Tory Burch Shines at An Intimate Dallas Dinner

For most, the thought of hosting a legendary hostess like Tory Burch would be intimidating, like roasting a chicken for Ina Garten or playing HORSE with Steph Curry.

As a frequent dinner party guest, I can’t think of two more charming and gracious hostesses than Catalina Gonzalez Jorba and Bela Cooley, who warmly welcomed the glamorous business icon to Texas for the first time in more than a decade.

The evening started at the brand’s Highland Park Village boutique for a cocktail party benefiting Harold Simmons Park, the 250-acre green space along the Trinity River. Friends of the brand and members of Dallas’ arts community relished the opportunity to enjoy a spicy margarita alongside Burch while raising money for the *ambitious* park. I spotted Highland Park Village queens Victoria Snee and Liz Thrash at the cocktail party, as well as London Boscamp and Olivia Mangrum, who wore head-to-toe Tory Burch to meet the founder.

After the cocktail party, Jorba and Cooley hosted a small group for dinner at Jorba’s art-filled, Spanish-style home in Highland Park. The Tory Burch team swathed Jorba’s cheerful “Yellow Room” (as she refers to it) with Jardin D’Été tablecloths and napkins from the brand’s home collection. White lettuce ware plates from the Dodie Thayer for Tory Burch collaboration completed the tablescape, along with charming yellow and green flowers in simple glass vessels. At the end of the evening, guests went home with a pair of green lettuce ware salt cellars to remind them of their night with TB herself.

During Burch’s chock-full Dallas itinerary, she also visited SMU for a conversation that Megha Tolia moderated about navigating entrepreneurship and starting the Tory Burch Foundation, which increases women’s economic power by supporting entrepreneurs to build lasting businesses. At NorthPark Center’s Tory Burch boutique, Kimberly Schlegel Whitman, Courtney Kerr Noonan, and Jess Bass Bolander hosted a shopping event in support of The Family Place (and perfectly timed with the start of Partners Card!).

Earlier in the day, I interviewed Burch in the moody bar at Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek. (More to come on our conversation, which ranged from being poodle-obsessed to embracing ambition to our identities as girls with brothers.) One question I posed to Burch became a table topic at that night’s intimate dinner.

“If you could attend the estate sale of any person in history, whose would it be?”

Burch, the consummate hostess who joined the second table during dessert, gave an answer that trumped us all. As it turns out, she already *has* been to the chicest estate sales of all time, including Hubert de Givenchy, Bunny Mellon, and Lee Radziwill.

From here on out, I have a new answer to my own question: I want to go to the estate sale of Tory Burch!

PC Seen: Meghan Looney, Christina Jafar, Porschla Kidd, Annika Cail, Stephanie Seay, Krystal Schlegel Davis, Megha Tolia, Sally Pretorius Hodge, Courtney Petit, Ramiro Garcia, Treasure Maddox Hannah, Kate Marie Grinold Sigfusson, Lauren Schnitzer, and Sabrina Harrison.