Becoming an Interior Designer by Kate Bolick

Author:Kate Bolick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

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Attending school for a degree in interior design may be more common than ever before, but the long-standing apprentice system is still alive and well. The original lady decorators who turned having an eye into a bona fide profession first learned from their mothers out of necessity—there was no other way to do it. Once those pioneers professionalized the field, the women who came after them could apply to work in their studios and learn about design or attend one of the newly formed design programs, such as that at Pratt.

Bunny Williams, who is widely considered to be a reigning doyenne of contemporary residential design, did a little bit of both. She studied design, but she also committed herself to a long-term apprenticeship. Steeped in history, but responsive to the changing times, she practices both the “old” and “new” ways of interior design. At seventy-five, she is the sort of figure all the design publications want to feature. Her clients are enormously successful people in business and finance. She can’t name names, but figured it was fine to mention her client Jack Welch, formerly the chairman and CEO of General Electric, since he’s a very public person. (When I got home, I looked him up: a recent estimate of his net worth was $720 million.)

Over the years, I’ve been assigned interviews with Williams for various design magazines and newspapers, but only ever over the telephone. So when I asked her assistant if it was possible to interview her in person for this book, I was surprised and pleased that the answer was yes. The morning of our meeting, I took special care getting dressed and at the last minute added a tortoiseshell necklace—fake tortoiseshell—in the hopes that it would make me look more professional and worth her time.

In more ways than one, Williams serves as a bridge between the old school of interior design and the one that is currently evolving before our very eyes. She was born in 1944, in Charlottesville, Virginia—horse country, as she’ll tell me when we meet; her father was head of the American Horse Shows Association. Her mother was an enthusiastic hostess and decorator. Williams’s legal name is Bruce Boxley Blackwell; Bunny is, no surprise, a nickname.

Williams runs her business out of an enormous studio at the Fine Arts Building, on East Fifty-Ninth Street, several blocks east from Central Park. It’s a pedigreed address, designwise. Built as a carriage house for Bloomingdale’s in the early 1900s, the building was converted into showrooms in 1962 and now houses a combination of showrooms for high-end home-furnishings lines and studios for various architecture and design firms. These days, Williams has sixteen employees.

Williams has often told the story of her first design aha moment. At age fifteen, she and her parents went to stay at the Greenbrier, a luxury resort in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia that was famously redecorated and restored in the 1940s by the famous designer Dorothy Draper. By then, Draper was one of the

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