“I
don’t design rooms, I design backdrops for
living,”declares Bunny Williams. “Like
a couture suit, each one is timeless, comfortable
and a reflection of the owner’s personality.”
Haute living, haute couture, it’s all in the
eye of the beholder. For the last three decades, Williams,
she of the marvelously sparkling grey-green eyes, has
been creating exquisite interiors around the world,
and now she’s sharing her unique decorating vision
in Bunny Williams’ Point of View (Stewart, Tabori & Chang,
October 2007, $60).
The tome, a mix of memoir and method, is a visual feast
that begins with a dress-up tea party in an 8-foot-square
white clapboard playhouse behind Williams’ childhood
home, a modest brick Georgian with green-black shutters
in Charlottesville, Virginia, and ends up on the breezy
veranda of La Colina, the Southern raised cottage summer
home she recently built in Punta Cana, the Dominican
Republic.
Culled from Williams’ high-profile clients around
the world, the rooms profiled look beautiful, but their
real beauty lies in the fact that they are designed
not so much to be looked at as to be lived in graciously.
Take Williams’ own three homes, the ones she
shares with her husband, antiques dealer John Rosselli,
and their three darling and devoted dogs – Elizabeth,
a sleek whippet with the personality of a princess,
and Lucy and Charlie, the more rough-and-tumble terrier
mixes who are proud to call themselves mutts. “I
don’t believe in creating rooms that are so precious
that they have to be saved for special occasions,” Williams
says. “I have used slipcovers in projects, and
I put faux leopard throws on the furniture for the
dogs and ended up liking them so much that I never
take them off.”
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| Two examples of stunning interiors
designed by Williams during her prolific career. |
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Williams, who began her career with the venerable design
firm Parish-Hadley, has taken her design advice to
heart and hearth, tailoring each of her own homes to
suit her needs. “John and I are very welcoming
people, and we love to entertain, so our homes have
to function for groups of people,” she says. “But
we also like to have alone space, so that is incorporated
also. Our home in the country, for instance, has a
dedicated room where we can watch TV together.”
The Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, where she
spends the workweek and does little more than rest
her weary head at each day’s end, is an eclectic
yet dressy mix of modern, Art Deco and English pieces,
the kind of place, she says, where an elegant Dior
cocktail suit would make the perfect hostess. “I
like to combine things that don’t relate,” she
says, adding that “I prefer that people don’t
think of it as a style so much as a collection of objects” that
includes everything from volumes of books to Victorian
needlework pictures.
At Manor House, a 19th-century Federal farmhouse and
cutting garden whose flowers coordinate with the interior
colors, the décor reflects the fact that it
is a weekend retreat. Williams says it is akin to a
favorite tweedy Burberry jacket, the sort she prefers
to wear when she wants things to be a tad more relaxed.
The living room windows, for instance, don’t
have curtains or blinds, so the sun merges the outdoors
and indoors into one panoramic postcard-pretty picture. “We
always have something going on here,” she says,
adding that recently 650 people toured and tramped
through the yard for The Garden Conservancy’s
tour.
More inspirational design
from Bunny Williams. The color of the polished travertine
floor is echoed in the hand-painted canvas on the dining
room walls.
By design, at the two-story Dominican Republic house,
the Oscar de la Renta turquoise silk kaftan of Williams’ four-wall
summer wardrobe, possesses another look altogether. “The
color turquoise reminds me of the water, and the kaftan
conveys the image of an airy, floating feeling that
fits right in with the tropical breezes,” she
says.
The new house, designed for al fresco living and dining,
has double porches on front and back and literally
breathes in the ocean views through French doors and
triple-hung windows. When Williams is in residence,
she and Rosselli often find themselves in their matching
chaise longues, reading or napping. The Venetian plaster
walls are vibrant tropical colors – cantaloupe
orange, banana yellow and lavender to match the thunbergia
flowering outside the windows – the floors are
covered with sisal or cotton, and the furniture, favorites
from Williams’ and Rosselli’s collections,
is slipcovered in off-white or ocean-blue cotton duck.
Ornate, overscaled white-framed mirrors and large custom
paintings of palm trees and white water birds invite
guests in the living room to linger languidly for a
long, lazy spell.
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| Views of La Colina,
Williams’ new house in the Dominican Republic. |
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For her clients and for herself, Williams shops around the world for
the objects that bring her rooms to life. “Travel is eye-opening,” she
says. “My ideas come from architecture, paintings, costume exhibitions,
crafts, new buildings and even just looking at – and really seeing – the
colors of the sunset. You always have to look for something different.”
The quest for something different has taken her everywhere
from the big cities of England and France to the far reaches of India,
Cambodia and Vietnam. And to her own past: One of her prized personal
possessions is a pair of bird-shaped wooden planters she bought from
the estate of her premiere mentor and employer, designer Sister Parish. “Each
object has a story, a memory, and I see every table as an opportunity
to create a still-life,” she says.
The planters remind her that “you always learn from people with
great taste,” she says. “The most incredible lessons I ever
learned were from Sister Parish and Albert Hadley. Mrs. Parish was very
traditional, and Albert was more modernist. They had very different sensibilities
and together they made extraordinary rooms that were traditional and
modern at the same time, so I learned new ways to use things.”
It goes without saying, Williams says, that she learned
a great deal from a great many people who really know how to live well
and she hopes that her work will bring new insight into the design process. “So
often people only look at design books; I’m hoping everyone not
only looks at but reads this book,” she says, “because I
want people to have the confidence and freedom to create their own special
spaces.”
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