Copyright, 2005, Dallas Morning News. All Rights Reserved.
| February 11, 1990
Pat Gammill gives each room its own, ever-changing motif Mariana Greene THE |
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It's not that the 7,500-square-foot house is crowded with collectibles. In fact, many of her pieces are stashed in closets, stowed in a warehouse and displayed in a newly leased space at Antique Sampler mall. It took four moving vans, she admits, to transfer her possessions here when her husband, a partner and actuary with KPMG-Peat Marwick, was transferred back to Dallas from Darien, Conn., two years ago. "I had boxes from the ceiling to the floor.' haunt) indigenous to Darien. "These were upper-level management people from all over the world living here,' she explains. "They either dumped stuff when they moved in, or dumped it when they moved out.' She points to a wonderful lamp base, a piece of vintage embroidery made into a pillow, a wall of framed bird prints -- all purchased for next to nothing. (Never mind that a 20-cent print from a sidewalk sale is framed in $300 worth of gilded wood or that the pillow made from an embroidered tea towel is edged in $75-a-yard caterpillar fringe.) Even when articles cost several thousand dollars, as in the case of the antique Georgian linen press and pair of Georgian bow-front chests Mrs. Gammill found at a Dallas mail-order catalog outlet, they still seem considerably underpriced. "I seem to have a real good gut instinct if something is a bargain,' she says. Usually, people who scour flea markets and junk shops have one of those interesting houses with layer upon layer of disparate treasures. Every bare inch of space becomes a canvas for artful arrangements. Mrs. Gammill prefers, however, to rotate her furnishings and change the landscape with the seasons, keeping clutter to a minimum and storing the rest. In winter, chairs and sofas turn inward to a fireplace and are insulated against the cold with pillows and throws. In summer, out come the slipcovers, and chairs are turned to face the uncurtained windows and her garden-in-progress. Each room is decorated around a theme, mostly a fantasy of what Mrs. Gammill imagines a certain room in a certain locale should look like. "This is my Dakota living room,' she announces, referring to the venerable apartment building in Manhattan. "Their stuff is old, and they have lived with it for 30 years and they've been happy with it.' It does not matter that Pat Gammill has never been inside a Dakota apartment. The room's mismatched gilded mirrors, odd assortment of gilded chairs and the Irish daybed layered with pillows and dog hair suit her image of what such an apartment should look like. Similarly, one bedroom looks like the 19th century quarters of a Cambridge Latin scholar; a bath with footed tub and pine floors reminds her of a divorcee's bungalow in Sinton, Texas, circa 1958; and the third-floor sitting room, with its striped cottons, white furniture and cabbage-rose chintzes, reminds her of a summer house in Quogue, Long Island. "The old things look like they have been around a long time; they have stability,' explains Mrs. Gammill, who attended 15 different schools as a child. "Maybe that's to compensate for the nomadic life I have led.' Word of her treasure trove stowed in closets and warehouses has spread among photographers, art directors and photo stylists, beginning with a knock on her door asking permission to use her front steps as the backdrop for a photograph of a welcome mat. Renting her house and property for location shootings has developed into a sideline that somewhat compensates for her acquisitive habits, or at least that's what she tells her husband. " "That junk,' he calls it. And it is junk,' she says. "But it is truly the stuff I love.' Mariana Greene writes weekly on home and design. |
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Copyright, 2005, Dallas Morning News. All Rights Reserved. |