Home is where the art is
Andy and Susan Smith sit in the gray velvet swivel chairs in the front living room/lounge in their new Memorial-area home and gaze happily at their new hobby: art, or at least collecting it.
Perfectly organized, this room is a conversation area with four plush chairs, an acrylic coffee table and Murano glass chandelier. And as a backdrop, they get to look at one of their favorite new purchases, artist Michael von Helm’s abstract painting, “Columbine” — a vivid mix of blues, oranges, pinks amid swirls of black and white.
It’s one of a handful of paintings the Smiths purchased as work progressed on the home they moved into just a year ago. They haven’t filled all of their wall space yet, but they’re off to a good start.
There’s a large John Hathorn painting in their family room, and a couple of colorful Margaret Evangeline camellias hang elsewhere. In the foyer is a Bernd Haussmann art on paper, and a sentimental collection of watercolors by Susan’s father is a sweet grouping in the master bedroom.
“When we started, I told Talbot ‘I don’t know the first thing about where to even go to buy art,’ ” Andy Smith said of direction from the couple’s interior designer, Talbot Cooley of Talbot Cooley Interiors.
Cooley gave the couple the names of some art galleries and told them to just start looking. Since they had no art at all, just about any size or shape could work somewhere. They started at Dimmitt Contemporary Art and connected with owner Kathy Dimmitt, who showed them all of the pieces they ultimately bought.
But first they had to do some thinking: What did they really like? How much could they really spend?
“It was a lot of fun. I would never in a million years have guessed that I would like art shopping,” Andy said. “We developed a passion for art with this house.”
When it comes to art, Dimmitt, who steered the Smiths through the collecting process, said more people have become interested in original art, and it’s common for people building a new home to jump in.
“What happens is they want everything to be good. They’re taking time to build a home and putting thought into its bones and finishes. Why wouldn’t they want great art?” asked Dimmitt. “If you saw Andy and Susan’s house without art, it’s nice, but dang, that art adds a lot to it. To me, it’s the jewel on the top.”
Time to build
The Smiths met in their early 20s when they were both ski bums in Colorado, taking a break from school and life. Susan, now 50, is a Nebraska native who had just graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in art history and wasn’t ready for a real job. Andy, now 48, had finished a couple of years at the University of Houston, and when it came time to finally declare a major, he had no idea what he wanted to do.
A break in Colorado, skiing and working for very little money and then meeting his future wife, gave Andy focus. He returned to Houston, finished school, and now he’s the CFO at an oil services company. The couple has three kids, Georgia, 21 and a student at Houston Community College; Gracie, 19 and a student at the University of Missouri; and Oliver, 17 and a junior at Stratford High School.
They also have three dogs, 9-year-old Sammy and 7-year-old Freddie, both Labrador retrievers, and Charlie, a 3½-year-old American-English Lab mix.
The family had been living in a home nearby and in 2013 decided to build a vacation home in Galveston. They put in all the bells and whistles they wished they had in their Houston home and soon realized what they were missing.
A visit to a friend’s new home confirmed it: They wanted to build.
“The Galveston home was the first time we’d ever built. We loved having a new house and recognized everything we wished we’d done differently,” Andy said. “If we’d taken more time to think about it in advance, it would be different.”
This time, they decided, they’d hire an architect, builder, interior designer and landscape architect who would work as a team to plan their dream home. Design started in December 2015, and construction began a year later. They moved into their new home in the Gaywood neighborhood in May 2018.
“My builder, Andy Abercrombie, said to me, ‘There are fivepage architects, 50-page architects and 100-page architects. I don’t think you need a 100-page architect. So if you’re going to look at 50-page guys these are the guys you should take a look at,’ ” Andy said of the kind of detail architects can provide.
They met with a couple of them, the second being Brandon Breaux of Brandon Breaux Design, who they connected with immediately.
“They showed me one picture of what they like and I said, ‘You’ve got to call Talbot Cooley.’ We’ve worked together quite a bit,” Breaux said of the interior designer.
The two were in touch throughout the design phase, so Breaux could accommodate her plans and she could select enough stone for counters and fireplace mantels.
Cooley set up a Dropbox site
A Memorial couple discovers a passion for artwork while decorating their new custom-built house