by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
As Senior Vice President of Stadium Operations and CFO for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Bill Prescott certainly has his hands full. In addition to overseeing the football operations at the stadium, Prescott also works with stadium concessionaire Levy Restaurants and Paul Vance (the team’s attorney) and owner Wayne Weaver on a variety of football-related issues.
On the non-football side, Prescott handles the financial operations for Weaver’s other projects including the DAR Group, the Jacksonville Jaguars Foundation and the Weaver Family Foundation.
It may come as a surprise then to find out Prescott also moonlights as part owner of Beaches Design Center with his wife Kim Prescott, who used to work for the Jaguars before getting into the interior design business.
“I’m the money man,” said Bill Prescott, only half-joking.
“He’s much better at marketing and we both have financial backgrounds,” said Kim Prescott. “We use him for a lot of marketing and our Web site and for morale.”
The business originally opened in St. John’s Town Center in March 2005 where the business stayed until late last summer. On Oct. 15, the retail business reopened as Beaches Design Center in South Jacksonville Beach in the 3200 block of Third Street. Both said Town Center was a great location, but the opportunity to move to the beach was a chance to get closer to their primary client base. It was also a chance to move into a larger space, allowing the store’s designers to create entire rooms.
“We wanted to showcase what is available,” said Bill Prescott. “We have access to over 300 vendors. The beach is more of our demographic.”
The Design Center allows customers to see virtually what their new living room, dining room, den, etc. would look like. The possibilities are endless due to the nature of the process. Customers don’t pick out a sofa, art and drapes, take then home and hope they like what they see. Instead, the designers work with customers to create virtual spaces, which combine all of the design elements and are easy to interchange.
“We are a full-service interior design studio,” said Jean Howell, who has been in the business for over 20 years.
Howell said the benefit of using Beaches Design Center is the team concept. She and the other designers work with the builders and the architects and the potential homeowner — or the current homeowner — on every facet of the interior design process.
“The builder, the architect and the design team are on the same page,” said Howell.
Unlike traditional home decorating, Howell and the other designers employ a holistic approach. They don’t suggest a sofa type and color, have it delivered to the homeowner and then move on to paint colors, window treatments, art and other furniture. Instead, entire rooms are designed using color and/or style themes. The result is a large board with an entire room as it could look complete with floor plans to show the space used and the space still available.
This may seem like a costly way to decorate a home or room. But, Howell says decorating through piece-mealing costs more in the end with riskier results.
“The misconception is that interior design is expensive,” said Howell. “It could be a costly mistake to purchase something if it turns out to not be the right decision. You can’t return sofas and you can’t return window treatments. When that delivery truck leaves, you own it.”
Jane Current and her husband Dana employed Prescott and her staff about a year to help remodel the living room of their Ponte Vedra Boulevard home. The room is attached to the kitchen and the Currents only knew they wanted to rearrange the furniture. After that, they were open to suggestions.
“I had used designers before, but never had we taken a whole room and said, let’s do it. We generally knew how we wanted the furniture laid out, other than that, we didn’t know,” said Current. “They presented a couple of different ideas and made it easy. They also made it easy to say, no we don’t like that.
“They made sure we were comfortable. When you spend that kind of money, you want to make sure it’s what you want and not what they (the designer) want.”
Current said once the final decisions were made, she was essentially told one April morning to get out of the house for a few hours. She came home later to a revamped great room.
“It has made a huge difference in the house,” she said.
Prescott said his involvement in the interior design business isn’t as far from pro football as it may seem.
“All businesses have common elements,” he said. “You have to have vision.”
Part of that vision occurs at the front end of a design project. While some of the clientele comes in the front door, many of the initial contacts are face-to-face in the home.
“We meet with the client on a complementary basis in their home for a consultation,” said Bill Prescott.
If the client chooses, they pay a small retainer and the design team and the client move to the next stage. Kim Prescott said it may take 10 hours to complete a room and some jobs take two weeks start to finish.
“What separates us is once you go through the design phase and order your upholstery and window treatments, you get a credit for the retainer,” said Bill Prescott.
“That’s something nobody else does,” said Howell.
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