IDEA COTTAGE
Round Top farmhouse transformed into designer’s dream
JULIE Dodson’s Round Top project mixes her personallife passion with her professional world of design.
The owner of Dodson Interiors in Houston has teamed up with Mark Massey, a Houston native who restored Round Top’s Henkel Square Market and created The Compound, to give new life to an early-1900s farmhouse.
It’s called the Round Top Idea Cottage and just opened at Massey’s Compound, just 2 miles south of the town square. Curious people visiting for Spring Antiques Week can peruse the cottage Pintereststyle, getting ideas for their own projects.
Admission is $10 and will go to animal shelters.
That’s where the personal passion comes in. Dodson, an animal lover, wants to help as many dogs as she can; there’s a basset hound mix named Boudreaux, a yellow Lab named Tank, Rambo the dachshund and a terrier mix named Loulou — all housed at the Brenham Animal Shelter or the Gardenia E. Janssen Animal Shelter in LaGrange.
Dodson had discussed the idea house with Massey and Kathy Johnston, his antiques show production director.
So when Massey got a call that an old farm cottage was up for grabs, he knew their project had arrived.
The home was relocated to The Compound, then Dodson and Massey played fairy godparents, transforming its interior and exterior into a 609-square-foot storybook cottage.
It’s now filled with antiques and vintage items and feels like a perfect weekend getaway. (Yes, it’s for sale, and a portion of the proceeds will go to animal shelters.)
Since January, Dodson has traveled between Houston and Round Top to work on the project, picking out paint and stain colors, finishes and furnishings and working closely with Massey and builder Lewis Tindall. She got some materials donated — paint and stains from Sherwin-Williams, tile and countertops from Walker Zanger. Furniture and accessories were borrowed from Compound vendors, who opened last weekend.
“For the Idea Cottage, my plan was to show how you could shop the fields and basically fill a home,” Dodson said.
Dodson saw the cottage before it was moved, and even she is shocked at its new look.
“I felt like I needed to have a hazmat suit on,” she said jokingly of her first visit. “I wondered what was behind the sheetrock, so we poked a hole in the ceiling and saw wood through there, and then bugs fell out of the hole. It was bad, it was so bad.”
Now she calls it a “darling sweet cottage.”
While the renovation has been underway since January, Dodson couldn’t start shopping
for the interiors until Compound vendors started arriving in mid March.
First, she found a bed, then turquoise breakfast room chairs that would go perfectly with the Walker Zanger tile. She circled the vendors a few more times and found a farmhouse table, a long bench that turns into a twin-size bed, a chandelier and a student’s desk.
It’s been an exhausting volunteer project, Dodson said.
“I can’t wait to get it open,” she said, noting that there may be a few adoptable dogs near the Idea Cottage. “I can’t tell you how important it is to rescue these dogs. I know you can’t save them all, but we’ve got to have some help financially to get dogs into forever homes.”
And there’s one more dog that Dodson is determined to find a home for. Beautiful and sweet, he doesn’t even
have a name.
Photographed inside the shelter, he stretched one leg up to the bars on his cage and pointed his head downward, as if he’s praying someone
will pick him next.
Later, bathed and ready for his doggie glamour shot, he looks clean, happy and ready to impress.
“I made a promise to him, I said, ‘Don’t you worry, buddy, I’ll get you out of here,’ ” Dodson said.