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I n 1998, Joseph Minton attended a cocktail party at the Preston Road home of Highland Park matriarch Evelyn Jones. Everyone was gathering there for drinks before heading off to Nancy Hamon's 80th- birthday bash at the Dallas Museum of Art, an elab- orate costumed affair with an Arabian Nights theme, for which Hollywood set designer Tony Duquette had trucked in eight semis full of props and costumes. Minton was appropriately dressed for the exotic evening in a tux and a white silk turban festooned with a dia- mond and turquoise pin. He stepped through the foyer into the main room and looked around. Women were elegantly draped in colorful silk saris and turbans, including his companion for the evening, the antiques dealer Betty Gertz, who wore a turban with a spinning cobra as decoration. "But I didn't pay any attention to the people," Minton says. "My eye was immediately drawn to the room's paneling and carved pilasters. I remember looking up at the Corinthian capitals." The beautifully patinated oak paneling enveloped the double- height room, and a fire roared in an enormous fireplace. Minton, an interior designer who splits his time between offices in Fort Worth and his longtime Dallas shop, Joseph Minton Antiques, noted that the mantel was ornately carved from rare, pure-white statuary marble, the kind from which Michelangelo summoned his Renaissance masterpiece David. The room reminded him of the magnificent 18th-century halls he often visited in England while stationed there as an Air Force lieutenant during the Cold War. Almost every year since 1971, he returned to England to buy antiques, and he's provided English antiques and interiors for top-drawer Fort Worth clients such as Anne and Charles Tandy, Bob and Pat Schieffer, and the Fortson family. Minton knows his stuff: This was no ordinary room. But there was no time to investigate, as everyone rushed off to Hamon's party. Years went by, yet the house never left his memory. "It haunted me," he says. "I had no idea that I'd be living in it one day." Fast forward to 2003, when Jones (who passed away in 2011) had put the house up for sale. Minton wasn't in the market to buy a new house. He already had a large home in Fort Worth and shared an apartment in Dallas on Turtle Creek with his longtime partner, Kevin Peavy, the director of Joseph Minton Antiques. Peavy recalls the night five years earlier when Minton came home from Nancy Hamon's party gushing — not about the gala's lavish costumes and sets, but about the mysterious ancient room he'd seen at Evelyn Jones' house. "He was raving about this incredible old room, with its high ceilings and wood paneling, that was such an unexpected surprise, almost like a secret room," Peavy says. "He kept saying what a perfect house it would be for us." The matter was settled; they just had to buy it. 69 (continued on page 58) K nown as the Lost Houses, hundreds of England's ancient country houses and ducal palaces were de- molished in the first half of the 20th century, having fallen victim to changing times and rising taxes. Wingerworth Hall was one such house. In 1920, Major William Hunloke put his family's historic estate up for auction, hoping to find a buyer. Completed in 1729 and set on 5,340 acres north of London in Derbyshire, the stately 22-bed- room manor failed to sell and was torn down in 1929. Several of its rooms were salvaged intact by the London auction house Robersons of Knightsbridge, who took the oak drawing room, li- brary, and large staircase. As a compendium to the sale, Robersons published a catalog documenting these rooms, along with rooms from other estates in black-and-white photographs and detailed descriptions. One stood out: the lofty oak drawing room with its 16 fluted Corinthian pilasters and carved statuary-marble fireplace. As you may have suspected by now, it was this oak drawing room that ended up more than 6,000 miles away in Dallas, inside the house on Preston Road. But how? The trail had gone cold in the 1930s after the Robersons' sale. Once they moved into the house, Minton began researching the room's history and sent photos of it to a cousin in England. The photos made their way to professors studying lost English country houses, who were friends of the family. "I didn't think much would come of it, but a month later my cousin called and left a message," Minton says. "I nearly went through the ceiling." Minton's room was identical to the oak drawing room from Wingerworth Hall. "I started Googling and BY REBECCA SHERMAN ART DIRECTION MICHELLE AVIÑA PHOTOGRAPHY PAR BENGSSTON ARCHITECTURE WILSON McCLURE INTERIOR DESIGN JOSEPH MINTON FLOWERS CHRIS WHANGER AN 18TH-CENTURY OAK DRAWING ROOM, SALVAGED FROM A DEMOLISHED ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSE, LANGUISHED FOR DECADES IN OBSCURITY BEFORE LANDING IN JOSEPH MINTON'S HOME. THE MYSTERY UNRAVELS.