Inside Dallas Designer Cathy Kincaid’s Perfect Holiday House in Highland Park
Everything is Merry in the Restored 1920s New England-Style Cottage
BY Rebecca Sherman // 12.15.23
Interior designer Cathy Kincaid in her Highland Park holiday house. (Photo by Pär Bengtsson)
Christmas 2012 is one that interior designer Cathy Kincaid will never forget. After a fire destroyed her house — taking with it many of her furnishings, along with her Christmas tree and ornaments — she was forced to move into a rental. Although she was grateful to have escaped the blaze with her pets unharmed, the timing of the tragedy was particularly painful. “I love the holidays, and I love to decorate,” she says. “My friends organized an ornament drive, and dozens of ornaments arrived on my new doorstep — many of which were fire trucks and dalmatians,” she says. “They then brought in two Christmas trees, which we decorated, and stocked my empty fridge with champagne and Christmas treats.” Those charming ornaments, along with the memory of her friends’ kindness during a difficult time, have been a part of Kincaid’s holidays ever since.
Two years after the fire, she fell in love with a 1920s former caretaker’s cottage in Highland Park in desperate need of restoration. With shingles and gables, the two-story house conjures rural New England rather than urban Dallas.
“It was a mess when I purchased it, but I was drawn to how American it felt,” she says. “There was no pretense to its honest exterior structure, though the interiors were Tudor with dark rooms, small leaded windows, and heavy plaster on the walls.”
She worked with architect Wilson Fuqua on the renovations, which included gutting the kitchen, adding a family room and entryway, and redoing the bathrooms. The formerly dark rooms are now luminous with ceilings lacquered in Farrow & Ball’s Borrowed Light, a dreamy pale-blue pigment that can make rooms look taller, she says. Art, antiques, rugs, and comfortable seating covered in her favorite patterns and fabrics give the interiors a warm graciousness. In other words, it’s a perfect holiday house.
“I have a couple of parties including a big Christmas Eve party with all my children and grandchildren and family and friends,” she says. “I serve all sorts of my favorite Christmas delicacies: beef tenderloin, tamales, gumbo, cheese souffles, Christmas petits fours.” Each season, she enlists decorating help from Margaret Ryder of Kane & Co. “I like a very old-fashioned, Colonial American style of decorating for Christmas,” Kincaid says.
Step past the green-lacquered front door wreathed in magnolia and pine branches tied with green apples, and you’ll find yourself in a delightful foyer, converted from a porch. Now with a large steel window, Ann Sacks marble mosaic floor tiles, and potted citrus trees, the entryway feels like a sunny winter orangery. A 19th-century French bench and Moroccan table display potted paperwhites and amaryllis, which she forces at Thanksgiving so they’re blooming by Christmas. Perfumed by lemon and orange trees and paperwhites, the house smells divine. A pair of blue-and-white lamps from her collection of old Chinese export porcelains is tucked into a lavish holiday vignette on an antique console. “Blue-and-white porcelains can be summery and beachy on their own, but they look great at Christmas with red and green,” she says.
Father's Day Gifts
During the holidays, Kincaid’s house is packed with family, including her nine grandchildren. A favorite hangout is the breakfast room, a sunny spot near the kitchen with an Eero Saarinen Tulip table and a large painting of a watermelon by Julio Larraz, part of Kincaid’s collection of still lifes. For more formal meals, everyone moves into the dining room, where she sets a sparkling table with china, crystal, and silver — some of which belonged to her mother, and some that she received when she married. For years, Kincaid had kept it all boxed up; she didn’t really like her 1970s wedding china until recently, and her mother’s plates reminded her of having to wash the dishes during the holidays as a child. “But now I think it’s beautiful,” she says. “I love it all.” The dining room’s fireplace mantel is lavishly swagged in pine branches and garlands of mini tangerines and kumquats. “They ripen, and you have to refresh them a few times during the month, but they’re worth it. I can smell them all over the house.”
On Christmas Eve, the family gathers in the living room, where there’s another fire going and a tree as tall as Kincaid herself twinkling in the window. “It’s a small room, but I can seat a lot of people, and everyone is close enough that you can all be in one big conversation,” she says. The right chairs are essential for a room with more than one seating area, so she used a pair of swiveling club chairs that can turn to face wherever the conversation goes. Kincaid loves textiles; the room is made even cozier with a mix of prints including a classic red pattern by Sister Parish that covers a pair of ’40s-era low-backed slipper chairs. Sofa pillows are in hand-blocked patterns by Antoinette Poisson of Paris and Dallas’ Lisa Fine, and antique quilts are draped over the backs of armchairs. “It’s important to mix antique textiles with new fabrics to give a room gravitas,” Kincaid says.
Although she lost her cherished collection of ornaments in the fire, the tree is trimmed with the fire trucks and Dalmatians her friends gave her, along with new ones made by the grandchildren and others collected over the years. “We strung lights and gold beads and swaddled the topper like a baby in a manger,” she says. “We do Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, and the grandchildren get to open one present.”
For Kincaid, other holidays pale in comparison, although she hosts an egg hunt at Easter and puts up a few decorations in the windows on Valentine’s Day. “I’m actually not a big holiday decorator,” she says. “But Christmas … That’s what I love.”
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