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"View Slideshow\n\nGonzales, Texas, where William W. Stubbs was born, is infertile ground for raising an interior designer. Located between San Antonio and Houston, the town, he says, is \"steeped in Texas culture. I don't think it even had an interior designer.\"\n\nHe describes his father, an electrical engineer, as \"a black-and-white kind of a man who did not understand me on any level.\" His mother, he says, \"was not particularly interested in art or design.\"\n\n\"Things that were custommade were on a roof in Russia with ice on them.\"\n\nStubbs's graphic imagination was fired by films and by an inspirational high school art teacher. \"She had that gift of being able to convince each child that they were special. She took me and a lot of other kids to our first ballet\u2014with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. She opened a whole world to me that I might never have known about.\"\n\nWanting to enter that world, Stubbs applied to Parsons School of Design. He was accepted, but, he says, \"my family just thought New York would gobble me up and there'd be nothing left.\" Instead, he went to the International Institute of Design in Washington, D.C. In retrospect, Stubbs considers the change of plans to have been a stroke of luck. \"This was in the '70s, so Parsons was all about a very simple approach to things\u2014you know, two Barcelona chairs, and if you have to have traditional, throw in an Oriental rug.\n\n\"I went to a school where we studied art history and curtains and draperies and had to do faux finishes that looked exactly like the different species of wood.\" It was, he concludes, \"a great background for the kind of designer I've become.\" As is the way with so many designers, Stubbs took an unusual route into the profession.\n\nAlthough he was briefly employed as an interior designer at a Houston department store, he was soon working for real estate developers.\n\n\"I decided I needed to figure out what I could say that a developer would understand. So I'd say, I'll handle every visual aspect of this project.' It was really an early form of branding. I wasn't asking, Would a lovely French chair be nice in this room?' but rather, So, how did you purchase this building, and what are your plans for it?' I understood that they were mostly interested in how the property made money, and so they loved me.\"\n\nAs his developer clients were increasingly successful, they moved into the luxury, high-rise condominium market. Well-heeled buyers saw the public spaces and model apartments that Stubbs had designed and retained him to do as well by them. His lack of experience with such clients was not a problem. \"A lot of people would be very daunted by doing some of these things. I just forge ahead and figure that we'll get to a solution. And we do. But there's some tough things in between.\"\n\n\"Tough\" hardly describes what Bill Stubbs has had to take on in the course of serving oil-industry wheeler-dealers from the former Soviet Union. In Moscow, while redoing a top-floor condominium in a dilapidated building, he had to contend with other occupants who had not accepted the idea that Soviet-style communism was a thing of the past.\n\n\"A nightmare!\" he exclaims, recalling the apartment's installation. When he arrived, there was no power to the apartment and scaffolding everywhere. \"There were 45 people working\u2014painting, wallpapering, trying to fix all the electrical wires that were pulled out of every wall, and it was snowing. It was snowing like something I've never seen, and all the furniture was sitting out in the street.\"\n\nBut his problems were just beginning. \"Using a crane, they were taking the furniture piece by piece up to the roof. They'd removed a huge plate-glass window to take the furniture through the window, and so there were banks of snow in the living room, melting onto the carpet. Once the furniture was on the roof, it warmed up, and everything got wet and then froze again. I thought I was going to implode. There were things that had been custommade and taken 18 months to be produced and shipped, and there they were on a roof in Russia with six inches of ice on them.\"\n\nTo save the situation, the designer gathered together the 45 workers and through an interpreter explained that they would proceed by finishing off one room at a time. \"As soon as a room was done, I'd close it off and put crime-scene tape across the door. But the next time I'd walk into the room, I'd see that someone with grease on his pants had sat on the bed, so it all had to be taken apart and cleaned and started over.\"\n\nThe man from Gonzales came to like the Russian and Ukrainian people, whom he describes as \"hospitable,\" \"extremely polite\" and \"very genteel.\" Still, Stubbs recounts the time he finished a job in Moscow, went home to Texas and got a summons from the client to return. \"We went in and sat down to wait for him. He finally appeared and offered us tea. After we'd had our tea and exchanged pleasantries, he got up, came over and stood in front of me\u2014and he's a huge guy\u2014and says, I'm sorry to make you come all this way, but I needed to tell you face to face how much I love this apartment.' \" And with that, Stubbs says, \"he picked me up and gave me a huge hug.\"\n\nRussia and Ukraine are not the designer's only distant ports of call, nor does he work in one idiom. With his staff of five, he continues to take on the widest spectrum of projects, ranging from affordable housing for the elderly to an Airbus A319 that is 110 feet long and residences in Houston, New Jersey and Sardinia.\n\n\"I'm all over the map, because I'm very driven by a client's taste,\" he says. \"I've never wanted to have a Bill Stubbs look. That's not because I have a master plan in mind but because I get kind of bored with things. I enjoy the fact that every time I go to meet a client, it's going to be something new and I'm going to be working in a different genre. I really enjoy that\u2014 the mystery of wondering what it's going to be like.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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