It was love at first threshold for artist Dahlia Woods when she stepped into the Hutsell house on Tokalon.
“I didn’t even realize what lay beyond the door,” says Woods. “It was a tremendous surprise. I just stepped across the threshold and said (to her real estate agent) ‘I want this house.’ He had to push me in to see the rest of the house. It just felt right — as if we were all meant to be here. It was fate.”
When Woods learned that her husband was being transferred to Dallas from Alexandria, Va., she flew in to explore some of our older neighborhoods, starting with the Park Cities. Woods, with a degree in the History of Architecture, had renovated 47 vintage houses and wanted another. But although she found Highland Park “quite beautiful in its own right,” it wasn’t until the journey took her to Lakewood that she found her true home.
‘Home’ to Woods means more than this structurally stunning 1929 Spanish Hollywood house with its vaulted barrel ceiling covered in original Mideastern-style murals. ‘Home’ means the whole neighborhood.
“I remember waking up the first morning in this house,” she says. “It was the 4th of July and the sun was coming up over White Rock Lake. Later we heard music and walked over to the Lakewood parade and people were saying ‘welcome.’”
For those who don’t immediately know what is meant by a “Hutsell house,” Clifford D. Hutsell built 50 homes in East Dallas between 1926 and 1941. His designs are whimsical and flamboyant, and a treasured contribution to our neighborhood’s unique personality.
There’s something for the whole family within these walls. For husband, Jonathon — a “voracious reader” — there is plenty of room for his 7500+ books; for daughter, Camille — a sophomore at Woodrow and an aspiring actress — there is a spectacular balcony overlooking the living room, opening out through original stained glass mirrored double doors, perfect for rehearsing dramatic soliloquies. For their son off attending the University of South Carolina at Columbia, it’s a great place to visit on breaks — and even the family cat, Lucy, has an intriguing enclosed courtyard and fountain to explore between naps.
The Woods’ daughter, Charlotte, is also an abiding presence in the household. Lost to a tragic illness when she was only 11, she is the reason Woods shifted from interior design back to her original training in fine arts. The mother remembers being medicated to sleep during those terrible days, to no avail. It wasn’t until Woods got up in the night and picked up a sketch pad that her heart begin to move on.
“My painting is a tribute to Charlotte,” says Woods of her daughter, who she says was beginning to show great artistic talent even at a such a young age. “You have a choice, to move toward life.”
Although the house is obviously a wonderful inspiration to someone with an artistic bent, its serene flowing colors are in marked contrast to the vibrant, opaque primary colors in Wood’s work. She says this is functional, that the two balance each another in mood, one providing the backdrop for the other. Wood’s style of painting is derivative of the Fauvists, part of the Expressionist movement that relied on the color of the subject for definition as opposed to the shape. Woods like to call her colors “visual vitamins.”
Although a number of Woods’ finished pieces are displayed in various living areas, the acrylic and gouache paintings are actually created in a studio detached from the main house. Originally a servant’s quarter, the small structure was still filled with stored furniture when the family began to move in. Once the former owners cleared everything out, Woods was delighted to discover a space suitable for her purposes.
In addition to scenes from around the world, sketched during the family’s travels, Woods began capturing Lakewood, East Dallas and the White Rock area in her art. The paintings have begun popping up in spots such as Starbucks and Tallulah, a neighborhood gift shop that Woods manages much of the time. (It seems that Woods walked in one day to ask if she could display a painting and was conscripted pretty much on the spot.) Several of her paintings have even been purchased by a Screen Guild decorator and will appear in episodes of The X-Files and Charmed.
These days Wood’s work is balanced between painting what she chooses, commissions, and adapting her work to gift cards, calendars and the limited edition prints that she reproduces on watercolor paper and hand colors like monoprints. She even keeps her hand in interior design from time to time, consulting on art placement, color and design for area homes. And her time in the gift shop is valued for the contact it gives Woods with people in the neighborhood.
Unlike a number of artists who prefer seclusion and limited contact with the outside world, Woods is just like her Hutsell home — wide open, passionately expressive, an original.
