Venus Williams serves up interior design

This is what you get when you hire Venus Williams as your interior decorator: an enthusiastic designer who has traveled the world, drawing inspiration from Moscow to Beijing, but never quite had time to complete formal training; a team of professionals working with her; and a place on a client list that includes celebrities and professional athletes.

And, of course, you get Venus Williams.

She's one of the great tennis players of all time: seven Grand Slam singles titles, an Olympic gold medal, a woman who changed the face of modern tennis. Her father gave her a racket when she was just 4 years old and told her she was going to become the best player in the world.

"Most people decide what they want to do later in life, and some people know really early," she said. "For me, what I was doing was already decided. Thankfully, I liked it." But that was her father's dream, not hers. "This was like when you get to make your own choice about what you love."

And Williams loves, loves, loves designing. She talks about space planning, construction, lighting and fabric swatches like nobody's business. In fact, it is a business: For more than a decade, she has quietly run an interior design firm in her adopted home of Florida, both capitalizing on and overcoming her famous name.

She recently traveled to the District of Columbia for the unveiling of her latest work: the renovated Southeast Tennis and Learning Center, an after-school tennis, arts and academic program created for children.

"As a designer, you design, and it's beautiful, and people feel great when they walk in — but how have you changed the world?" she asked. "For us, this sort of project means so much to us because it's going to impact so many lives."

Williams had been playing tennis for 14 years — and was two years away from her first Wimbledon and U.S. Open singles titles in 2000 — when a letter arrived on her doorstep when she was 17 or 18. It invited her to study art and design at a technical school in Tampa, Fla.

"Oh, I want to go to design school!" she remembers telling her mom. She loved being creative: She grew up sewing and still has the homemade skirts she made for her first professional tournament at age 14.

Tampa was too far from their southern Florida home, so her mother vetoed that plan. But she allowed Williams and younger sister Serena to enroll in a Fort Lauderdale arts school, where they both studied fashion design. Between training, practice and traveling the world for tennis, they learned pattern-making, clothing construction, textile design and computer programming.

Venus Williams graduated in 2007 with a degree in fashion design and launched a small sportswear line called EleVen to a mixed reception.

But all along it was interior design that really captured her imagination. While traveling, she would slip away to explore art and museums — in Moscow, for example, she loved the intricate ceilings of St. Basil's Cathedral. She began reading books on interior design and consulted with professional decorators.

In 2002, after finding a partner who could handle the business while she was on the road, Williams founded V Starr Interiors, a small boutique firm in Jupiter, Fla., not far from where her family lived after moving from California when she was 10 years old. The real estate market was booming; she thought it was the perfect time to try to break into the field.

Everyone knew who she was, of course, but some people assumed she was just a titular owner with no talent. (Early on, the state of Florida reportedly reprimanded V Starr for overstating Williams' professional credentials.) Others were happy to hire V Starr solely for the publicity of having Williams attached to their projects: Two years ago, Williams and her team decorated a $6.5 million luxury model condo for a Boca Raton development. Her name and photo were splashed all over promotional material and Florida real estate magazines.

"No matter who you are or what you do, you have to be good at it," she said. "You have to have the right team. You have to start at the bottom. The advantage that I had was to be able to open doors. You can get into a meeting. But when you get into the meeting, it doesn't mean it will go well."

Today, the firm has four full-time professional designers, all women.

Williams is the only one on the team without a degree in interior design. She studied it for two years — "I would sit there and draw a line, then erase it, and draw it and erase it. I drove myself nuts" — before finally deciding she could be more effective to the company if she got a business degree. (She's working on it.) It was, all things considered, the practical choice: Williams, now 34 years old, heads an estimated $60 million empire.

But she's deeply involved in all of the design projects, e-mailing ideas back and forth while on the road. V Starr began with residential work, including houses for a couple of NBA stars. "Oh, they're the easiest," she said. "They just want it done. They're very busy. They tell you what they want, you do it, and then they're very happy." But she quickly got bored with home design and switched the firm's focus to commercial work — hotels, condos, clubs and other projects — because "I wanted to be creative on a wider scale and think outside the box."

She just sold her midcentury Hollywood Hills house — a project she never had time to finish — and her plans to build a dream home in Florida are on hold. "It's always a dream house until you realize you don't want all the things you dreamed," she explained. "Why am I doing this? I just want a closet and a gym."

For the moment, tennis is still her top priority: more majors, a spot with the Washington Kastles, and one more shot at gold at the 2016 Olympics. She'll play as long as she's healthy and having fun. After that? Designing full time because the thing she likes most is working with creative people.

"I enjoy getting that rush, doing something else cool, something new," she said. "I definitely will travel the world taking meetings."