Above left: One side of the capacious main living room. The hand-painted wallpaper here coordinates with the paper in the entry hall, just on the other side of the wall.
Above right: The entry hall, left, leading to the main living room, right. The burnished parquet floors have seen many a presidential sole.
As design tales go, this one’s a gripper. Consider the characters: two wildly colorful homeowners, a modernist master of an architect, a famous Tinseltown actor turned decorator and at least two White House designers. A blockbuster of a decorating movie? Roll cameras. But it gets better: This story is true, and it unfolds in the tony enclave of Westover Hills, the famously wealthy town outside Fort Worth where the hills are dotted with Tudors and traditionals, but where Anne Bass and Anne Burnett Tandy built homes by Paul Rudolph and I.M. Pei, respectively. Certainly, Westover Hills is a delicious mix of the established and the edgy — but we cannot imagine it crashing together with more exuberance than at 1300 Shady Oaks Lane.
Above left: The main living room, as it looked in 2009. The small green chair is Billy Haines’ iconic Elbow Chair, a chic vestige from the house’s original Haines interior. It is “meant to be sat upon sideways,” says Karen Figilis, a representative for William Haines Designs, “with your cocktail gown flowing in front of you.”
Above right: The formal dining room — no sign of Billy Haines left here, but a dramatic illustration of the contrast of A. Quincy Jones’ sleek architecture against crystal sconces, oil paintings and soup tureens.
Enter Eddie and Fran Chiles, he the founder of the Western Company of North America — a pioneering firm in improving the flow of gas and oil from wells — and onetime owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. Fran had an illustrious career in the 1980s as a member of the Republican National Committee. We first learn of their 1960s house from an out-of-nowhere e-mail, including the tidbit that it is for sale — Eddie had passed away in 1993 and Fran moved out last fall. The plot thickens. There are whispers that the original interior was done by William “Billy” Haines, the 1920s actor who became a decorator after an infamous ultimatum by Louis B. Mayer to either marry a woman to hide his homosexuality or leave the silver screen. Haines left — and went on to become one of design’s greats, with a client list that included Gloria Swanson, George Cukor and Joan Crawford. Our fingers can’t fly over the keyboards fast enough. Nothing definitive turns up. We send out an SOS. Nothing concrete comes back — until a Chiles granddaughter quietly confirmed that it was Haines, citing a mention in the book
Class Act: William Haines Legendary Hollywood Decorator: “1970-73 Design projects include: Joe D. Bain, Bel Air and Wilton Crescent, London; Duncan McMartin, Bermuda; Helen Keltner, Bel Air; Eddie Chiles, Fort Worth, Texas; Van Horn Ely, Hobe Sound, Florida.” Chiles had admired the work of Haines and indeed hired him for the Fort Worth house, along with Haines’ design partner Ted Graber. Oh, how we love a great opening act.
Left: Fran Chiles’ bedroom, circa 2009.
Right A guest bedroom.
Our story leaps from there. We learn that the 12,000-square-foot house, built in 1966, was designed by none other than Los Angeles mid-century master A. Quincy Jones, he of the elegant atriums, high ceilings and walls of sheer glass. In fact, it was Haines who recommended Jones for the job, the two having worked together often, most notably on Sunnylands, the highly chic house in Rancho Mirage, California, for publisher/philanthropist Walter Annenberg and his wife Leonore, a former Chief of Protocol for the United States. Jones’ house for Eddie Chiles is, like Sunnylands, long and low, a limestone hill-hugger with views to downtown Fort Worth and beyond. “You can look over Eddie’s Western Company towers,” says architect Mark Gunderson, himself a modernist who loves the Chiles house, passing it daily when he was working on a house around the corner. “I think that was part of why Eddie built it.” The angular house, says Realtor Kay Day, who has the $7 million listing, sits on more than three acres along the eighth tee of the Shady Oaks Country Club. “People would drive up and let people off,” she says, laughing, “thinking they were at the country club. Fran would have to arrange to get them down to Shady Oaks.” The anecdotes go on, from Eddie picking out the limestone himself to the million-dollar landscaping to a bedroom on the lower level covered in photographs and devoted entirely to a certain Ron and Nancy. “Reagan Slept Here,” says Day. “That’s the name of the room.”
Left: The pool pavilion, with its stained-glass window from the Travis Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth, secured by Fort Worth designer Ken Blasingame, who worked on the house after William Haines and Ted Graber.
Right: The arrival sequence, chez Chiles. The bordered-travertine floor continues directly through
the double doors into the entry hall. Architect Jones was a proponent of blurring the indoors and out — visually and otherwise.
The house is about to have another act. After subsequent interior work by Ted Graber (he worked extensively on the Reagan White House) and most recently by Fort Worth designer Ken Blasingame (he, too, worked on the White House, for George and Laura Bush), then an estate sale last November, 1300 Shady Oaks Lane will become a literal stage for several decorators when it turns showhouse in September, sponsored by the preservation group Historic Fort Worth. Blissfully, the house is still with us — mid-century architecture finally earning its rightful place in the same sentences as the words historic and important — as is the vision of a certain oilman standing at his long, low limestone house, looking out over the glittery city, surveying his modernist kingdom. Roll cameras...
Image at top of story: The entry hall, with its Chinese wallpaper — likely from Gracie, as decorator William Haines favored the legendary hand-painted papers — that also appears in the living room beyond the wall. Realtor Kay Day says the wallpaper panels have been appraised at $175,000.
Image below: Architect A. Quincy Jones devised a powerful porte-cochere, not only for shelter but also for a sense of importance upon arrival. The Chiles house, though, is often mistaken for the Shady Oaks Country Club, as the house is sited along the club’s eighth tee. Fran Chiles would have to arrange transport to the club for folks dropped off unawares.
Click on "launch slideshow" at top of story for a closer look at the Chiles' Westover Hills house. All photographs by Trey Freeze, www.mosaicphotomedia.com.
“People would drive up and let people off,” says Realtor Kay Day, “thinking they were at the country club.”