designs FOR LIVING GREAT HOMES

LIKE AN ANTIQUE CLOCK THAT NEVER falters, four generations of the family of Richard and Ann Hazlett sit down to dinner in their home every Sunday night. The grandparents, parents, children, and their children gather to relish one another’s company and to be embraced by the warmth of the rambling East Dallas home that never fails to welcome them into its charismatic midst.

That’s just the way its owners wanted this house to be: beautiful but not pretentious, and filled with personality and style rather than hard-edged perfection. With its assortment of books, art, antiques, and family mementos joined harmoniously together, the home has evolved over almost three decades of existence into a place of supremely mellowed comfort.

“The house is an extension of us,” explains Ann. “It’s become our personalities.”

“It’s been a hobby for both of us and a joy to both of us,” adds Richard Hazlett. “We have planned it down to the minute details to get exactly what we wanted.”

When the Hazletts had the house built ” for them 29 years ago, “we set out to build an old house that was new,” Ann continues. “I wanted a house that looked like it had been lived in. With our two sons, we weren’t going to be just looking at this house, we were going to be living in it.”

The Hazletts achieved their goal not only with attitude but with actual design. Both the interior and exterior of the two-story, three-bedroom home make extensive use of aged wood, giving it a sort of Americanized English country look. That singular sort of appearance has produced some bewilderment on the part of builders and workmen over the years.

“I didn’t want the cedar shake singles on the outside walls and roof to be radically out of line, hut I didn’t want them to be in line, either,” Richard says. “It was hard to get these sorts of things over to the builder.”

Another lapse of communication occurred regarding the living room mantel. To cap a Texas fieldstone fireplace in the enormous room, measuring 2 5 feet by 40 feet, the Hazletts had located a rustic cedar beam. They fell in love with the particular piece of wood because they adored a crack spreading almost the entire 18 feet of its length. They arrived one day during the construction to discover to their horror that the thick beam had been sturdily cemented in place- backward. “The workmen proudly told us they had installed it so the crack didn’t show at all,” she remembers.

The Hazletts survived that and other domestic trials, including the rearing of their two sons, and, as Ann laughingly puts it, “millions of other smelly little hoys,” plus such unusual pets as a boa constrictor and a pack of white mice. But none of the misadventures left them as saddened as the time when roofers failed to seal their work in progress a few years hack and rain destroyed hundreds of books in the living room.

“We’ve always been surrounded by books because we love them so much,” she explains. Their library includes everything from new best sellers to scholarly works of British history. Because of his love of the latter, Richard Hazlett owns a bookstore, The History Merchant, specializing in rare, out-of-print, or first-edition histories and biographies, with an emphasis on Winston Churchill. (Hazlett also owns Executive Coffee Service, a business now managed by one of his sons, Ben Hazlett.)

Some of Hazlett’s other abiding interests have found expression in the home. His pastel-and-pencil paintings hang on the living room walls, and various surfaces display the English miniature soldiers he has painstakingly painted (with the use of a magnifying glass) and assembled for dioramas or table-top scenes.

With chat much on hand, Hazlett has left to his wife the duties of interior designer. She’s handled the job with much pleasure, placing side by side antiques, some handsome reproductions, assorted art pieces, and numerous reminders of their travels. None of it may have been intended to fit together, but thanks to Ann Hazlett’s unerring eye, it does. “I think that if you see something you like, it’s generally going to fit into your home, because that’s a compilation of everything you like,” she says.

One thing Ann Hazlett promises she’ll never do is finish working on her home. She’s just completed redoing one of her son’s bedrooms, turning it into a music room (in the manner of a British soldier’s quarters) for her husband, and new granite counters for the kitchen and new upholstery for the living room sofas rank next on her list. Then, no doubt, she’ll find something else. “How boring it would be if everything was perfect,” she concludes.