PaperCity Magazine

November 2016 - Dallas

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Filled with sophisticated furnishings from the era — Paul McCobb, Edward Wormley, Billy Baldwin, Philip and Kelvin Laverne, Harvey Probber, and Paul Evans — the Louisiana house was a glamorous introduction to a world of design that would become Bodron's passion. "My youth was spent riding my bike looking at houses," he says. "Riverside Drive was where the historic plantations and big old 1920s and 1930s houses were. I was just as obsessed with the wonderful traditional houses as the modern ones." Bodron's fam- ily lived in a 1960s ranch house a short bike's ride from the levee — his father was a pediatrician, his mother a civic leader and Junior League member. Bodron often pedaled to the library and filled his bike basket with books on houses with floor plans. When older, he accompanied his mother to look at houses for sale, some of them on the bayou. Like others in town, she admired the houses on the tributary, he says. House-hunting gave Bodron his first lessons in developing floor plans. "I'd go home and get my ruler out and paper and try to draw the houses to scale," he says. As part of a class assignment in high school, Bodron interviewed the aforemen- tioned businessman and architect for a paper he was writing. So began the start of a friendship that lasted until the architect's death in 2012. When his widow decided to sell the house on the bayou and move to the Villa D'Este high-rise in Houston, where her daughter also had an apartment, she hired Bodron + Fruit to remake her new home. Her only request? Use as many of the original furnishings as possible. Bodron was only happy to oblige. M aybe it's his Southern her- itage, but Bodron's inte- riors are known for being as comfortable as they are sleek — a balance that takes a lot of advance planning. "The first thing I always ask clients is how they want their house to work, not what they want it to look like," he says. Furniture plans are finalized long before clients ever sign off on purchases. In this case, it meant measuring, photographing, and cataloging each piece of furniture from the house on the bayou, then working with the scale and shapes on paper. "One of my specialties is figuring out what can fit," Bodron says. Meanwhile, the envelope of the 15-year- old Villa D'Este apartment underwent substantial remodeling, including the en- try, kitchen, master bath, bedroom, and closets, along with new lighting and paint colors. Because she wanted the option to enclose the dining room from the living area, Bodron created four textured sliding glass doors. The original classical panel- ized columns that ordered the space were retained. "Many high-rises are big boxes in the sky without architecture, so sometimes it's nice to use moldings and decorative light fixtures," he says. Case in point: the Ingo Maurer pendant that was purchased for the reception area. Constructed of three layers of silver-leaf tea paper, it's a lustrous, sculptural element. The owner likes texture, so Bodron used plenty of Schumacher wall coverings, including in the entry niche and on all the decorative pilasters, which had previously been mir- rored. In the dining room, Bodron opted to keep two monumental palm-tree floor lamps left by the previous owners, because they "screamed of being something really good," Bodron says. It was a lucky find: After doing some research, Bodron discov- ered the lamps are rare pieces by French furniture maker Maison Jansen. Armed with a solid furniture plan, Bodron determined that much of his client's vintage pieces would work in the new residence, including a nine-foot cus- tom Widdicomb sofa, two pairs of Billy Baldwin slipper chairs, a matching pair of McCobb lounge chairs, a massive Philip & Kelvin LaVerne cocktail table, and a dining table attributed to Gio Ponti and Bertha Schaefer. Carefully refinished and reupholstered in such luxurious fabrics as Romo, Great Plains, Bergamo, and Zimmer + Rohde, the client's original 78 In the breakfast room, vintage Paul McCobb table and chairs, with Larsen textile from Culp Associates. Photograph by Mathieu Mercier. In the entry, antique Persian kilim rug from Abrash Decorative Rug Gallery. Vintage Paul McCobb credenza. Glass sculpture by Gene Koss, 1993. Wall panels from a house in Kent, circa 1730. Designer Mil Bodron

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