Tennis icon Venus Williams has launched Grand Slam, a new furniture and decor collection created in partnership with Crate & Barrel and Crate & Kids, drawing on her design background and her relationship with the sport that made her famous.
The collection, which launched on September 15, spans furniture, lighting and decor for adults through Crate & Barrel, alongside a separate line of furniture, bedding, artwork and decor for children’s spaces through Crate & Kids. Together, the two lines total close to 200 pieces.
Williams, who founded her interior design firm V Starr in 2002, said the tennis references in the collection were intentionally subtle rather than literal.
Sculptural silhouettes and refined materials take precedence throughout the line, while details such as a pleated lampshade were designed to recall the movement and shape of a tennis skirt. A table lamp in the collection features a base of stacked oak wood spheres styled after tennis balls, built to resemble the hoppers used to collect loose balls during practice.
She told Design Milk that collaborating with Crate & Barrel and Crate & Kids on the collection was a lot of fun, adding that she has always believed great design should feel timeless, and that timelessness was the guiding idea behind the collection.
Much of the collection draws on Williams’s travels, including time spent walking the streets and markets of Milan with the Crate team in search of material and design inspiration. The line features extensive use of stone, from marble tabletops and mirror frames to lamps and smaller accessories, many of them sourced in Italy.
Speaking to Vogue, Williams said she has a huge appreciation for spaces and gets quite offended when she feels a space is not right. She said her decades of travelling the world for tennis, including stays in some of its best hotels, had shaped the design instincts behind the collection.
For the Crate & Kids portion of the collaboration, Williams said she wanted to bring the sophistication of mid century modern design, one of her long standing style interests, into children’s spaces without losing their sense of play.
She pointed to pieces such as the Alley Wood and Terrazzo Kids Desk, which pairs a warm wood frame with a green terrazzo surface, as an example of that balance between grown up material choices and a child appropriate sense of fun.
Alicia Waters, brand president of Crate & Barrel and Crate & Kids, said Williams embodies the intersection of power, style and design, and that the collection was designed to seamlessly bridge high design with functionality across both the adult and children’s ranges.
Williams said every piece in the collection was intentionally designed to feel artful, timeless and design driven while still working cohesively together, with a few nods to tennis worked in through the geometry and elements of the sport.
She said the overall goal was a feeling of being able to live with the collection forever, adding that for Crate & Kids, the line represents the bedroom of her dreams.
