• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, December 7, 2015

Chuck Williams, a carpenter by trade who built his own shelving and opened a shop in Sonoma, Calif., in 1956 to peddle high-end cooking utensils, died in his sleep at home in San Francisco on Saturday. He was 100.

“In recent years the cooks store he founded had grown into a $3-billion corporation with more than 250 Williams-Sonoma stores in the U.S. and Canada, along with a chain of other stores that includes Pottery Barn and West Elm. He remained the ‘emeritus director,’” writes Mary Rourke in the Los Angeles Times.

“In his first store, he sold a small array of cookware imported from France, introducing America to the French kitchen products such as the soufflé dish, the sauté pan and even balsamic vinegar,” Joe Sutton reports for CNN.

Or, as Robert D. McFadden puts it in the New York Times: “Once upon a time in America, soufflés fell flat and pasta lacked oomph. Drab kitchens had pots, pans and knives from a department store. Who knew Calphalon from Le Creuset? Or Wüsthof from Sabatier? Garlic presses, slicers, timers, thermometers? It was just meat and potatoes, plunked on a table.”

In 1958, Williams opened a second store in San Francisco a few blocks from the city’s shopping center, Union Square, according to a company timeline. Three more shops followed but Williams was not as successful as a businessman as he was as a cultivator of loyal customers and arbiter of taste and cookware.

He was reportedly losing money when he sold the company in 1978 to Howard Lester; it went public in 1983. But Williams “remained its public face,” McFadden writes, “producing cookbooks and catalogs, operating a test kitchen and traveling to promote Williams-Sonoma and select merchandise.” 

The company issued its first catalog — 10,000 were printed — in 1972 after a customer, copywriter Jackie Mallorca, made the suggestion to do so. They have acquired a following of their own over the years.

A testimonial video on the Williams-Sonoma website makes it clear at the outset that Williams remained “the center of the Williams-Sonoma brand … the filter that we throw the decisions through when we think about customers, when we think about quality, when we think about innovation …”

Williams said in a 2006 interview that “he took annual trips to France to source pots and pans. He would track down manufacturers and visit factories to find the best kitchen tools,” writes Julie Johnson in the Sonoma Press Democrat.

“I spent a lot of time in Paris,” he said. “I loved looking at the stores and saw what was available for the home cook, like heavy pots and pans. You couldn’t buy those here — just thin aluminum pots. The tools were lousy. I thought somebody should do something about it.” 

On the company’s website, longtime friend Laura Martin Bacon posts a chat with Williams that, among other things, gives us insight into how he acquired his diverse talents over the years. 

“I learned to cook by watching my grandmother and listening to everything she told me,” Williams says. 

Turned down for active service in the military for medical reasons during World War II, he became an airplane mechanic.

“When I was young, I was very much of a loner. Working overseas forced me to be with people all the time, so I was able to acquire some good social skills that have helped all my life,” he says.

He learned carpentry by asking questions at the lumberyard and then just doing it, he tells Martin Bacon. He also relied on other tradesmen to tell him if he was doing something wrong.

As for his storied customer-relations skills, those came from a stint working on a “date farm” as a teenager. “I learned way back then that it’s important to make friends with every customer and address them by name so they feel comfortable,” he says.

“According to a company fact sheet on its founder, Williams had reviewed more than 11,000 Williams-Sonoma recipes since 1992, and firmly believed that a dinner party should consist of no more than six people,” reports Tessa Berenson for Time.

“I think he shaped the taste of all those who love to cook,” his friend, TV chef Julia Child told Newsweek in 1997, reports Becky Krystal in the Washington Post. “In the early days of my show, the home chef couldn’t buy any of the items I used in cooking. You had to buy them the next time you went to France. Chuck changed all that.”

Williams never married and there are no immediate survivors. 

“He often said the store was his life and that he had no regrets,” writes Rourke in the Los Angeles Times.