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DECEMBER | PAGE 73 | 2015 Previous page: Mariquita is the matriarch of an extended family and an ever-burgeoning third-generation jewelry firm. She wears a suite of her signature bold glass creations. Circa-late-17th-century portrait of Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller. This page, clockwise from top left: The dining room channels the Queen Anne era, as a suite of chairs from Germany, circa 1740, encircles the dining table. Furnishings from the late 17th and early 18th century dominate the first-floor interiors. Outside the upstairs sitting room, a work on paper by William Goldsmith, a globe-trotting friend from San Miguel. A punctuation point in the living room is the heavily carved Baroque-era fireplace mantle, a find from an English antiquing jaunt. Above, a Mexican skeleton band. Mexican garb and walls painted an optimistic shade of marigold. Signature glass creations fill the shelves, encircled by white branches, evoking a tableau straight out of a Joseph Cornell box. While her brand is indicative of the Mariquita touch, where the glamorous and the unexpected frequently collide, and Masterson herself cites Picasso as touchstone for entering new territories ("'I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it"), this is a story of reinvention. The jeweler says of the impetus for a big move, "At 75, it was time for the beginning of my new chapter." That was two and a half years ago, when she put her long-time River Oaks home — where she and her late husband had reared their brood of kids and grandkids — on the market. She found a new receptacle worthy of future adventures in a cozy English Tudor, which needed almost a year-long renovation. After residing in temporary digs — she moved into this redone abode in early 2014, earnestly entreating designer and dear friend Richard Holley to speed up the workmen and get the new nest ready. His only condition, Masterson laughingly recalls, "was that I leave town" while the interiors were finalized and the furnishings installed. While some of Masterson's previous antiques and art made the cut, other pieces were divvied up among her children. The resulting rooms devised by Holley cannot be described as spare, but as a perfect balance of talismans —a collection of European silver vessels here, an 18th-century portrait there — and treasures that seem anchored in a time period approaching 1690 to 1730, the era of William and Mary, throughout the living room, with a few touches of Queen Anne in the dining room. Stalwart wooden chairs with flourishes of turned baluster arms and rails, and in many cases, original needlepoint upholstery cozy up to gate-leg turned tables. Paintings of the era — a brooding landscape or still life throughout the main hub of the house — are enlivened by works such as an early Mexican colonial embroidery, inherited from her own family. At a spry 77 ½, Masterson is poised for her next endeavors, all hatched from this casa or her adjoining garage, which doubles as a design studio — planning a Society for the Performing Arts dinner party after the original one was rained out; experimenting with fresh freeform designs in which the glass is flecked with gold leaf; searching for tequila cocktail recipes based on one featuring tamarinds she imbibed years ago in Taxco; perfecting chile relleno and cheese soufflé in time for holiday entertaining and a guest list that includes the discerning Jackson Hicks as well as hoards of grandchildren; contemplating a new Dallas retailer for her exuberant necklaces, earrings and rings; and above all, savoring con gusto "my new chapter."