Kim and Ryan Roberts had never had a house to call their own.
In the four years they’d been married, Ryan, a professional baseball player, and his wife had moved 26 times, hopping between furnished apartments as his career took them all over the country. They spent off-seasons in the Dallas area, where they both grew up. But last January, they finally decided to plant roots in Preston Hollow, and Kim was determined to do it right—even if housesitters would be enjoying the home most of the year.
“When we lived in Arizona (while Ryan played for the Diamondbacks), a bunch of my girlfriends from the team had designers,” she remembers. “We didn’t have a house, so we would always just see these amazing houses, and I would dream of the day that I could do the same thing. When we bought the house, I mentioned it to my husband and he was, like, ‘Oh, you can do it.’ And I said, ‘No. We need a professional.’”
‘One of the coolest things Ryan said to me was, “I don’t want anything related to baseball here. This is my home, not a showcase for my talent.”‘
“Her husband laughs because we are a lot alike,” Doniphan says. “If I loved it, she loved it. It was a match made in heaven.”
Most of the yearlong renovation and design process took place while Kim and her children—Hudsyn, 4, and Lyric, 18 months—were living in Clearwater Beach, Florida, while Ryan was playing for the Tampa Bay Rays. So she and Doniphan collaborated by phone, talking as often as five times a day. When a decision required an in-person meeting of the minds—creating the intricate tile pattern for the floor of the downstairs powder room, for instance—Doniphan would fly to them.
As most long-distance relationships go, this one required a lot of trust. Fortunately, that wasn’t an issue. “They really let me take the lead,” Doniphan says. “She trusted that I had her best interest at heart all the time.”
If she had any doubts, the finished product she came home to last November wiped them away. The billiard room, media room, and now-cozy living area (created by capping the high ceiling to make way for an upstairs playroom) provide the perfect places for entertaining friends and family, which they do nearly every night they’re in town. The master bedroom got the sexy makeover she wanted. And her love of fashion is evident throughout the house, though perhaps nowhere more clearly than her two-story closet, which features a spiral staircase.
‘Doniphan took my vision and inspiration to another level.’