a photographer’s home

Story by JEHADU ABSHIRO | Photography by KATHY TRAN

in 1986, a photographer and an artist decided to build two houses — one for living and one for art.

The two-story stucco structures have glass block, large circle windows and a maze of winding stairs and decked bridges connecting the two buildings. Obsessed with Hawaii, the couple eventually moved, or so East Kessler neighbors say.

In 2007, the next couple bought the structures. They decided to merge the two buildings, enclosing a jagged portion of the limestone cliff. The photo studio with floor-to-ceiling windows became a master bedroom with an ensuite laden in marble. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovations. Yet they never updated the electrical panel, which had all the markings of a full photo studio.

In a full-circle moment, photographer Kathy Tran and writer Daniel Rockey came across the Art Deco house in 2022. They hadn’t planned on buying a house for three to five years. They had been looking for a warehouse, but those are rare and expensive in Dallas. It was tight in their 1,600-square-foot Deep Ellum loft that doubled as a photo studio, but they were eventually planning to build a container home that compartmentalized both their work and personal lives.

This Haines Avenue house was literally made by a photographer who wanted to work and live in the same space.

“We loved it so much,” Tran says. “We put in the bid that same night.”

An investment group already had made a bid, so Tran and Rockey decided to overbid to clinch the deal.

And 36 years later, the lot on the right once again is a photo studio, and the lot on the left, a home for a photographer.

It’s not often that a 29-year-old photographer owns a $1.1 million compound, neighbored by doctors and Mark Cuban’s lawyer.

“When I got this house, I looked around. I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, this is how much I’ve been working?’ I had no idea that I was going to be able to afford something like this at 28 years old,” Tran says.

Tran has been handling three to four photoshoots a day every day for more than a decade. She has been hustling since she was a child, living in Richardson. She grew up in a strict, traditional Vietnamese household with what she describes as an abusive, alcoholic father. Her blue-collar parents worked long, hard hours trying to make ends meet.

“I was the firstborn. They really had their eyes on me,” she says. “So, I was rebellious. I was looking for love in all the wrong places.”

After getting pregnant at 13 in a statutory rape case with a 22-year-old (he went to jail), she was homeless and got herself emancipated as a minor.

“I forget that a lot of people don’t know that about me. They don’t know where I’m coming from because I went through all the hardships when I was younger — pregnant, raped, abused, homeless,” Tran says. “I just felt so powerless. For the rest of my life, I’ll have my own independence and control over my own life.”

Her former middle school counselor opened her home to Tran. First, she was spending one night there, then two, three nights a week. Then she was adopted.

“And then it ended up being where my white dad and I were painting my own room,” Tran says. “And that was like a very dad and daughter thing that I’ve always wanted.”

Her Asian and American families blended into one, she says, celebrating milestones and holidays as one unit.

“I went from living in the ’hood to a gated community. There was a lot of changes for me to see,” Tran says. “I’ve lived my life in opposites.”

Always drawn to art, she went to a magnet school beginning in seventh grade. Her American parents took her to museums and pushed her to explore the arts. She dabbled in other art forms, but paintings don’t dry fast enough, and art is often a lonely experience. Photography is fastpaced, filled with human interaction.

By the time she started at a Dallas Community College, she had built a business shooting portraits and weddings. Plans to transfer to Southern Methodist University to study advertising eventually faded. One, she needed to take care of invoices and clients instead of studying lecture notes. Perhaps more importantly, she realized advertising wasn’t for her. She loved photojournalism.

Hard news, protests, street style, concerts, she was shooting it all.

Central Track was her first journalism client. Then she heard the food photographer at the Dallas Observer had left. Tran drove to the editor’s house and said she wanted to do the food photography.

Our love of architecturally significant properties is matched only by our love for this unique part of Dallas. From the historic districts to the up-and-coming neighborhoods, we are passionate about what makes this community, and those that call it home, special.

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That’s when her career shifted.

Food became her bread and butter. This is a city that eats. A restaurant that needs photos for marketing pops up almost every week, and the metroplex is littered with food-oriented corporations.

She’d eat leftover food from shoots for sustenance, so she never really learned to cook. The first time she invited Rockey over to her home, she pulled out a smorgasbord of 10 different types of cuisine.

“I think like a month before I met him, I was like, alright, I’m gonna try cooking. And I think God was like, ‘Thank you for trying. Here is your man,’” Tran says.

They had matched on Tinder while Tran was hanging around University of Dallas’ engineering school — she figured she was going to end up with an engineer and decided that was the best place to find them. Rockey, a Frito Lay food scientist and chef, happened to be visiting his engineer brother.

Eventually, Rockey left his corporate job to join the Kathy Tran team as a videographer, food stylist, writer and editor. The first few years they were together, he’d write the stories, and she’d shoot the photos.

Most, if not all, of her original clients in the hungry years are still with her. (This includes the Advocate , for which Tran has worked as a freelance photographer for the past 10 years.) The Kathy Tran team is Rockey, Tran and two other staff members. They’re working three to four shoots a day still.

But it’s a new season for them. The house is just one part of it.

