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In an era of celebrity TV chefs and obsession with the latest shade-grown fair-trade coffee, the Williams-Sonoma culinary retail chain might seem like just another pushy brand cleverly catering to our aspirational appetites.

But, like other ubiquitous retailers such as the Gap and Starbucks, you can trace all those shiny copper pots and haute chef knives back to a lifestyle visionary with a single humble shop.

In this case, 91-year-old Charles (Chuck) E. Williams is still around to tell the tale of opening a French cookware shop in Sonoma, Calif., in 1956 (his first location was a former hardware store).

He had a simple idea: bring restaurant-level cookware, appliances and ingredients to the home chef for the first time in the United States.

Heavy Le Creuset enamel ware, Kitchen-Aid and Waring mixers, Cuisinarts, olive oil, wine vinegars and other kitchen mainstays many of us take for granted today are among his proudest product placements.

(To celebrate the chain's 50th anniversary, many of these items are being offered in a special Sonoma Green, the colour of the original store's awning).

After working as an airplane mechanic in the Second World War, Williams began a 10-year career as a house builder in California, where he had moved as a teenager with his family from Florida. A trip to Paris in 1953 sparked an epiphany.

"Why did I do it?" he says in his Jacksonville drawl over the phone from his San Francisco office. "Seeing all the wonderful pots and pans and bakeware and the tools that were available to everyone. I just didn't understand why we had a system where all of those sorts of things were available to restaurants but not to home cooks."

At the time, he says, pots were thin, inexpensive and uninspiring.

"We didn't have sauté pans for home use!"

Williams's observation came at just the right time. After just a few years his store, which lovingly displayed its wares on open, hand-made shelving -- "not piled up on a table like at Macy's" -- was dovetailing nicely with the emerging food establishment.

In 1961, Julia Child published her seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking and a year later hit TV screens with The French Chef. Williams has fond memories of his friendship with Child, whom he met in San Francisco on her book tour.

He was also pals with cookbook author James Beard, whom he met when the culinary icon visited the new San Francisco location (which replaced the Sonoma shop) in 1958.

He says it's easy to forget his friends' influence on the cooking landscape.

"With Julia, it wasn't learning how to use a Charlotte mould. It was actually the cooking of vegetables," he says.

"And the cooking of meat. Americans, if we cooked string beans, we cooked them for an hour. She taught people to cook string beans for two or three minutes. That changed completely the way people cooked. It gradually changed and we didn't realize it was happening."

So, too, was Williams-Sonoma gradually growing into a blockbuster player on the foodie scene.

"It was a simple shop for 17 years," he says. "I never expected it to grow into the company it did."

Although he was, in a sense, democratizing cooking techniques, Williams says he underestimated the store's mass appeal.

He thought he was serving upper-class types who had spent time in France and were beginning to cook -- or, more likely, who had French chefs who longed for finer tools.

But the former home builder had laid a solid foundation with a simple philosophy.

"I didn't buy anything I didn't want," Williams says. "I didn't buy anything with the hope that customers would like it."

Take the story of his first buying trip to Europe with Howard Lester, who bought the company from him in the late 1970s (Williams remains director emeritus).

Lester was keen on sourcing fancy caviar serving dishes; Williams tried to ignore the request. Eventually, Williams ended up buying a handful of them. They went unsold.

"He also wondered why we weren't buying a new pasta maker which didn't just make flat pasta, it extruded round pasta. I said it didn't work very well." Soon thereafter, Lester noted the pasta makers were no longer on the market. Again, Williams knew what he was doing.

Now, Williams-Sonoma is a 250-plus-store chain with more than $3-billion (U.S.) in annual sales. Its founder attributes this to the rise in home entertaining.

As for Williams, his own kitchen is the scene of simple fare.

He delights in a fancy lettuce and grapefruit salad, and a multinight stew.

"I like to make a little stew of lamb, with onion and some chicken broth and add some vegetables, maybe a carrot and a potato and onion to it," Williams says. "I don't put too many vegetables in it. I'll eat those vegetables. Then, the next night I'll add different vegetables and have it again. I do it with chicken thighs, too. Three nights of a little stew without too much work."

Might good, simple eating be the secret to his long life? In bucking the Betty Crocker and Jell-O world of the 1950s, he also seems to have bypassed today's fast-food excesses, which he barely has the vocabulary to describe.

"I can't attribute it to anything else. I think I've eaten well and sensibly. I've never been one to sit around and eat, what do you call them, popcorn, and all this kind of stuff. I'm not a Coke drinker. I don't drink Coca-Cola."