Cool, calm, collected
Donna Brown’s design touch flows from The Gray Door to her creative home
The Gray Door’s owner fills her home with antiques to reflect a relaxed life.
Glass shelves rest on sturdy iron brackets, gauzy linen-burlap skirting drapes under concrete countertops, and a rustic 19th-century work table holds court in Donna Brown’s kitchen.
The room is a study in contrasts, delicate glass and feminine fabric against masculine stone and iron. Counters don’t hold a toaster or coffeemaker but are filled with art, potted plants and pottery containing old silver flatware.
Her island, that work table topped with dramatic Portuguese marble, is a stunning tableau. She’s ready to make dinner for a few neighbors, and eggy handmade pasta rests in a swirl in a bowl while woody mushrooms rest on a board, ready to be chopped. Raw, heads-on shrimp never looked so pretty as on a bed of ice in a bowl nearby.
Brown’s kitchen could pass for an antiques store — for that matter, her whole home could — as she recites the origin of its contents: hobnail glasses that were her grandmother’s, a collection of 19thcentury French Moustier platters hanging on walls and an old plaster bust that you’d never expect to see in a kitchen.
Every single thing here boasts many previous lives, and Brown relishes the history that comes with each piece.
It is the sum total of her life so far, a journey from wife and mother to independent businesswoman. In her 70 years, she’s learned both who she is and who she is not, and that her biggest victories have all begun as major risks.
A toe in business
Brown’s father moved their family a lot, changing cities as his oilindustry career took him from one town to another. When she was 13, they landed in Houston, and she eventually graduated from Lamar High School.
She married in college, and life took her to the cities where her husband worked, first in Nashville and then back to Houston, where he worked and she raised their two children, a son and a daughter.
Art history was what she had studied, subject matter that helped her understand the world around her.
“Things made sense to me in a different way,” Brown said. “It wasn’t all history or wars or philosophy. It was creativity to show that things were changing and people were thinking differently. It made the world much more interesting to me.”
When her children were still at home, she and a friend, Patsy Fox, launched a fledgling business selling small antiques. They’d scavenge Europe for whatever they could find and ship items to Houston to sell at antiques shows or consigned at interior design stores.
It was fun, and she could do it when her children were still at home. When she wanted to go bigger, her friend did not, so Brown went off on her own. She’d sort antique “smalls” into laundry baskets and deliver them to design-store clients from the back of her stationwagon. As things sold, she got paid.
When she turned 50, life took a dramatic turn. Her son was in college, and her daughter was married. Brown found herself divorced and in need of an income.
Antiques were what she knew, and she already had established a reputation and clientele, so she opened a shop, The Gray Door, in 1996. Initially, she leased space from Carol Piper, who sold rugs alongside Brown’s antiques.
Encouraged by Piper, Brown took a leap of faith.
“Carol’s favorite quote is, ‘If you’re not on the edge, you’re taking up too much room,’ so I just stepped off the cliff,” Brown said, noting that she didn’t even have the next month’s rent.
To fill the shop, Brown called friends — among them Mike and Cindy Neal, Sharon Skelton and Linda Gale White — for her multidealer venue. Eventually each of them went on to have their own businesses, and Brown ran a one-woman show.
When Piper needed more space, Brown moved The Gray Door to a shop on Marquart, where she operated from 200813. Since then, she’s been in a three-story building on Ferndale, where the ground floor is her shop filled with interesting European antiques and the upper two floors are her home.
“These two funny little blocks are so different. There’s every age, every ethnicity, every persuasion,” she said. “It’s the most diverse group of people I’ve ever been around, and everybody has strong opinions, and it’s fun. I would never want to move away from here.”
Quiet décor
No longer a dealer in just “smalls,” Brown has filled her shop with case pieces from France, Italy, Sweden, really all over Europe. There are chandeliers dripping with crystals, architectural antiques and art. Though her shop is open to the public, a large part of her business comes from architects and interior designers looking for unique pieces to finish their clients’ homes.
Her own home has its entrance at the side of the building, but sometimes the line between home and business blurs.
Two grand chandeliers in her living room were once for sale in her shop. Barely noticed by customers, she moved them to her living room, where every visitor comments on the spectacular lighting.
Some of her home’s furnishings started in the shop; some of the shop’s pieces are things that no longer have a use in her home.
Her living room is filled with chairs and small tables, a mishmash of mostly French and Italian pieces. There’s a French directoire chair, an earlyera Empire chair and a simple but sculptural Louis XVI armchair. Antique vignon tables serve as cocktail tables in the living room or as space for extra guests in the dining room.
“I’m not really a fabric person,” Brown said when asked why everything’s upholstered in offwhite linen. “I find a lot of fabrics distracting, and I like the furniture, so I like to put something on it that shows the furniture.
The pale colors also create a quiet ambience, which Brown says fits her stage in life.
“I want … everything to be chill. I want the punch to be in rugs, art and flowers,” she said. “We live in the tropics, so I like for things to be cool around us. It’s a lot easier to live in a space that’s quiet.” A big round table in her dining room is covered in linen tablecloths and surrounded by a variety of wood and upholstered chairs.
“It was wonderful to ship my mahogany dining table and my Chippendale chairs to my daughter in Memphis so I could get my mismatched chairs,” Brown said.
Then she lifted the floor-length tablecloths to show the decidedly unfancy table they’re covering. “It’s a fold-up restaurant table,” she said. “I bought it from a wholesale store. I paid $100 for it.”
An anniversary
Approaching her 71st birthday, Brown embraces new things in her life. She caters to her 8-year-old miniature Schnauzer, Darcy, who enchants neighbors and announces shop visitors. And she has a new husband, something that surprised her as much as it did those around her.
He’s Bill Stewart, a forensic accountant she’s known since they met on her first day of school in Houston some 57 years ago. They reconnected over the years and have several mutual friends.
“I’m not sure how it turned from friendship to romance. One day, one of us went, ‘Hmmm,’ and we both were there. I didn’t expect it, and he didn’t expect it,” she said. “We were just good friends, and I always admired and trusted him.”
Once friendship turned to romance, they married quickly. They’ll mark their first anniversary in December.
“I was one month shy of 70 … I highly recommend it; your list is so much shorter. In your 30s your list is like this,” she said, spreading her hands wide to show the many qualities a young woman might look for in a mate. “And you get to my age and your list is, “Is he a good person, does he have a sense of humor?”
Twenty years ago, Brown faced a new start in life. She marvels now at how it freed her from the way she thought she had to live and the way she thought she needed to decorate her home.
“After my divorce, it was the first house that was just mine. I learned that I had good ideas. I gave myself permission to change my mind. It was the first time that I had ever given myself the permission to just explore.”