designer I know, that even is successful, always say that it’s nothing like the decorating in America. In America, people do the whole project. They build a house, they decorate it. In Europe, a lot of people have things, you know, if they want you to work on their house, they need a pair of curtains for the drawing room or they want to recover a sofa. There’s less of—there’s some of it, but it’s not like in America. This is a huge country. We have new people, new wealth, new houses. The growth of this country is amazing and that has supported the decorating business. So back to what you’re saying, I think that decorators are competitive with each other. So a decorator—another designer doesn’t necessarily want to walk their client into a shop that has my name on it. They want to go to an antique shop. They want to go to shop, but it’s a little bit of a different situation.

And when it came to you and John working together, when it comes to design and interiors, is there something that you guys just never quite saw eye to eye on?

Very little. John is, well, let me say this. John really loves his things. I mean, he loves his objects. So he doesn’t really like decoration very much. And it was very funny, we were building a house together in the Dominican Republic and I had to get everything re-covered. He had a lot of furniture from a house he’d sold in New Jersey because we were living together. And so we had all this furniture, but I had to get fabrics and things. So I thought, “Okay.” So finally I got everything I wanted to do, and John came home one night and I said, “John, I want you to look at these fabrics and things because I need to order things to get them re-covered so we can ship them to the Dominican Republic.” And he looked at it and he said, “I hate everything.”

I said, “What do you mean you hate everything?” He said, “Oh, it’s just too much.” Because John really likes white walls, sisal carpet and beige furniture, because then he wants all those things. And I said, “John, this is the Dominican Republic. I’m telling you this one fabric, that you think is the whole room, is just going to be on one chair.” And finally he said, “Okay, okay.” And of course he loved the house when it was finished and it wasn’t overdone. But I think he had this moment of thinking he was going to walk in and it’s all going to be fancy, too much pattern, too much stuff. And he was very happy to see all of his furniture restored and in the house.

Sounds like a collector’s mind.

Yes, total collector’s mind.

Since you’ve had quite the successful career—I’d like to think of you as someone who sort of rides out any kind of trend that is here today, gone tomorrow—and you really always come back to this idea of comfort.

Do younger designers on your team ever try to convince you of something when you’re putting together a house that maybe that generation is sort of fascinated with, now that you have younger people on your team?

I love it. They excite me all the time. They’re so much more geared into all the Pinterest, TikTok, they see things more than I do. I mean, frankly, I spend my free time looking at my books, my own scrapbooks. I don’t spend a lot of time on a computer or my phone. I just didn’t grow up with it. And I’d rather look out at things than just the phone. 

But they see new things, new artists. So they’re bringing new things to me all the time. New fabrics, new textiles. So all of a sudden there’s this bold, wow. And then I think, “Okay, I can do this. This is fun.”

I think decorating, if you live in a house or an apartment for a long time… It’s like the book that’s coming out, An Affair with a House—I’ve lived in that house for 40 years. I knew when I bought it, I was gonna—I couldn’t afford everything. So I had empty rooms for a long time—but I knew this was gonna be a homebase for me. And I think that you don’t want things to be too trendy. I remember in the beginning, I had no art, no furniture. So I put this big patterned wallpaper in my living room, and I had chartreuse curtains and everybody walked in and said, “Oh, wow.” Well, I got so sick of it. And I got rid of it because it just was like too much. So, I think that when I look at things… I think you wanna be bold, but you also want people to make sure that they’re gonna love it for a long time. Because it’s expensive to do all these things.

And you’ve done a lot of books. One of your latest is Life in the Garden. And you’ve also created online courses with Create Academy, which are wonderful.

