Dear Reader
Our Mission
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“I can’t believe how intelligent your people are,” said The Person to Whom I am Married. I took him to mean my staff, thanked him, and said I would pass along the compliment. “Well, your staff is smart, too,” he said, “but I meant the people you write about.”
Ah, the forest. Ah, the trees. Mr. Allison’s dim understanding of what D Home publishes – and why we publish it – is why I thought to share our editorial mission, especially on this, the occasion of our six-year anniversary. I think it’s fair to state that when we entered the market in 2000, Dallas was known mainly for its McMansions, the residential version of “whose is bigger?” Not only was this our reputation across the country, but – much worse – it is what we believed about ourselves. I wondered as we put together the first issue: How could the most brazenly entrepreneurial city on the planet be so haplessly conventional when it came to matters of design and architecture? The answer was simple: It isn’t. As we discovered in the early days of this magazine, Dallas has interior designers and architects producing remarkable projects and a preponderance of people – intelligent people! – living gracious, thoughtful lives. Now we’re holding these people up to the world and saying, “This is Dallas; this is who we are.”
Ignoring Dallas’ proverbial appetite for glitz – and publishing the city’s intelligent yet stylish side – has been an engagement in aesthetic politics. If you accept the adage that all politics is local, then you will understand that what we are doing at D Home is deeply political. We publish the homes, gardens, products, and advertisers whom we think advance the aesthetic of our city.
To give you an idea, read Rebecca Sherman’s story about Julia Dodd’s Oak Cliff house, with interiors designed by Loyd Taylor of Loyd-Paxton Inc. Here is a meticulously designed, mid-century modern ranch-style house from which you will glean decorating ideas and great sources. But you also will discover in this story a woman with the courage to toss off the bridle of family history and start her own story, using the vocabulary of furniture, art, and space. In this issue you will also tour Anne and Alan Bromberg’s house. These iconoclastic individuals have lived their entire marriage in a two-story clapboard house in Highland Park. No designer. No maids. Just the two of them. With Glenn Arbery’s words and Dave Shafer’s photography, you will meet these characters, at once fastidious and generous, and see how they are living this chapter of their long marriage, surrounded by their books and sacred treasures.
The worth of intelligent people is that they make you think: about how you live your life, what it means to create a home, how you relate to your neighborhood and your community. D Home’s interest is not in publishing pictures and stories about all of the status that money can buy, but in showing domestic life in this city in its most beautiful, intriguing forms. Perhaps you will take some inspiration from these pages.
Enjoy this issue, and let me hear from you.
Cordially,
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CHRISTINE ALLISON
Editor and Publisher
[email protected]
