Something Clients Want

Architect Paul Revere Williams has designed some of the most imposing houses in California's glossy Beverly Hills, but he cannot live there himself. He has designed a score of luxury hotels and swank spas, but he knows that few would welcome him as a guest. As one of Los Angeles' top five architects, he could afford a mansion, but he lives in a somewhat rundown part of town. Paul Williams is a Negro.

Architect Williams never wasted time brooding about the handicaps of color. Long ago he decided that a Negro, in order to succeed at anything, had to work twice as hard as a white man. Last week Architect Williams, 53, sat behind the long, streamlined desk in his plush Wilshire Boulevard office and ticked off what he has done. He had just finished a $200,000 remodeling of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and was working on a $500,000, 160-room addition to the Ambassador, a $3,000,000 new section to the Beverly-Wilshire. Under construction were $20 million worth of houses, stores, etc. designed by Architect Williams.

Night Trick. Orphaned at 3, Paul Williams sold newspapers and ran errands while going to grade school, worked his way through evening art classes by making watch fobs out of brass and gold-plating them. On finishing high school he got a $15-a-week job as a draughtsman for a Los Angeles architect. Assigned to make a drawing his first day, he took it home with him, stayed up all night, turned it in complete the next morning. His boss thought Williams mighty fast.

He used the non-stop trick again when he started his own office to build small houses with the luxury of big ones. Automaker Errett Lobban Cord liked a small Williams house and asked him to sketch a $300,000 house. Other architects were already working on sketches for it. Williams, by working 22 continuous hours, finished his design first and got the contract. Other big orders followed from Singer John Charles Thomas, Will Hays, Bert Lahr, Bill Robinson.

Upside-Down Trick. For clients who were reluctant to hire him when they saw that he was a Negro, Williams developed an impressive trick. He would sketch a house for them, upside down, while sitting on the other side of the table, often got the job when the client saw what the architect had in mind.

Williams got into hotel designing by doing Saks Fifth Avenue's $1,000,000 Beverly Hills store, which was to be a shop "with a residential atmosphere." His next project: a hotel with the air of "many residences under one roof." He tried it with the $1,250,000 Arrowhead Hot Springs Hotel near San Bernardino, has since designed seven others. One of his fanciest jobs: the glassy Tennis Club at Palm Springs, Calif.

Some architects have been known to sniff at Williams' work; esthetically it breaks no new ground. But Williams, who does not like the severity of modern designs, makes no bones about his ability to work over old ground. He gives a new look to Early American,, Spanish, Cape Cod, and judges his work by one standard: "If I build the kind of a house a client wants, I'm a good architect." Clients seemed to agree: last year Williams grossed $140,000 (his staff of 20 includes two Negroes, a Chinese, two Germans, four Jews), netted around $50,000.

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