Do you like this idea of teaching and sharing what you’ve learned about design? Because now from hearing you, it sounds like there was so much learning from your time at Parish Hadley that it’s sort of wired into you, this idea of passing things on and sharing information and ideas, and not being a kind of a guarded decorator, guarding their secret list of—

I feel so strongly about that. And the older I’ve gotten—I was so blessed and lucky to have the education that I had. And Parish Hadley turned out a lot of great designers. Brian McCarthy and I did a book called The Tree of Life, which is all the people that came out of that design firm. And it’s astounding, the talent that was there. And I believe that it’s hard to get that kind of information. Design schools don’t teach it anymore. When are you gonna sit around and talk about Elsie DeWolf and Jean-Michel Franck, and all the design people and the gurus, and Emilio Terry, all these—it’s just amazing. And half the time, people, young designers who have a name, if you gave them a list—I could give them a list of a lot of people important in the design world, and I bet they wouldn’t know who they were. Just because there’s no source to get it. So I’m hoping that I can leave some of that curiosity—they may have to go find it themselves—but just open the door to being curious and travel and educate yourself.

And when you’re teaching others about stuff or you’re putting together a book, is there something that comes up again and again that you feel like you have to edit into what you’re doing, if you know what I mean? Like you come up with a plan and then you look at it and you go like, “No, no,” there’s this idea or there’s this concept or something that keeps coming up, that you have to make sure you’re leaving your stamp on it.

Oh, that’s an interesting question. One of the things that I absolutely feel is that people have to go and see things in person. You cannot understand a room from a photograph, from a Pinterest picture, you just cannot do it. Even rooms that I knew, that I’d seen a thousand pictures of, when I finally got to go see them in person, it was like a different experience.

And so I think that I try to encourage people to, instead of going and lying around the beach for their vacation, try to travel, try to go see houses, try to go look at things. If this is your passion, this is what you have to do. And if you’re good at this, it is a passion. I mean, it is something—I take a trip, where do I go? I end up in a house museum, an antique shop, I’m always doing something. And you go to a great shop and then the shop owner tells you about a little restaurant in Lisbon that you wouldn’t have found. And then they tell you, “Oh, try to go see this.” And the world opens to you if you have curiosity. And I think you have to go look at things.

With Life in the Garden, gardening is such a part of your identity with the success of the book,  is there a bit of gardening advice that you give people if they are a newbie and they’re saying, “Oh, well, it looks doable.”

I always laugh, I think you can decorate your living room and maybe once a week you could push the vacuum around and dust it. The thing about a garden, it is constant, constant maintenance. And I think you have to only bite off what you have time to do.

My garden has grown, I now have to have full-time people there, I started out gardening on the weekends myself. I had two perennial borders. Being a designer and wanting to develop the property, it’s gotten completely out of hand. And I think people don’t quite understand the maintenance side of it. What can they hire somebody to do or what do they expect to do themselves? And if they have to do it themselves, just have shrubs, just have trees, have it very simple. Because gardens, even a vegetable cutting garden, takes constant work. And I think it’s the reality of it, where you don’t have to be quite so realistic when it comes to your house about maintenance.

And in 2023, your firm changed names to reflect the new partner in the business, Elizabeth Lawrence. Tell us about Elizabeth and how long was she working with you before the change was made and how all that is going?

Well, Elizabeth actually came to my office as an intern. She was at New York School of Interior Design and she came in for a summer internship. And she was here for two summers, I think. Then she went on to do something else for a while. And then I was looking for somebody and she came back and she was hired immediately. She had been the best intern I’d ever seen. I knew immediately she had a good color sense. She was passionate. We would talk about design. It was just, she was a unique person. And so she was hired and she has worked with me—we were talking about it yesterday, last night, actually—and it’s a little over 20 years from the time of the internship, then a couple of years off and then working here. And she became a partner three years ago and I want, she’s so much a part of this office anyway. I mean, she helps me so much on the business side of it, the personnel side of it. The decorating part is the fun part, but running a business is—

How many people are you at this point?

16.

On the design side, on the studio side?

Well, the whole thing, yeah. Well, there’s 16 in the design side, which is backup, coordinators, accounting. And then I have Bunny Williams Home, my furniture line, that has about 10 more people.

Oh, gosh. And so how does that work with your studio? Does the studio design the products or do you have a separate team for that? Or how does that work?

