Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/536148
Clockwise from top: In the dining area, the antique farmhouse table is from Twenty Six Twenty. Pair of Italianate chairs from Antiques on Dunlavy (now Antiques & Interiors at The Pavilion). Bertoia chairs from Cast + Crew in Marfa. Vintage Eames lounge chair. Hill's balcony cactus garden includes an 8 1/2-foot agave named Javier Bardem. In the bedroom, Ligne Roset platform bed and ottoman. Above the bed, Stewart Cohen's photograph of a gun-toting Marfa resident. Barbara Hill, wearing Marni gold-tipped cowhide shoes. Mid-century chair, which Hill refurbished and recovered the seat in cowhide, features a quote from her Pulpoetry collection. At left is a European telephone, which Hill collects. Word-based artwork by Lawrence Weiner is in Dutch and English. Vintage Platner chairs. Italian Rupert Sanderson ankle boots. In the bath, La Cava's Aqua Grande sink has been left unfinished. Reflected in the mirror is a vintage Bad Company album cover. JULY | PAGE 35 | 2015 like rooms to have something sexy, surprising and humorous about them. I like to play things against each other." Like her interiors, Hill's life is full of contrasts. She grew up in East Texas and entered the Miss Texas pageant in 1956 as a way to escape what she describes as a culturally repressed childhood. "I was way too cutting edge, even back then," she says. She wooed the pageant judges with a rendition of the 1947 French song C'est Si Bon, sung in the manner of sultry cabaret star Eartha Kitt (of "Santa Baby" fame), snagging Hill the title of Miss Texas. A University of Houston lit school dropout — she left school to get married and start a family — the former beauty queen taught herself how to pull together the minimal, chic rooms she's now known for. "It was intuitive. I didn't study with anyone. The closest thing to a mentor I ever had was Dominique de Menil. Just being around her was inspiring," says Hill, who worked for de Menil at the Rice Museum during the '60s and '70s, helping to organize exhibitions and docent tours. In 1971, Hill — whose surname was Cusack at that time — opened Cusack Gallery, where she represented New York and European minimalist and conceptual artists such as Robert Mangold, Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren and Carl Andre. These were "artists that no one in Houston was showing at the time," she says. "By then, I had four kids and was divorced. But it was an exciting time." Hill lived in the attic of the gallery, a 1920s bungalow behind the Contemporary Arts Museum. Hill's daughters lived in the gallery's back rooms, and her sons