Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1501753
salvaged stone, broken tile, and reclaimed industrial windows. Some are freestanding — a kitchen, a dining room, an orchid room. There are also open-air spaces: a banquette and table tucked into a grassy berm, or the kind of outdoor fireplace Bellamy saw dotting the grounds of villas along the Mediterranean coast, where he spent time. Others are pure whimsy, such as a massive LED light box he reclaimed from One Arts Plaza's sales center after it closed some 15 years ago, now installed on a manicured stretch of lawn. He planted the gardens with evergreen plum yews, Japanese maples, and topiary boxwoods, sculpted into spheres. Here and there, he's placed mounds of shimmering blue slag glass, old stone columns, and pots decorated with colorful broken tiles, planted with lavender and pom pom juniper. "I like layering things, putting a wall around the corner for you to discover, adding surprises to a garden like architectural and other remnants that you might not expect to find," he says. Slag glass, for instance, is the beautifully colored byproduct of the metal-ore-smelting process, and he's used it in gardens since the '80s. Bellamy often brings potential clients here to show them the grounds; many of his clients, such as Jennie Reeves — a gardener herself — have been with him for decades. Bellamy's neighborhood has gradually gentrified since the '80s, with townhouses popping up and raising land values. In 2018, after living in the cramped cottage for 38 years, Bellamy sold a swath of land and put the funds into building a spacious new three-level stucco house, which he designed. The Tower House, as he refers to it, was started at the height of the pandemic and finished last summer. It's his grandest folly yet. Villa Life Robert Bellamy's remarkable compound that started with the tiny pink stucco garage apartment in the 1980s, was a gradual process that took years to complete. For the garage apartment, he removed the front and enclosed the staircase, creating a tri-level apartment inside. Long before industrial chic was popular in Dallas, he installed heavy metal windows he discovered at a wrecking company and hired late artist Judy DeSanders to create etched-glass panes. DeSanders, whom Bellamy had known since childhood, had created artistic windows for legendary 1980s hangouts 8.0 bar, Tango, and Nostromo. Inspired by the architecture of Charles Dilbeck, whose eccentric cottages in Highland Park had enchanted him as a child, Bellamy clad the exterior in an artistic jumble of stones, bricks, and architectural elements salvaged from demolished houses in the area. "Dilbeck's houses always had brick walls that would go this way and that, and rocks that jumped out at you," he says. "I couldn't get over the way he used different materials so well. I loved his work even as a kid." Bellamy's fascination with broken tile and outdoor rooms developed after a stint living in a château in the south of France, studying under the late British garden designer John Brookes, whose public works include the English Walled Garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden and the College Green Garden at Westminster Abbey. "We'd go see all these luxurious Beaux Arts villas along the Mediterranean, and they all had these little follies, almost dug out of the earth," Bellamy says. In Spain, he was enthralled by architect Antoni Gaudí's trencar mosaics, a process that involves creating shapes by combining broken pieces of tile from ceramic tiles, plates, and cups. He returned home and began incorporating trencar-style mosaics into everything, including an arch made from tile shards over the cottage's door. He built a tile studio on the property and began making and selling furniture and pots decorated in trencar-style mosaics. Inspired by the follies he'd seen in the South of France, he built a sunken outdoor banquette from old carved-stone capitals and a twisted, Gaudí-esque outdoor fireplace, which he covered in shards of white tile. "I'd also been to Guatemala and realized how incredible it was to have these houses with green fortresses around them. So, I built a fountain, walls from stone scraps, and planted all around it," he says. A perimeter of towering red cedars —one, 18 feet tall — shield his property from the The Tower House, completed in 2022, references the Mexico City studio shared by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Opposite page: The outdoor fireplace with twisted chimney was inspired by Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí's trencar-style mosaics made from broken tiles. 49