It was this attention to detail and respect for his customers that helped his business grow. He once delayed a catalog photo shoot after sampling the apple pie that was to be featured, declaring that it did not taste good enough to be authentic and requested that it be remade. They said he had an uncanny intuition about choosing products that would prove both useful and of the highest taste he was so attuned to detail that he insisted on the exact placement of pans on a store shelf so that they were easy for someone to pick up. Williams’ closest friends and co-workers, he did just that. I wanted them as friends as well as customers.”Īnd according to Mr. I wanted to answer their questions with knowledge and confidence. “I wanted to show them pots and pans that they may not have seen before.

“Right from the beginning, I wanted them to enjoy their visit,” Mr. Service to his customers - who were also his friends - was the signature of the Williams-Sonoma store. Williams opened the first San Francisco location of Williams-Sonoma in 1958 and shortly thereafter launched a wedding registry. I had no money at the time but I could just walk around and look at his beautiful things.”īased on the requests of his society women friends - who urged him to relocate to San Francisco and to the same block as Elizabeth Arden where the fancy ladies got their hair done - Mr. “He had those melon ballers, those copper pots. Williams opened his store, Waters said it allowed her to find what she’d seen abroad. “I wanted to live like the French, cook like the French. “When I came back from France when I was 19, I moved back to Berkeley,” said Alice Waters, who would later go on to open Chez Panisse. Many of those items would have a huge influence on America’s best chefs. When he bought the Sonoma hardware store in 1956, new pots and pans were some of the first items he sold. They would wobble on the stove, and it was hard not to burn food in them.” “Pots were mostly those terrible little aluminum things that always warped. Williams recalled in a 1995 story in The Chronicle. “Back then, American cooks typically had two knives - a big one and a small one - and not necessarily sharp,” Mr. He quickly became enthralled with both the cuisine he experienced and the tools necessary to produce such dishes - the coq au vin and the Dutch ovens, the pâtés and the molds, the gratins and the mandolins. There, he spent time in cookware stores and the restaurant-supply sections of department stores, which were unlike those in America. A group of them took a trip to Paris in 1953, and his life was forever changed.

He moved to Sonoma after a golf trip with friends left him smitten with the then-sleepy town, and began socializing with friends who also loved to cook and entertain. Williams was stationed in India and Africa, where he was able to explore the culinary techniques and foods of the area. He once placed an enormous vase of lilies on top of a giant pedestal in the glove department, a bold move that “shocked everyone,” he recalled, and became a store tradition.Īs a mechanic with the Army during World War II, Mr. as a window dresser, where he gained experience in visual merchandising. Williams moved to Los Angeles to work at I. Williams found a job working at the roadside stand of a family-owned date ranch, and his family left him there. Williams was 16, ending up in Palm Springs. But his family suffered in the Great Depression and traversed the country looking for work when Mr. 2, 1915, and raised in northern Florida, the housewares enthusiast had fond early memories of baking alongside his grandmother, who once owned a restaurant.

William so oma