Over the course of her decades-long career, the tennis icon Venus Williams has traveled the globe, staying in some of the best hotels in the world—and she’s been taking notes.
You may know her as a legendary athlete, but Williams is also an avid interior designer with her own design practice, V Starr Interiors, which she founded in 2002. “I have a huge appreciation for spaces,” Williams tells Vogue. “I actually get quite offended when I think a space is not right,” she adds, laughing.
Now, fans can have a piece of Williams’s interior design vision in their own homes, courtesy of her new furniture and decor collection with Crate & Barrel and Crate & Kids, which launches tomorrow. The wide-ranging line features a mix of mid-century modern and eclectic pieces inspired by a design trip she took to Milan with Sebastian Brauer, the head of product design for Crate & Barrel and Crate & Kids—and, fittingly, tennis.
“We wanted to put in a really fun tennis inspiration without it feeling too cheesy,“ Williams says. Brauer adds: “The intention was never to produce a literal translation of tennis. We were interested in the larger culture surrounding the sport—the choreography of movement, the precision of its geometry, the rituals of preparation and arrival, and the particular elegance of its history and its environments.”
That desire—to infuse tennis into the collection in a way that felt authentic to Williams’s life–sparked a line of products that has both subtle nods to the sport and “very overt” references, Williams says, with a laugh. “We have a sculptural accent chair that feels really avant-garde, very Italy, but it has these accents that are a nod to tennis balls. So we snuck some things in there,” she says.
In her approach to the Crate & Kids collection, Williams—who is an aunt to her sister Serena’s two daughters, Olympia and Adira—says she wanted to design “a room that I would’ve always wanted as a kid.”
Alongside the tennis influence, Williams says she wanted the collection to feel elegant and timeless. “You should feel like whatever you put in your home you can live with forever,” she says. “It’s just like when you inherit an heirloom piece of furniture; it’s had its own life. That’s what I want these pieces to have.”
How does Williams see tennis and design in relation to each other? “Tennis is a full-on gladiator sport, and an all-out war, but it’s just delightful. Design is a challenge that you get to yourself, and the creativity is endless.” Williams says. “But also, the creativity on the court is endless.”