By Charles Desselle
Portrait by Billy Coleman
My natural style, ” explains Cheree Roberts, founder and creative director of SW3 Design, “follows a philosophy of keeping it simple and real.” The Fort Lauderdale-based designer has worked in the city for 18 years, but she hails from Dallas where her father’s stake in a local furniture retail chain meant that her mother styled and decorated the store locations. This background, in part, accounts for Roberts’ discerning eye. At the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Roberts developed her passion for large-scale minerals. Today, a microwave-oven-sized amethyst graces a coffee table in her home—a natural object deeply treasured by the designer and an indication of her attraction to color.
However, it was the experience of traveling the world early in her career that most significantly influenced Roberts’ attitude toward design. Through her wanderings, she developed an approach that she calls simple luxury. “The life lesson from the experience,” Roberts explains, “is that it’s about quality, not quantity.” To illustrate her point, Roberts recalls an elegant dinner hosted at the home of a Thai entrepreneur and his wife. She says that the simple but exquisite interior design “wasn’t about a room full of stuff as much as it was about the fantastic nature of the objects they did own.” The highlight: a Ming vase worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, displayed unpretentiously on a well-lit shelf.
The “real” approach permeates several aspects of the designer’s life, and it ensures her ability to maintain a healthy work-life balance, which includes—in addition to managing her well-established design studio—running the family home and raising her 12-year-old son, Alec. Likewise, Roberts’ small but highly mobile boutique design studio accepts projects almost entirely through word of mouth. “I have to like my clients, and they have to like me,” she says. “Because it’s about being happy in life.”
Roberts often meets new prospects at dinner parties hosted by current clients. Because of such personal introductions, the studio almost always engages with people who have an organic connection to the designer. “We work to find out what’s important to our clients,” she explains, “to bring that forward and accentuate what is treasured—almost everyone has something meaningful to them.” Whether it’s an art collection, a prized family heirloom or even a cadre of pets, SW3’s design methodology is driven by the discovery of what is special to its exclusive homeowners. It’s through this intimate process that many of Roberts’ clients have become friends—and repeat customers. Over the last 18 years, these friends and clients have tapped SW3 to design primary residences, yachts, office spaces and vacation homes all over the country, from California and Colorado to Texas and the Florida Keys.
While Roberts’ studio is currently working on several stately homes across the country—the kind for which she has become perhaps most well known—the designer personally identifies with a trend we expect to see a lot more often: downsizing from the palatial to the more easily maintainable.
Her dream project would be a tropical, naturally shaded indoor/outdoor space on the water with hammocks strung in trees, but boasting very high-thread-count bed linens. “Most important, I want it to be tiny,” Roberts explains. “I don’t want a big house that I have to worry about… if a storm comes along and blows it all away, that’s OK.”
Originally appeared in the Winter 2014 issue.