There are the normal quirks of owning a house built into the side of a cliff that was originally two separate buildings. There may not actually be a single straight wall in the 4,601-square-foot house. A little mix-up had the city shut off their water because records hadn’t been updated to reflect the buildings were combined. And an air conditioning hullabaloo.

“If you take the whole thing and put into the wash, it comes out fine still,” Rockey says.

He built a wall to turn a space into a guest room. They made the three-story spiral staircase dog-safe. They’re working through the cosmetic changes. Painting the kitchen black is on the short list. The bathroom in their treehouse-like master suite needs to be gutted of the hot tub and mauve tiles. The next big project is building out the deck to even out the terrain, so they can have a backyard wedding with the Dallas’ skyline as a backdrop.

Rockey’s mother and one of their best friends live with them in the house. A friend with an educationbased nonprofit is renting one of the larger spaces to work out of. When her father was in the throes of dementia, her Asian parents moved into one of the rooms. The six-bedroom, six-bathroom house makes it feasible.

“I just love being able to have these different lives in here, that live a different pace,” Tran says. “And I think it’s like a great reminder of where you are in your life.”

Tran has always had penchant for compounds. Before she and Rockey lived in the loft, she was renting two duplexes.

“I wanted to run this creative community,” Tran says. “This is better than I’ve ever imagined. Because I wouldn’t have designed a layout like this that worked for us. We didn’t know what it was going to look like, but we knew what we wanted it to be.”

Their creative community is wellness-oriented. The team cycles together regularly, and neither Tran nor Rockey drink alcohol. They prefer “aggressively lounging” in their home, surrounded by their people.

“I know I work a lot, but I am very big about having a balanced lifestyle,” Tran says. “I spend a lot of time with family. It’s very half-and-half because I go real hard on both.”

The couple hosts yoga classes in the studio, dubbed Kessler Studio, and neighbors just walk over and walk in. They had an artist showcase with more than 100 guests earlier this year.

It’s all part of the bigger shift into becoming a lifestyle brand. A YouTube channel was launched late last year so she can share her story and the life Rockey and her are building.

“I want to just live my life a little bit more creatively,” she says. “I shoot for so many other people that I want to focus on shooting some things for myself. And I want people to know me better and hire me for who I am.”

Like murder mysteries, arguments about politics and unsolicited relationship advice from your weird Aunt Deb, it all started with a dinner party.

Well, many dinner parties. At potluck gatherings that met every month for years at the homes of Winnetka Heights residents who live south of Twelfth Street.

And over the course of these evenings, the neighbors discussed, among other things, the rapidly changing neighborhood of Oak Cliff and their concerns that their tight-knit community may eventually be taken over by developers.

Their neighbors to the north were protected from this worry.

The Winnetka Heights Historic District was adopted in 1981 and is the second largest historic district in Dallas. Spanning from Twelfth Street to Davis, and Rosemont to Willomet, the district preserves around 50 city blocks worth of prairie and bungalow-style homes.

South Winnetka Heights was interested in that protection.

So neighbor Michael “Patty” Evans decided to say “screw it.”

Preserving The Style

While Winnetka Heights is a part of a historical district, which protects all historic architecture and impacts any modification made to a historic home, the residents of South Winnetka Heights were more interested in pursuing a conservation district application.

A conservation district is an ordinance that is laid out by neighbors during community meetings and is intended to preserve the physical look and style of the neighborhood it covers. Regulations are completely determined by the community members with minimum requirements in different categories such as architecture and development.

That feedback is then drafted up by city staff and ratified by the City Plan Commission and City Council.

South Winnetka is small, only around 95 residential homes that sit within the borders of West Twelfth Street, South Edgefield Avenue, West Brooklyn Avenue and South Polk Street.

The majority of the homes are one-story, and all but three were built before 1940.

Evans has lived in the area since 2005, and he says he joined the neighborhood because he was drawn in by the homes’ charming aesthetics.

It’s a sentiment shared by many of South Winnetka’s residents.

After witnessing a historic home on Willomet Avenue get demolished, and a new modern one replace it “within a matter of days,” Evans and other neighbors realized they needed to work toward conservation district status “sooner than later.”

He “didn’t know anything” about the process of becoming a conservation district, so he began reading online and calling city staff about the prospect.

“I think a lot of people don’t realize that, actually, most of the city employees will work with you a lot. You know, they don’t get calls like that very often,” Evans says.

In July 2020, nearly one year after the neighborhood’s first inquiry into the conservation district application, city staff determined that South Winnetka Heights was eligible for conservation district status.

The city verbiage that surrounds conservation districts emphasizes the importance of neighbor consensus in creating the districts.

“The neighborhood committee meets with property owners to ensure awareness of the process and active participation throughout the neighborhood,” says an introductory presentation that is given to the community at the start of a conservation district application. “Ensure all voices are heard and everyone is aware of the process.”

Evans, with a team of other involved neighbors, began canvassing the neighborhood asking for signatures in support of the conservation district application after several pre-application meetings.

Evans says that speaking with neighbors was a chance to inform them about the ins and outs of the conservation district application process. Ensuring everyone knew what the neighborhood was going to undertake was key to gaining support.

