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house in Benjamin Moore Luminous white punctuated by Tricorn black. An artist at heart, Roberson grew up in West Virginia, where she was a frequent visitor to the Dorothy Draper-designed Greenbrier resort. "It's one of my favorite places on Earth," she says. "The colors and sophistication really had an impact on me." Roberson made her way to Dallas by way of SMU, where she was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Meadows School of the Arts, where she focused on drawing and photography. After college, she worked in New York City as a fashion photographer, among other jobs. After four years, the rigors of surviving wore on her, and she moved back to Dallas, where she took a job at Dunn and Brown Contemporary (now Talley Dunn Gallery). She also served as assistant to noted art photographer Nic Nicosia, who is known for exploring the dark side of sub- urbia through staged black-and-white pho- tographs that blur the line between fiction and reality. "There's something haunting about Nick's work that I relate to," Rober- son says. The two have remained close friends, and several of his works hang in her house, including his 1991 Real Pictures #6, a dark and unsettling image of a young girl standing on the kitchen table dressed like a ballerina in the spotlight, while her parents look on from the shadows. The pho- tograph hangs in the dining room above an antique French chair, a family heirloom left in its tattered original upholstery, its white muslin underside exposed. It's a stunning composition layered in meaning, elicited from her years as a trained artist rather than any formal notion of what interior decoration should be. Roberson inherited design clients from friend Emily Miller, while Miller was on maternity leave. The transition to designer seemed a good fit; Roberson had already been styling shoots for Miller's finished proj- ects, and Miller had confidence in Rober- son's eye. "I've had to teach myself about the business side of it," she says. "But the fact that I haven't gone to school for inte- rior design means I don't have anyone's voice in my head, telling me to do things a certain way." One of her first jobs was the interiors for her husband's restaurant, 18th & Vine, a barbecue spot inside an old Tu- dor house on Maple Avenue, which gets as much praise for the crisp black-and-white interiors as it does for the food. F or Roberson, interior design is just another way to dig deeper into our- selves, much as a photograph by Cindy Sherman makes us delve below the surface. "The mystery of Sherman's photo- graphs fits my house perfectly," Roberson says. "I get what she is trying to do. There is something normal and familiar in her work, but also something odd. I see this quality in my own work." The sense of peeling back layers is also what drives Roberson to antique stores and flea markets. "You see an old chair, and it makes you wonder: Who sat in that? That chair has information about someone's life, about their journey." Her house is filled with mementos of the past: old pocket watches, cards with inter- esting calligraphy and photo-booth images of friends. There are antique typewriters from a typewriter-repair business owned by her husband's family and tiny bronze casts of her children's hands made by artist Brad Oldham. There's a gallery wall with black- and-white family portraits and a drawing by artist Helen Altman. "All kinds of stories come to mind when I look at these things," she says. "I like layers — that's real life. To me, it's important not to just show the surface, but to show some depth." THE HOUSE IS A VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF ROBERSON'S PERSONALITY — A PARADOX OF EMOTIONS THAT WE ALL EXPERIENCE THROUGHOUT A SINGLE DAY, IF WE'RE WILLING TO ACKNOWLEDGE THEM. 82 In the master bath, Waterworks Highgate fixtures. Signature Hardware tub. Vintage salvaged door. French chair in cowhide from Calypso St. Barth. Antique pagoda mirror from Circa Who, Miami.