Ubiquitous design blogger Joni Webb hyperventilates over the March issue of Veranda magazine, which features actual interior pics of the house Kay O’Toole had built behind her Kay O’Toole Antiques & Eccentricities shop. The shop is in the building with the rounded corners next to the Firkin & Phoenix Pub parking lot at 1921 Westheimer:
I had heard the blogosphere mumbling about this Veranda showing Kay O’Toole’s new house and that was what had my mouth watering like Edward’s whenever Bella is around. Honestly, I’ve been waiting over two years for this issue!
O’Toole owns a French antique shop housed in a 1920s brick building that was once home to several different businesses. Through the years, she eventually acquired the entire building and tore down the dividing walls – creating a long and narrow haven for the best of what France, and now Belgium, Sweden, and Italy have to offer.
O’Toole’s single-story, one-bedroom stucco home — designed by Murphy Mears Architects — is another long and narrow haven, modeled after something O’Toole saw in New Orleans’s French Quarter: It’s one room deep, and backs up to the property’s back fence.
Couldn’t Webb have just charmed her way inside, camera in hand? Oh, she’d tried that:
Comment of the Day: Salvage Army Collections, Door to Door
“It would be great if there was an organization to address this need. I’ve done some drive bys of the listed demos and seen everything from old clothing, furniture, fixtures, windows, cabinets, doors, everything get piled up and thrown into the roll-offs. Historic Houston and Habitat Re-Store seem to let the opportunities come to them rather than seek them out. Is there a way to get the word out to the masses that there is a way to reduce the waste and that salvage is an option?” [mstark, commenting on Demolition Strip Search]