“Some of it was a language barrier, and my wife speaks Spanish, so I drove her around going door to door for a while,” Evans says.

By July 2022, 71 petitions were submitted, and 76% were verified by city staff, a wide margin from the 58% required.

Embracing Individuality

Kathi Kibbel moved to her home on North Clinton Avenue in 2000. At the time, she says people throughout Dallas often responded with confusion when she shared that she lived in Oak Cliff.

“It was living on the edge a bit,” Kibbel says.

But, like Evans, she loved the charm of the homes in South Winnetka Heights. She and her husband spent several years waiting for a home in the neighborhood to be put on the market, and they jumped as soon as one was.

Kibbel was one of the original dinner party attendees who was interested in becoming a conservation district, although she credits Evans with being the “fearless leader” who got the process started.

But once community meetings began, Kibbel was sure to be in attendance.

Over the course of 10 meetings in seven months, South Winnetka Heights homeowners gathered with members of the City of Dallas Planning and Urban Design team to discuss everything from paint colors to parking density to roof form.

While South Winnetka Heights flew through the 10 community meetings required by the city — in comparison, neighbors in Lakewood have been through 15 meetings to expand the existing conservation district — Kibbel says the first few meetings showed there were some neighbors “on defense.”

“They were afraid we were going to make them do things that they didn’t want to do. I think a lot of people thought we were really going to be restrictive,” Kibbel says. “And then they realized, no, that’s not what we want to do. We’re just trying to keep people from tearing down a house or building some zero-lot-line or McMansion.”

Kibbel says there was no interest in using the conservation district regulations to force neighbors to change the look or feel of the hous es that already exist. In fact, the whole point of the application was to “preserve the look of the neigh borhood,” as it exists now.

While a historic district designa tion would strictly regulate things like materials used to build a home and keeping the paint colors of homes historically accurate, the nature of a conservation district al lowed neighbors to build the quirks of South Winnetka Heights into their regulations.

It was important for the neigh borhood to continue embracing individuality, Kibbel says.

“If you look at the front of my house, the colors, it’s obvious we don’t care what color you’re paint ing,” Kibbel, whose home is tur quoise blue and trimmed in orange, says. “This would not be approved in a historical district, you know, that’s not historical colors. In the Bahamas it is, but not for Dallas in the 1920s.”

The regulations laid out in the conservation district ordinance will dictate parameters for any future development, once it is adopted.

If a house has a feature, such as fixed shutters and stained wood siding, that does not comply with the parameters, it can remain until it needs to be replaced. At that point, the element will have to be replaced in a style that complies with the conservation district reg ulations.

A Growing Movement

The 10th and final conservation district meeting was held March 6.

Trevor Brown, chief planner for the city Planning and Urban Design department, commended the South Winnetka Heights neighbors on their swift and agreeable handling of the process.

Winnetka Heights is the first neighborhood to go through the process from scratch in over 10 years.

Brown says it has been so long since a neighborhood has created a new conservation district that there is not currently a staff member in the office of Planning and Urban policy for how many applications the city can handle at a time, Brown says the process requires “considerable commitment of department time and resources.”

The department will likely stagger new cases it takes on, so once the South Winnetka Heights application has been finalized it’ll be an arms race for who is next to ensure their neighborhood stays exactly as they like it.

For Evans, and for all of the neighbors who began thinking about becoming a conservation district all those years ago at those dinner parties, an approval from the City Council will be the final chapter of this story.

But there may be an epilogue.

Street Sign toppers marking the South Winnetka Heights Conservation District will make things feel all the more official. And Evans wants to figure out how to raise money or obtain grants for “some of those historic fancy streetlights” to line the blocks of the neighborhood.

“That’s the big you know, the candle on top of the cake,” Evans says. “If we can get some lights. That’d be cool.”

CONTRIBUTING STYLES:

Most homes within South Winnetka Heights were built before 1940 and fall within the following two styles:

Arts And Crafts

The 20th century Arts and Crafts home style was an early modern movement that rejected the historical precedent of decoration and opulent design. The homes modernized ornamentation by simplifying it. The Arts and Crafts movement is credited for its influence on prairie style homes, which are found throughout Winnetka Heights, and craftsman style homes.

Key Features: Low-to-the-ground facade, low-pitched roof with wide eave overhangs, prominent porches, framed windows.

Transitional Craftsman Bungalow

The word bungalow can be used to describe a small home of any style, but in South Winnetka Heights, the bungalows act as a stylistic bridge between the Arts and Crafts and Craftsman styles. The relatively small homes were often built with the working class in mind, and were popular throughout the U.S. for the first few decades of the 20th century. Because these homes are a stylistic transition, many elements reflect the true Arts and Crafts homes throughout the neighborhood.

Key Features: Low-pitched and front-gabled roof, large porches often supported by columns, one story, beams under gables.

Source: A Field Guide to American Houses

Retrofitting 1960s-era

Airstreams (above) and welding for function, form or both (above right) are just a couple of the things happening at Stash Design, whose offices and warehouse are inside Tyler Station.

Gary Buckner (right) owns Stash Design and Stash Signs, is a partner in Tyler Station and has significant projects underway around the state of Texas.