Colleen O.
Yelp
I look at Williams-Sonoma at Town Center as a kindred spirit to Dean & Deluca across the street - with the latter selling gourmet food and the former selling the tools to make the gourmet food.
I have no five-star, culinary kitchen - but walking through this place and I know I want one someday. I love the wall of cookbooks and coffee table books about food - and the staff doesn't mind if you look through them, they encourage it. Yes, it is in the heart of Johnson County (its unofficial motto being, if you can't afford it, get out), but it's also a food museum to me, a place to walk around slowly, looking at its displays and reading the information posted about it on the side.
Their seasonal displays get me excited for holidays ahead, like Hallmark, they set out Christmas as early as October - but it fosters the excitement of the seasons well. Right now, W&S is selling a filled pancake pan, a pan with a few ice cream scoop-sized holes in it, where you can pour the batter and fill it with (as they sell it) pecan pumpkin mousse and they turn out to be these perfect little dumpling-sized pancakes. It's useless but it sounds like the best way to spend your next Sunday in bed, does it not?
They also sell gourmet mixes that make eating really good things that much easier, for example: monkey bread (although not the most gourmet of their products, it's a bestseller and ridiculously good.) They sell quirky things for Halloween coming up: Giant Halloween caramel apples and personalized trick or treat totes, jack-o-lantern aprons.
I won't buy any of this, but its fun to imagine that one day I'll have the money to live this frivolously.
I also appreciate how the entire checkout is modeled into a real kitchen counter in the center of the store - where they hold real cooking classes for a fee and other cooking demonstrations for free everyday. It's like a cook's heaven.