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“It’s not just that you artfully place the chair in the corner of the room, which may look great for a photo shoot. Those who are interested may notice a good piece of furniture or a painting, but for people who are not interested, their feeling should be ‘This is a comfortable place to be.’” Above all, she says, she thinks about real life and the grace notes that make it easier. When people come over, they shouldn’t be intimidated by the house or the room or anything in it. “I want to create rooms to be used, not showcases to be admired. “I have to understand how clients see themselves,” she says. “She’s totally intuitive.” But she works hard at it too, asking clients about everything from their TV-watching habits to whether or not they prefer to go barefoot indoors. “She has such emotion and a genuine enthusiasm for helping people make houses that are nice for their guests and perfect for themselves,” says the designer Thomas Jayne, who first met Bunny when he joined Parish-Hadley as an assistant.
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More important, she has taught her clients how to live in them. In the course of her forty-year-plus career, which began at the legendary Manhattan firm Parish-Hadley, she has decorated houses in places as far-flung as the South of France and Sun Valley, Idaho. It’s this same talent for making people feel at home, for making them comfortable in their own spaces, that has most informed her work as an adult and made her one of the most well-known and respected interior designers in the world. This was something that was instilled in us.” They cared about people and making them feel at home. “You better have the bar set up and the olives out and the cheese straws and pecans ready.” The Southerners she grew up around were definitely house proud, she adds, “but they also cared about the way they lived.
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“I always say that in the South, people drop by,” she says. After a perfect lunch of sliced tomatoes, fresh corn off the cob, and a new chicken salad John had spotted in the New York Times, we polished off the wine and tucked into homemade ice cream with peaches and cookies warm from the oven.īoth times they’d been expecting me, of course, but the thing about Bunny is that she’s almost always expecting someone-and she’s prepared even if she’s not, a habit she credits to her upbringing in Charlottesville, Virginia. Again, I was welcomed effusively with a glass of rosé and a seat on the screened porch overlooking one of Bunny’s gorgeous gardens. Fast-forward a few years to this summer, when, stuck in Friday traffic between JFK and Bunny’s Connecticut retreat, I managed to delay yet another lovely meal.
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When I finally arrived, complete with beagle in tow (Bunny is forever exhorting folks to bring their pups to her houses and those of her friends), whiskey and cheese straws were immediately on offer, and everyone (including Bunny’s husband, John Rosselli, the über–antiques dealer who has also been Furlow’s business partner for decades) acted as though they always ate dinner at 11:00 p.m. When we were collaborating on a book about the houses of Furlow Gatewood, the inveterate collector who is her great friend, I not only forgot about the time difference between my house and Furlow’s (where we were spending the weekend), I got almost irretrievably lost (apparently Shangri-la doesn’t turn up on your average GPS). Almost every time I’ve arranged to meet with Bunny Williams, I’ve been horribly late (and not just a little embarrassed), but Bunny herself has never been anything but unfailingly gracious.