Well, I do the designing with a team at Bunny Williams Home. I’m always thinking, “Oh, I’m just designing some things this weekend.” You see something, and I think, “Oh, well that would make a great mirror.” Something comes up like, “I want a coffee table that’s higher.” So if you’re on your sofa wanting to watch television, you can have your dinner in front of you, not on a low coffee table. So I’m trying to make a sort of the old-fashioned tea table height coffee table, because that’s the way people live.

I mean, you’re at home, you’ve got a sofa, you wanna put your dinner there. I don’t want it on the floor, so I’m trying to make something that sort of relates to that. So I think designs come up because of need sometimes, and you get inspired. So I work on all the designs that come out of it with people from Bunny Williams Home. And even Elizabeth will say, “Did you see this? Or what do you think about that?” So we’re all—she’s contributing to the design side of it too.

And I heard you’re also working on a boat coming up, or you’ve done a few before perhaps?

Well, not like this. This is a huge sailing yacht. And it’s quite, it’s been fascinating. I adore the architects of the boat. I mean, they’re just totally different. When you think about every tiny little thing that has to be thought —it’s space, you can’t have a drawer that falls out. The technical things of building a boat are amazing.

There’s a lot of weight considerations.

Everything.

Everything has to be balanced out and you can’t just move a chair.

Well, and also this is a sailing yacht. It’s not like a big flat yacht where things don’t move. This boat is sailed. I mean, the owner is an incredible sailor. So everything has to be attached. Every chair has to have a way of being attached if the boat’s under sail. So it’s fascinating. It’s just fascinating.

How big is this sailing yacht? I mean, in terms of square feet-ish.

It’s very big.

Okay. 

Very, very big.

So is it harder—if it was a house of the same size, is it something like twice as difficult?

Well, it’s interesting because it’s really—a house needs every piece of furniture, piece of art. The majority of this boat is built by the boat builders. I’m doing carpets, fabrics, but working with the architects and the discipline of where lighting goes. So it’s been more of an interior design project than decorating because you can’t decorate it a lot. You can have carpets made, fabrics for the upholstery, beds, bunkheads, artwork, but it’s the technical part of it that has been fascinating to me. Though the boat’s big, each space is small. So how do you function in that? Where does someone sit? So that part of it has been fascinating. You don’t have to furnish it with a lot of things because everything has to be built in.

One thing we’ve brought up before is this idea of comfort, which is such an English slash American idea in my head, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. And in this age of Instagram and flat images and Pinterest and everything, what is your advice to people when you’re trying to create a comfortable, an actually comfortable, home?

Well, first of all, you think about how do you live? You know, you’ve got a room. Where’s the television gonna go? Where are you gonna work? What is your life? What do you need to do in these spaces? And you kind of start there and you think, “Okay, I really do want a big television. I like to watch movies or whatever.” So needless to say, you’re gonna have a sofa across from that.

We’re all working from home. Even if you go to an office, you come back and you’ve got your computer. How do you wanna work on the computer? And it’s great if you’ve got a place, a table or a desk. A lot of people I see work with their laptops. I do have an iPad but when I’m really trying to work on something, I prefer the computer not to be in my lap. Particularly if I’m typing or looking up things. So where is that gonna be? And I think that helps to form your floor plan, where are you gonna put furniture? 

I think the other thing is people gotta get the scale right. Everybody thinks, “Oh, you know, I need a 10 foot long sofa.” Well, maybe it doesn’t fit in your room. You’ve gotta learn a little bit about scale and make sure that it complements the size of the room that you’re working in. And if you have a sofa, and you want six people, how are those people gonna relate to each other? So, you’ve got sofas on either side, you’ve got some chairs facing the sofa. So that if you have friends over, it makes sense. They all have a place to sit down. And when they sit down, they should have a table next to them to put their drink on or their coffee. I always say I started Bunny Williams Home because I couldn’t find drinks tables, because it drives me crazy when I go someplace and I’ve got a glass of water or a drink or a glass of wine and I sit down, and there’s no place to put it. That’s not comfortable. So, it’s thinking things like that, thinking about things.

