Introduction For The “Willoughby Design Lookbook”, Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards 

Introduction For The  “Willoughby Design Lookbook”      

In 2019, Ann Willoughby was nominated for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards in the Lifetime Achievement Category. This Lookbook introduction gathers Ann’s design statement, biography, honors, and accomplishments, along with images that evoke the culture, team, and office life of Willoughby Design. 

In her statement, Ann looks back to a childhood in Mississippi in the late 1940s and early 1950s…a landscape of family, memory, and contradictions that helped kindle her creative entrepreneurship and her lifelong desire to build a life shaped by family, friends, and creative work. 

Ann’s earliest memories are of the Smith family homestead in Raymond, Mississippi, seven acres tucked into the hilly woods in the historic town. The 1840s antebellum home was surrounded by typical outbuildings, a large workshop, a smokehouse, chicken coops, a cowshed, rabbit hutches, flowers, and vegetable gardens…the ordinary abundance of a place that, in a child’s mind, became a playground of unlimited possibilities. A feeling for place, family, endurance, storytelling, and adventure became a touchstone of Ann’s memory. Less than a quarter mile away stood the magnificent Hinds County Courthouse, once the capital of Mississippi, built by enslaved people in 1857. Jim Crow would not officially end in the South until 1975. These early encounters…with the land, with the rituals and tensions of a small Southern town, and with the steady wisdom of an 85-year-old great-grandmother, helped shape the life and career that followed.

Ann was an only child and the only grandchild in a household of three generations of adults. She spent long hours and endless summer months outdoors drawing and making creations from her drawings. There, out of found objects-rocks, old smoking pipes, ancient bricks, flint glass, buttons, Civil War shells, and small treasures gathered in the burnt trash heap and around her great-grandparents’ home…she crafted a handmade world of wonder. It was a time when a child’s imagination and time were still unstructured, largely free of rules, adult oversight, formal lessons, and, in Ann’s case, the company of other children. Reflecting on her childhood, Ann believes that this uninterrupted, intense focus on discovery, drawing, and making instilled in her a deep love for the design process.

With a child’s innocence and curiosity, Ann absorbed Southern culture—its food, hospitality, storytelling, sense of belonging, and the rhythms of daily chores. She was encouraged and, with the fearless confidence of a young child, developed a passionate love for family and place. And yet the racial hypocrisy, misogyny, and the cruel treatment of innocent people created a dissonance that could not be ignored. Even then, she began to develop an instinct for questioning social and institutional rules and traditions. Those early experiences left a lasting mark on a girl’s future dreams. Was it possible to design a better life?

In 1978, Ann opened a three-person design studio at 423 Westport Road in Kansas City, Missouri. There, in a small room and with big ideas, she began the experiment that would become Willoughby Design. 

The Introduction to the Willoughby Design Lookbook opens with ten stories of Willoughby Design partnerships, tracing a path from 1978 through 2018. 

In 2028, on the 50th anniversary, a digital timeline titled “Willoughby Design, 1978-2028”, will be available online. At this writing in the summer of 2026, we are in the planning phase. Our goal is to launch the 50th Anniversary timeline on the Willoughby website, The People's Graphic Design Archive(PGDA), AIGA Medalists Archive at AIGA, The Spencer Art Reference Library of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and a potential collection of Willoughby artifacts and files at the Murphy Art & Architecture Library at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.