My Blue Heaven: Julian Onderdonk at the DMA

If you’ve been in Texas for any amount of time, you’ve seen the inescapable bluebonnet landscape paintings. Many homes feature one, my grandmother’s for example, over the fireplace. Well, the ones at the DMA, in Bluebonnets and Beyond: Julian Onderdonk, American Impressionist, are much better. And unlike our unpredictable season, the DMA assures viewers four months of peaceful gazing and grazing among the state flowers (March 23-July 20). Sarah Eveans and I got a sneak peak today and discovered why Onderdonk was christened “The Bluebonnet Painter.” (more…)

Residential Architecture Standouts on April Home Tour

[Photos: Tim Hursley]

Those familiar with the Godbey Lecture Series know its discussions–Encounters with Medieval Spain; Poetry of John Keats; and Russia at the Crossroads–can make you the darling of any cocktail party. Their twelfth annual spring tour of homes, benefiting the fund for faculty excellence at SMU, offers more useful info. The April 3 tour features the work of Lawrence Speck of Page Southerland Page, Lionel Morrison of Morrison Seifert Murphy, and Gary Cunningham of Cunningham Architects. The Dallas residences are quite lookers, as this Speck house (not spec house) shows. He redesigned this Turtle Creek-side home, originally by the late great Bud Oglesby. $150, a small price to pay for a Dallas Architecture 101 course. Register by calling 214-768-2532.

Home Tour in San Miguel Allende

The homes here are painted stucco and I’m told the painters mix the pigment on the spot, no chips from the Home Depot. Miraculously, they come back in a year and can match the paint perfectly — it’s an art. My visit here has made me re-consider building to the lot line. In SMA, homes are built to the lot line. You enter the door and walk into a glorious courtyard and garden in the middle of the home. This floorplan was devised centuries ago during the gold and silver rush for security so wagons loaded with commodities could pull in and be locked up for the night behind the front door and gates. I’d LOVE to have my backyard in the middle of my house!