The Doyenne of Design: Bunny Williams

When she was a child, Bunny Williams’ parents took her to the West Virginia resort, The Greenbriar, right after Dorothy Draper had finished decorating it. Williams was gobsmacked.

Interior designer Bunny Williams reigns supreme as the queen of the well-heeled house. Starting with her own Connecticut estate, the Manor House, on to the homes she’s designed for others, the furnishings are invariably fine and the results always sublime.  A native of Virginia, Williams has practiced her trade in New York for decades, working at the Parish-Hadley firm before striking out on her own. For AT HOME’s design issue, we decided to check in with her on the dos and don’ts of successful decorating.

Who influenced you in terms of style and taste when you were growing up in Virginia?

My mother, my godmother, my cousins. We lived in the country and everybody loved their houses. Everybody entertained at home a lot; everyone did their own decorating. Nobody in those days would have called up and hired me. My mother was always going off with my godmother to an auction, to look at fabrics.  My mother was not a professional but she had a lot of style.

What was the first room you recall decorating?

My dollhouse. It was very simple; it had a staircase. I would wallpaper it, I’d make curtains for it, every birthday or Christmas I would get more doll furniture. I had a bedroom suite of painted Swiss furniture. It was fun. I was always in there doing something with it.  

What is the most common mistake you see in people’s houses when they do the décor themselves?

I think people try too hard. Probably the worst thing they do is to over-decorate. If you are going to over-decorate, you really need to know what you’re doing. In a funny way, less is more. You have got to know when to edit, when there is enough, when to stop. Some people get obsessed; every lampshade has a trim, every chair has a pillow, the tables are too full and you walk in and go ‘ow.’ Rooms and gardens all need voids. They all need a place the eye can rest. Sometimes I think people forget that.

At a Kips Bay Showhouse you did years ago, you paired fine antiques with a chair from DWR. What characteristics do the old and the new have to have to cohabit beautifully?

No matter what it is, good design carries. There is a lot of ugly antique furniture and there is a lot of ugly modern furniture. If you find things that have a beautiful line, a beautiful shape, then they start to work together. Sometimes you want something very simple next to something that is more ornate. If you have a carved French chair, what is pretty to put next to it is something very simple—Lucite or a u-shaped metal table. The chair has the ornateness and the contrast is what makes things interesting. What is fun is to be brave and try to mix things. Then I think you have a room that stands the test of time. It won’t get dated. You walk in and you don’t know if it was done yesterday or 10 years ago. I think all of is want to change things in our house and if everything is en suite, when you change one thing, it all falls apart.

What is the key to picking the right colors?

I love color but all color needs to be neutralized. I cannot stand a house that is just filled with hot colors. But I love color. I love orange, pink, turquoise. But you always want to put it with something. I like orange and moss green whereas I don’t want orange and apple green. I am always looking for the balance of interesting colors where you have a faded neutral color with a pop of color. I love eggplant and turquoise. I would hate to do an all white room because I would probably go crazy. You don’t want the colors to be invasive to people. You have to be careful how you use them. It’s the shade of the color. I don’t want hot orange but I love a pale orange. The wall needs to be a bit softer, a bit more neutralized than some hot color you are going to have in a chair or a pair of pillows. You are going to get tired of a hot color room.

Please elaborate on your quote: “I can do a traditional English room in my sleep but why should a room be stifled by tradition?”

You want to walk into a room that holds your interest. If you walk into a room that is a period of anything, I don’t’ care whether it is all English furniture or all French furniture, you kind of don’t see it because your mind goes ‘OK, this is an English room or this is a French room.’ But if you go into a room that is a bit more intellectual, where there is interesting art, an interesting mix of furniture, the more you look at the that room, the more interesting it becomes. You start to take in all the details, unusual objects, a special chair. I think of a room like I do people. A room that opens to you over a period of time is more interesting than the room you just go in and say, ‘Ok, this is a French provincial room or an all Swedish room.’ Not that it is a bad thing, it is  just boring.

Please discuss “picking moments.” What is the key to doing that? And how judicious do you need to be?

You have to pick your moment with what you have. If you have a great painting, is that the moment? Or maybe you have a big wall and you make a wonderful arrangement of photographs, a drawing, and a painting and the wall becomes the moment. Or you put a mirror on the wall and you use an interesting color and the color becomes the moment. Oftentimes when people start decorating, color helps you because color makes up for the fact that maybe you don’t have good furniture or may be you don’t a lot of things on the wall. If you have an all white room, you are going to notice every, single thing in that room. If you have some things with color and pattern, it is a sort of inexpensive way of decorating.  Because things are going on even though the furniture isn’t so good and there aren’t many things on the wall, when you have color or pattern, they make the color or pattern be the moment. I have found that over the years I have bought better furniture and better paintings, I have simplified the decorating. I don’t want to distract from those things. They stand out more because there is less pattern, there is maybe one or two colors, the rug I would rather look at the paintings. I think that is the way we evolve in decorating. Decorating for most people isn’t done in one moment. You buy and then you add to it.

If you could offer just one piece of advice what would that be?

Buy the best you can a piece at a time. And they you will never get rid of it. I would rather try to buy one nice thing each year and eventually you are going to have things that you are going to treasure for the rest of your life.

Where do you shop for great things at good prices?

Estate sales. If I am in a town and there is a consignment shop, I go into it immediately. Oh, absolutely. It’s astounding the buys people can find. All of sudden they are selling a beautiful pitcher for $5. Or a perfectly nice lamp that needs a new lampshade for $25. People should look at those all the time. I don’t do eBay or Craig’s List. I do 1st Dibs. But I only buy from dealers I know. All of a sudden, the internet has allowed you to be all over the world. I would suggest they call and they need to get pictures of the up down, top, bottom. I make them send me pictures of the top, bottom, back. I want to know exactly what it looks like. One should get a tape measure and measure it to be sure they know exactly what the size means. Particularly chairs.

What is the trick of creating interesting and attractive bookshelves?

Bookshelves are about using them. Some people have bookshelves that are arranged in a way that you know those people never take anything off the shelves. That drives me crazy. Why have the bookshelves? It becomes a dust collector. I have books all over me. The bookshelves are filled with books I look at, go to, do something with. A lot of people say, I want all these bookshelves and then they show up with 5 books. Then you have to artfully display things on the bookshelves and then to me it starts to look like a store. I always think people have to have enough books to make it believable that they have either read the books or might look at them.

I think it is fun to intersperse an object. Sometimes I might push the books back and lean a small drawing or photograph—something that personalizes the books. If you have them, you should have books, magazines, stacks of old auction catalogues, they all look real. They look like something that is a reference. And I think it is important to put your photographs in matching albums. Go make your albums. Find something you like, buy 10 of them and keep it going. Then it looks pretty on the shelf.

Tell me about your shop, Trelliage.

Trelliage opened about 21 years ago on a whim. Those days no one was doing garden shops. Today we have many more interior things—chairs, lamps. We have opened a second shop where we sell a lot of tabletop, gift things. It is really an outlet for the things I love to have and that people need. Things I have a hard time finding.

That is why we go to estate sales. There you are always testing your eye. The more you know quality the more you can walk into an estate sale and find the gem that somebody missed. That is what makes the hunt fascinating.

I just hope people fun with their houses. The more they look at good things, good antiques, good art, the more they learn and the more it trains their eye.

But they have to go out and look at things. They can’t learn everything on a computer. Turn the computer off. You can’t talk about design and know about design, learn about design, unless you experience a room, unless you sit in the chair, see the three-dimensional quality of it, the scale of it.