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62 In the main-house living room is a series of paintings by Palm Beach artist Michelle Feder. Over the mantle, vintage painting found in France. Hammered-metal and stone side tables from Mecox. Cities TALE OF TWO After opening seven stores, Mecox founder Mac Hoak and Fred Perkins pulled up stakes in the Hamptons and put down roots in an old French manor house in Houston — just shy of the store's 20th anniversary. BY REBECCA SHERMAN. PRODUCED BY MICHELLE AVIÑA. PHOTOGRAPHY PETER MOLICK. L ike almost everything in the retail genius' creative orb, Mecox founder Mac Hoak's 85-year-old museum- area house comes with a good story. First, let's go back 25 years, when Hoak was working in finance in New York City. He fell in love with Fred Perkins, a Houston native (now his husband and Mecox vice president), whom he'd enticed to Manhattan with the promise of returning to Texas after a few years (the limit Perkins could imagine going without good enchiladas and frozen margaritas). But a career change intervened: On a blustery February day in 1996, Hoak drove along Montauk Highway in Southampton and spotted a vacant storefront once occupied by a family-run landscaping business. "I was a novice gardener and had a grandfather who loved gardens," he says, "so I wanted to do something in that part of the world." When he got home, Hoak called the broker and leased the building. A month later,