SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

This year’s Old Oak Cliff Conservation League Home Tour is all over the map

STORY BY RACHEL STONE PHOTOS BY BENJAMIN HAGER

This year’s Old Oak Cliff Conservation League Home Tour is Oct. 8-9. For the first time, tickets to the tour are available at Tom Thumb on Hampton. They cost $20 for anyone over 10 years old and $12 for seniors, but adult tickets go up to $25 on the days of the tour. The tour often presents magnificent or unusual homes, and this year is no exception. There are 14 houses on the tour this year, from Winnetka Heights to Oak Park Estates, from 100-year-old homes to mid-century modern split-levels.

The two in this story, very different from each other, represent a little of what the home tour will showcase this year. More information is available at ooccl.org.

The 111-year-old Spanish mission

Someone recently gave Candice White a 1973 DallasTimesHerald article about her Spanish mission-style house at 1934 Lansford. It was the paper’s “House of the Week.”

“The style was very ’70s, with flocked black, red and gold wallpaper and shag carpeting everywhere,” she says.

That’s pretty much how it was in 2000 when White moved into the home she calls Villa Blanca.

“We pretty much gutted it,” she says.

The one-story house was built in 1900 and renovated in the ’70s, when two bedrooms were added. Originally, the home facedthecreekthatrunsbehindthe house.But over the years, the back of the home became the front, facing Lansford.

There is a lot of lore surrounding the house.

A previous owner says it was built as a convent,althoughthat’sneverbeen confirmed. Another story tells that the house was a speakeasy during prohibition. Several people have said there is some sort of tunnel that runs from a cupola, which was built as a cistern for collecting water, to the creek. But no one has ever been able to find any tunnel.

About that cupola: Previous owners had used it as a dressing room, as it’s off the master bedroom. They had installed mirrors, wallpaper and shag carpeting.

When White was renovating, she asked her work crew to take all that out, along with a low ceiling that had been installed.

She wasn’t sure what she would find under there. But it turned out to be a high brick silo with windows, which she could see from the outside, untouched since the ceiling was installed.

Now the cupola serves as a reading andmeditationspace,aninteresting feature, if less than functional.

The home’s walls are at least a foot thick, and the home was designed to staycoolbeforeairconditioning.In the winter, White burns wood in two fireplaces to keep it warm. A Bacchus relief over the main fireplace is original to the home, a fact that casts doubt on the convent story but confidence in the speakeasy theory.

White also added arches to the entryways, updated the kitchen and bathroom,andinstalledshiplappineshe bought from an old sugar mill in south Texas. She bought pink marble tiles from a garage sale at a mansion in Kessler Park for about $100, soon after moving. She used that for flooring in the atrium and kitchen.

Asunusualandinterestingasthe inside of the house is, the outside is a gem, too. White tore down some shacks that were on the 3/4-acre property and installed a shaded winding path and a garden with all Texas native plants. The home’sexteriorfeaturesarchitectural details, such as two blue fleurs-de-lis flankingtheoriginalentrance,which make it unique.