CURATION FIXATION

These Oak Cliff neighbors turn collecting into a fine art

Story by RACHEL STONE | Photos by DANNY FULGENCIO

MARIE KONDO’s 2014 book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” taught many Americans how to keep their homes neat like the Japanese, how to let go of things and declutter one’s life.

But accumulating stuff is part of life. And treasure hunting can be exhilarating.

It’s not easy to strike a balance between tidy and expressive. There is a fine line between hoarding and hobby, but these Oak Cliff residents only select the best, and they take curating their collections to the next level.

Antiques In The Family

What does one buy for the couple who has everything?

When Gretchen Bell and Benny Hinkle got married earlier this year, one friend gave them a human femur bone, which Inuits in the 1800s used to club hunting prey.

We’re sure a nice picture frame would’ve been fine, but it was the perfect gift for this couple, whose lives revolve around antiques.

Bell opened Dolly Python boutique in East Dallas 12 years ago. The shop is known for vintage clothes and cowboy boots as well as its antique-mall style booths from dealers with unusual taste. Her husband, who worked at the White Elephant for 18 years, opened his own shop, Benny Jack Antiques, in a space adjacent to Dolly Python last year.

They live in a two-story house near Kiest Park that is packed with treasures.

The Hinkle-Bells are not minimalists. Every available space on their walls, shelves and side tables are filled with things to draw you in. It’s an astounding amount of stuff, but it’s all put together just so, like a very homey museum.

The front room, with its crimson walls, is a gallery of striking 19th- and 20th-century paintings that Hinkle has collected over the years.

There’s also a zoo of antique taxidermy — a pheasant, a white crane and a baboon, among many others.

Bell started in the business at 19, hitting Dallas estate sales with the classified ads and a Mapsco. She worked at the bygone Ahab Bowen vintage clothing store in Turtle Creek for many years and also worked a second job as an assistant clothing stylist to fund the opening of Dolly Python at age 30.

She collects an overwhelming number of fascinating things, including Fred Harvey railroad jewelry. Harvey was an entrepreneur who opened a string of cafes at railroad depots in the 1800s American West. Those cafes were among the first to sell Native American jewelry to tourists.

She collects “naugahyde monsters” for her 4-month-old son, Furious. They’re dolls that were made in the 1960s to promote the fake-leather naugahyde furniture, and they can sell on eBay for hundreds of dollars.

It took months earlier this year for Bell to pack up and move out of the East Dallas house where she’d lived for more than 10 years. She says it was a painful and deeply personal process of deciding what to keep and what to let go.

Now she has a woman cave in a basement room of the house Hinkle bought four years ago.

In her room, there are nude paintings from the 1940s, handcrafted cowboy boots, 1950s mug shots from the Tarrant County jail, a collection of murderers’ rap sheets from New Orleans, a three-dimensional handmade map of the Americas and pounds of thunderbird jewelry, just to scratch the surface.

“Our style is very different, but we compliment each other,” Bell says. “Our shops are the same way. They reflect our personalities.”

Hinkle and Bell knew each other for many years before they started hanging out a few years ago. On their first date, she gave him a double leopard claw fob for the pocket watch chain that he always wears.

“I could never date someone who was not in this business,” she says. “It’s hard for people to understand what we do.”

When we visited their home in July, Hinkle’s latest acquisition was a taxidermy flying fish.

“I’d never seen one before; that’s why I wanted it,” he says. “That’s always what I’m looking for. Something I’ve never seen.”

Opposite page: Gretchen Bell and Benny Hinkle at home with their son Furious. Clockwise from right: Shelves in the Bell-Hinkle home showcase possessions, including Bell’s “cyclops baby” in a jar, a carnival sideshow prop. Hinkle and Bell have collected enough antique taxidermy to stock a natural history museum. Hinkle has been collecting paintings for many years, and he has an eye for arranging them.