The Magnolia Story(39)

Putting those tiles in a home just works for me. They’ll never go out of style. They’ll never seem dated. And the more time I spent in that old house in Castle Heights, the more that notion sank into my heart and showed itself in my work.

It’s funny how people will get caught up in trends. It’s almost like the shag carpet thing in the seventies. People who put it in their houses weren’t thinking, Hey, let’s go be dumb. They were thinking, This is great. It’s gorgeous! But there are just a lot of trends that come and go, and what Jo was aiming us toward was setting a standard that’s the complete opposite of trendy.

Why would I want to encourage my client to use the new hot color when I know that in a year or two she’ll need to paint the walls again just to get rid of it? I wouldn’t want to do that in my own home. I wouldn’t want to waste all that time and money.

I suppose we could have gone in the other direction. I mean, we’re businesspeople, right? Why wouldn’t we convince the customer to do the hot new color? Then we’d be back every year or two going, “Oh, you’re not still doing that orange we talked about last year, are you? That’s so outdated. Here, we can give you the newest green for $10,000.”

That’s just not who we are. And honestly, I’m a creature of habit. I’ve done my makeup the same way since I was thirteen, and I’ve always had long hair. I think I’ve just always liked classic. The Castle Heights house sort of focused me in on it more in terms of design, but in personality I was always that way. I find something I like and I stick with it. Ironically, that’s how Chip is too. He’s worn the same brand of boots since we married, the same brand of jeans since we married, the same old basic white shirt since we married.

So going after classic, long-lasting looks just made sense to me. My knack for finding antiques and interesting pieces at markets and garage sales certainly didn’t die when I closed the shop down. I kept it up in the interest of staging our flip homes and open houses, and I kept many of the most interesting pieces I found for us.

I started to get more creative in how to display my finds too. Building upon the idea that three-dimensional objects add character when they are hung on walls—an idea that started with the fencing window treatment I used in Drake’s first nursery—I started hanging baskets on the walls, and then baskets with plates in them. I hung antique gates up to add texture, along with interesting pieces of wood, branches, and other things you might not normally expect to see on a wall.

I started making trips to Canton, Texas, which holds a famous open-air flea market every month called First Monday Trade Days. There I found lots of old, authentic pieces from all over. I frequented the twice-a-year trade days in Round Top, Texas too. And as I did so, I realized my design aesthetic was evolving.

I stopped looking at all the scratches and the scrapes on the old pieces of furniture as flaws. I loved that they told the story of a family that had once eaten at that dining room table—or whatever the story might be. So instead of thinking about how I could refurbish these pieces, I focused on how I could highlight their imperfections. Like houses, the pieces with the best bones were the most fun to bring back to life and the most profitable when I got done.

Some of my early decorating jobs featured all sorts of brand-new pieces of furniture and décor. But I quickly learned that it was the old pieces, the quirky pieces, and the classic pieces that people talked about.

The quirky piece of cabinetry with all sorts of little nooks in it that came from an old hardware store, with notches on the side and little pencil markings where someone used to keep various size bolts organized—I put that piece in my home, and no matter who happens to see it, they’ll wind up touching it or saying something or asking questions about it. There’s a life to these old things, and I started to buy more and more of them just to rotate them in the house and play around with how they fit in different settings.

In fact, I was buying so much that I decided to try something new. The one thing I missed most when I started working from home was the interaction with all of my shop clientele, so I thought, Why not open up a shop right here at home? Instead of having a store that kept me busy sixty hours a week, I gathered inventory as I went along and decided to open up my house for a Magnolia trunk show three times a year. I filled four rooms of our home with all sorts of finds and displayed them with the same attention to detail I’d paid to the interior design of my shop. Then I invited all my old clients—and all our new neighbors—to come by.

Those trunk shows were more successful than I ever could have imagined. Not only did I sell a lot of product and make some good money, but the neighbors and their friends all had a chance to see what I’d done to the interior of our Castle Heights home. Suddenly all of these folks with really nice homes started asking us to remodel their homes. In about a year’s time, with four babies and no advertising or marketing budget whatsoever, we made the jump from renovating eight-hundred-square-foot student-rental houses on Third Street to remodeling some of the finest homes in Waco.

By this time our own home in Castle Heights had been featured in some regional magazines. All that attention meant I started putting pressure on myself to always have my home look clean and put together. But with my older children now toddling around, I found it became harder and harder to maintain both a showroom of a home and a practical space for my family.

One afternoon about four years into this new routine of working from home and making a name for Magnolia Homes, I collapsed onto the couch in a state of complete exhaustion. I only had an hour at most before at least one of the kids woke up from his or her nap. I stared at their toys strewn all over the floor and under the end table, and it stressed me out that I had to pick all that up yet again.