You mentioned working from home, is there anything in the post-pandemic world of design that you feel has shifted, beyond just knowing where to place a laptop? Do you sense a shift in what your clients are looking for and what they need at home?

Well, I think what happened is a lot more people stayed at home. It’s not so much they’ve shifted, but they really care about their homes because they spent a lot of time in it. And they’re like, this could be improved. Maybe we should really spend some money on this because we understand—I think it got people to use their homes.

So they’re looking closer, basically.

Yes, yes.

Oh, okay. Well, that sounds like a good thing and a bad thing, at the same time. And there are a lot of younger folks in the emerging design world listening to this, I’m sure. I’m wondering what kind of advice you have to the next generation of interior designers.

I think the most important thing is that, when you have a client, that client is coming to you for information and your knowledge. And you got to know what you’re talking about. You can’t fluff it because they’re gonna figure it out right away.

You also have a responsibility to help them make the right decisions. It was funny, I was talking to an old client, yesterday I went to see her, and I’d done this apartment and she had decided to make some changes in it because she’s got a divorce, she’s now got grandchildren. So, a lot of the things that I had done for her originally wasn’t her lifestyle. And she said, “I’ve made a big mistake.” And I said, “What?” She said, “Well, I went to somebody that I knew and we ordered all this furniture from such and such a place, which I won’t mention, and it’s been a nightmare. The things came in scratched. I’m waiting, I’ve been waiting four months for whatever.”

This is what I hear over and over again. Deliveries and schedules are harder all the time. Everybody knows that. But part of the staff I have is checking on that. We have what is called coordinators. They’re, to me, as important as I am. They’re the ones who follow up on it, who make sure that the fabric’s the right color, who make 400 calls to make sure that that table is going to come in as planned, so that your clients aren’t disappointed. And I think it’s very hard for clients, when you get things piecemeal. I always say to a client, “This is gonna take six months, a year, whatever it’s gonna take. And we should plan at the end to have what I call an installation. It’s not gonna do you any good to have a sofa and nothing else. So let’s order it, plan it.” We know how to allow for the time, the delays that are gonna come in. And then when you install it, the client goes, “Wow, I get it.” But it’s the followup that’s just as important as all your design ideas.

And I think we don’t realize how much time that takes. And that’s where you can lose a client. And that’s where things can really go wrong if you’re not on top of the followup all the time.

And what’s next for you? You’ve got an anniversary of this book coming up.

Yep, this fall, it’s 20 years since we did An Affair with a House. And they’re launching a sort of updated edition. They’re also, which I’m very excited about, doing a box set of three of my design books that were printed. Point of View, which is one of my favorites, is really informational. I mean, it’s written about electrical plans, floor plans, color. It’s a couple of years ago, but it’s basic philosophy of design. So they’re reissuing the design books in a box set, which I’m excited about. 

And then Elizabeth and I are working on another book, which will come out next fall, William’s Lawrence. And it’s the projects that we’ve done together over the last five years.

Oh, amazing. And of all the updates that you’ve had to make to these books, that I would say are kind of classic, is there anything that sticks out in your mind that really needed to be updated from when you first worked on them?

No, it was interesting because, again, I think good classic information is—you know, each designer is going to put their vibe into it, which they should. Why should somebody copy me? The only thing I could do is to give them some footprints to help things, to help them planning it. But I don’t wanna totally influence them on color. I talk about it, you know, and I’ve had, you know, I’ve had designers who’ve worked for me who have a much more neutral palette and some who have a much more flamboyant palette. But that makes them stand out for their personality. I think, again, it’s like anything. If you’re gonna be good at anything, you’ve gotta practice and you’ve gotta know the basics and then you give it the flair that you bring to it as a creative person.

Thank you to my guest, Bunny Williams, as well as to Nicole Nicholson and everyone at Blitzer & Company for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net, and follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. Don’t forget, you can purchase the first ever print issue of The Grand Tourist online now on our website. Just a few copies left. And follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Til next time!

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