Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1544028
W hen lifestyle influencer Ashley Robertson called designer Ginger Curtis to say she'd just bought a 1929 Tudor in Dallas' University Park, Ginger's answer was immediate. "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," she remembers saying. The two had worked together before, on a new-construction home that Robertson, whose Instagram followers number in the hundreds of thousands, had partly designed around her social media content — bright, shoppable, clean-lined. This was something else entirely — layered with history and the kind of gravitas that only an old house can carry. Curtis, founder of Dallas-based Urbanology Designs, lives in a house built in 1901 and has a deep affinity for the old world — its crown moldings, worn floors, and rooms that reveal themselves one at a time. "That's something you cannot recreate in new construction," she says. Robertson's Tudor was everything she admired. In the family room, the walls rose in dense, trowel- heavy ridges, the way bark accumulates on an old tree. It was a diamond in the rough, she told Robertson. "I've never seen anything like it in all the years I've done projects," she says. "Not in houses, not in architectural books. It felt like a one-off creation." The house needed work — its updates had gathered carelessly over the decades — and it was too small for Robertson; her husband, Austin, who helps manage her business; and their children. Curtis expanded the footprint significantly, adding a den, a breakfast nook, and a primary suite. The former door openings — "boring and square," in Curtis' words — were 86