October 19, 2006

• I'm back!

  Lovely house, just lovely.  A few reflections, in no particular order of importance:

  • Amazing how low the upstairs railing was!  It came to mid-thigh on me and I'm 5'5"; if someone's 6' it'd be closer to knee-high.  No wonder the Historical Society forbade any children under the age of 13 years old. 
  • Hadn't realized that it had once housed the Fort Worth Girls' Service League, several of whom showed up.  That was interesting, indeed, to listen to them happily reminisce about old times, pointing out which room had been their bedroom and how many girls had slept in it, that they all ate together in the dining room at a very long table, how the door was locked at 11:00 p.m. so if a girl wasn't home by then she was locked out till morning, and their luggage had been kept in the third floor ballroom, which sadly enough was off-limits for the tour.  No one had ever fallen over the railing onto the stairs below, so far's they could recall.
  • There are mostly two different types of attendees....those who zoom quickly through, which seems a waste of $15-20 (the price of a ticket), and those who are determined to get every dime's worth of value by inspecting each room thoroughly and exhaustively, often asking a plethora of unanswerable (at least by me) questions.
  • People don't listen worth a flip when told "Don't touch anything."  A bunch of first-graders couldn't require more supervision.  A set of twisted shapes made of green glass caused particular problems, as attendees wanted to fiddle with them.
  • Some designers are marvelously talented, while some have strange taste.  Who on earth would take the room which had been the nursery when the Waggoners owned it and, instead of turning it back into a nursery, make it a very modern guest bedroom?  At least the colors worked with the rest of the upstairs, but it didn't fit the house at all.  Another designer included African masks in one of the downstairs rooms, which I thought were quite jarring.  Maybe designers like jarring?
  • Someone in Fort Worth must have a whole lot more money than do I (ha!), based upon the prices of the various elements used by the designers.  A sofa in one room was $16,000.  A painting was $20,000.  The amount of money represented by the furniture, accessories and art in that house is astounding.  The drapes in the Master Retreat (my assigned room) are available as a Showhouse Special for $3,500.  For TWO windows, one of which is quite narrow!    Who'd pay that kind of money for drapes to cover two windows in one small room?

  The volunteer in the room down to the right and I decided what's needed is a Designer Showhouse held in an actual home, such as one built by D.H. Horton or KB Homes, and furnished strictly with goods from Home Depot, SuperTarget, Dillards, etc. with no single item costing more'n $2,000.  IOW, a Showhouse For The Rest Of Us. 

  That same volunteer told a tale that'll make your hair stand on end, depending upon how easily that happens.  She said a few years ago she was with a friend who was taking something or other to an upholsterer's to be redone.  While there the man opened the door to what was a storeroom filled with, well, junk.  It was old, beat-up pieces of furniture he'd snag off the curb as he drove around.

  The kicker?  According to him, several designers regularly came by to scrounge through his junk collection, culling pieces and having him refurbish them, whereupon the designers would sell them for huge sums of money.  Stuff collected off the street, that'd been chucked out by someone!  Can you imagine?  He thought it quite amusing, thinking of people in well-off houses, paying fabulous sums of money for "designer" furniture which had been tossed out to be collected as trash.
  
  

  • 3:52 pm
  • 3 Comments