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FEBRUARY | PAGE 39 | 2015 tips. Her personal style is all about looking natural and keeping things real; talk to her five minutes, and you realize the type of beauty she peddles is much more than skin-deep. It's an authenticity she's translated at home with the nurturing help of her best friend, interior designer Lucinda Loya of Houston-based Lucinda Loya Interiors. Tonya was 17 and fresh from Kansas when she met Loya, then 24 and dating Tonya's brother. A transplant from Louisville, Kentucky, Loya saw a kindred small- town spirit in her new friend. "The minute we met, she became my soul sister," says Loya. Twenty years ago, they began making twice-a-year trips to Round Top together, "sweating it out in the fields with lemonade and Rice Krispies treats," Loya remembers, and hauling treasures and "rubbish" back in the car "piled so high we couldn't see each other, so talking was all we could do." Those car rides home, filled with "intimate conversations and laughs," helped build an enduring bond between the two women. Much of what they bought over the decades at Round Top has ended up in Tonya's last three houses. Some things worked; others didn't. "When she and I started antiquing together, we had so much fun discovering that we gathered up everything we loved before we could make sense of it all," says Loya, who founded her firm 17 years ago. "Through the years, our tastes have evolved into a more reinforced esthetic, cleaning up our act along the way. Tonya's previous home was decorated with some influences of a French farmhouse from all that had been collected — hornet's nests, driftwood remnants, flower vases, china doll legs, broken angel wings. Now I've tweaked it by adding cleaner lines with newly purchased furniture [such as an oversized farmhouse table in the dining room, R & Y Augousti shagreen tables spotted on a trip they made to Barneys New York, and a Corbusier leather chair from Internum], adding art of larger scale and just taking a more modern approach, such as angling the antique sofa from the wall in a somewhat awkward and unexpected way. Truth be told, we jokingly call it 'farm tweak.'" The architecture of the Riners' current house was designed by husband Wade, a real estate investor, "who had this house in his head forever," says Tonya. "He is good with all the spatial things I don't understand." Clean-lined and modern in slabs of marble and oversized chevron wood flooring and In the dining room, antique doors from a French chateau were hinged together and mirrored. Beneath, a custom iron table covered in Designer's Guild Blue Roseus wallpaper. Farmhouse table and wingback chairs from Restoration Hardware. Framed antique pattern studies for wallpaper are from New Orleans. Window coverings are in sheer Pollack wool. Designer Lucinda Loya studies the room. In the living room, wood floors are over-scaled herringbone pattern. Eighteenth-century baroque sofa upholstered in Pollack Smoke mohair. Artwork: Large work by Dornith Doherty from McMurtrey Gallery; reversal drawing by Randy Twaddle from Moody Gallery; photographs Frazier King; images from Tonya Riner's test photo shoots. A low tray next to the antique sofa holds a lichen and a twig birdcage. A detail shot of the antique mirrored doors from a French château that hang in the dining room. Tonya Riner personalized it with entries from her grandmother's diary in china marker.