Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Magnolia magic
Joanna and Chip Gaines have created a wildly popular brand by mixing Texas tradition with modern taste
The first Chip Gaines heard of avocado toast was in 2017.
He and his wife, Joanna, were about to open a 200seat restaurant in downtown Waco, Texas, where their home design and construction business is based. The family pancake recipe was locked in, and the biscuits and gravy were good to go by the time Joanna Gaines mentioned adding a vegan option to the breakfast menu.
“That’s disgusting, babe,” Chip Gaines told her, shaking his head. “No one wants avocado on their toast.”
She persisted. She also suggested a juice bar.
“I don’t like any juices,” he said, unhappily sampling some trial smoothies. “I like bacon.”
In the end, as fans of the couple’s popular home makeover show, “Fixer Upper,” will be unsurprised to hear, Joanna Gaines prevailed. Magnolia Table opened with avocado toast on the menu and has added chai latte and a $12 “juice flight” alongside basics like sweet tea and blueberry muffins.
In just seven years, since “Fixer Upper” began airing on HGTV, the couple has renovated more than a hundred houses and expanded the Magnolia brand into restaurants, craft markets, books, villas, real estate agencies, furniture, a magazine, a Target brand and — coming up shortly — their own cable channel, the Magnolia Network.
Their continuing negotiation between Texas tradition and modern taste makes for good television and has also proved to be a wildly popular approach to home design, beloved by millions of followers on Pinterest and Instagram. In their hands, there is no house too small, too dark or too old to be transformed with topiaries (formerly known as houseplants), giant clocks, ironwork and white shiplap into her signature bright style, best described as Boho-GlamIndustrial Farmhouse.
That’s the aesthetic at the couple’s own home, a Victorian farmhouse set on 40 acres outside Waco that makes frequent appearances on the show. They live there with their five children, ages 1 to 15.
Part of the appeal of “Fixer Upper,” which drew more than 16 million viewers a week in its final season in 2018, is seeing that spark of tension play out in their marriage. In the tradition of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and Homer and Marge Simpson, there’s one impulsive, enthusiastic risk-taker (Chip, 45) and one sensible, occasionally exasperated realist (Joanna, 42). And it takes both kinds to transform a business into an empire.
In a Zoom interview from home last month, Joanna Gaines sounded like many parents who are currently working while attempting to be full-time educators, cheerleaders and cooks: frazzled.
“I had to get off social media for a while, so I made a full Texas dinner,” she said — chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and zucchini casserole. “It took three hours to make and it was gone in 10 minutes.”
Gaines didn’t build her reputation on her home cooking, and when “Fixer Upper” premiered in 2013, she looked like no one’s idea of a Southern design queen, with her Birkenstock
sandals, wardrobe of jeans and T-shirts and charcoal-gray manicure.
Her mother is Korean, and her father’s heritage is Lebanese: She slipped recipes for bulgogi and Lebanese salad into her first book alongside pimento cheese, chili and no less than eight breakfast casseroles. It has sold more than 2 million copies and was the No. 2 best-selling cookbook in the United States on this week’s New York Times list — behind her new cookbook, published last month. (Her 2018 design book was also No. 1 and has a prescient title: “Homebody: A Guide to Creating Spaces You Never Want to Leave.”)
With no formal training or experience in design, decorating or cooking, she has felt her way into the domestic zeitgeist and become a star — and the first Asian American woman to have a mass-market “lifestyle” brand.
There is not much that is aspirational about the food in her books, but much that is inspirational, especially in the photographs of Gaines herself, of the children doing wholesome farm activities in muddy boots, of her cottage garden and white-tiled open kitchen.
Homely dishes like hash brown casserole and peanut butter brownies are presented against pure white and linen backdrops; some dishes are spilling over, or slightly over- or undercooked.
Both of Joanna Gaines’ cookbooks are subtitled “A Collection of Recipes for Gathering,” and giant dining tables, open floor plans and family meals are a big part of the Magnolia brand.
Without the possibility of actual gatherings at the moment, she is focusing on cooking from scratch and trying to enjoy the freedom to cook for hours instead of rushing to get dinner on the table after work.
It’s a good thing she has five children, she said. “It means we can still have a big family dinner, even under quarantine.”