Designer Doniphan Moore’s Smashing Dallas Home and Studio
Edited to Perfection
BY Rebecca Sherman // 07.21.25
The living room of Doniphan Moore’s townhouse is furnished with highly personal pieces, including a custom sofa of Moore’s design with bronze sabots and walnut base upholstered in Holly Hunt silk velvet. MOUS side table. Piet Boon small drink table. Custom Kyle Bunting rug with Moore’s astrological stars. Italian lounge chair in Lauren Hwang fabric. (Photo by Kristopher Ellis)
Doniphan Moore’s renovation of his Dallas house and studio took years longer than expected, but the results were worth the wait — and it’s smashing. Drenched in moody jewel tones and exquisitely furnished, these sophisticated interiors are layered, restrained, and edited to perfection.
Doniphan Moore bought his East Dallas townhouse 18 years ago, straight out of SMU, renovating and furnishing the two-story, three-bedroom bachelor pad in the vibrant M Streets area over the years. Always a work in progress, the house was never quite finished and evolved with him as he grew a successful interior design business, which he operated from an office at home, a space he quickly outgrew.
In February 2020 he was one day away from signing a lease on an office in the Knox Street area when he spotted a 1947 Art Deco-style building for sale in Uptown.
“I had been looking for six years for the right place and just fell in love with the building’s original charm and character,” he says. “Dallas doesn’t have many commercial buildings with age like this, so it was a dream.”
Moore, who closed on the building just weeks before the pandemic hit, spent lockdown juggling the studio’s renovation along with client projects in Florida, Kentucky, Dallas, Tennessee, Denver, and Houston’s River Oaks. At the same time, Moore was selected to design a lavish master bath and dressing rooms for the inaugural Kips Bay Decorator Show House Dallas — no small feat. Despite the challenging times, Moore secured some 60 partners who donated their time and resources. The glamorous space, which was enveloped in de Gournay wallpaper inspired by Gustav Kimpt and Japanese textiles, set the design world buzzing when the show house opened that fall.
But when it rains, it pours. The epic Texas ice storm of 2021 caused five pipes to burst in his house, ruining almost everything on the first floor except for the hand-painted Porter Teleo wallpaper on the ceiling. A year into the pandemic, construction permits were still almost impossible to get, and the supply chain was an ongoing problem. With his studio and house in shambles, Moore steadied his resolve and improvised.
“I lived out of my bedroom upstairs and squeezed my office into another small room,” he says.
He was already feeling the pinch from downsizing his company at the start of the pandemic, so his father pitched in, taking over the books and learning CAD on the fly from his home in Florida.
The renovations took more than two years. “It was a journey,” Moore says. “I was looking forward to the moment when I could just breathe.” His saving grace was a song by Will Reagan called “Not in a Hurry,” which helped center him.
“It was a reminder that God’s time is not my time and to slow down and surrender to the things I have no control over,” he says. “The song became my anthem.”
Good things often come from adversity, and Moore used the challenge to make his house even better. “I fixed things you’ll never notice in photographs, like lining up the molding and doorways. I streamlined architectural details and edited a ton,” he says. “And, I found myself drawn to more color than in the past. My house doesn’t get a lot of natural light, so I decided to lean into the house’s natural moody shades.”
A former gray-and-white kitchen became much richer in shades of pinot noir, burgundy, and dark chocolate, with Waterworks tiles and cabinets lacquered in a custom hue by Fine Paints of Europe. The small space is a jewel box of different metal finishes, including a pewter-tone ventilated hood detailed with polished brass, burnished copper lights, and mesh cabinet screens in oil-rubbed bronze. Solid-brass shelves, plated in butler silver, have tarnished into an iridescent petrol patina.
“I focused on mixing metals throughout the house that you wouldn’t think would normally go together, but they provide a deeper, more unexpected palette that I love,” he says.
Moore inherited his Kentucky grandmother’s southern sensibility for entertaining, and the kitchen is an informal but elegant gathering spot with a custom butcher block from Grothouse that doubles as a counter and leather-and-wood stools from Blackman Cruz. The kitchen opens to a glamorous breakfast room that, like the elegant dining room, is highlighted by sumptuous materials and graceful furnishings that draw you in.
“Elegance is so often lost in the world we live in today, but there’s a romanticism to it that makes me swoon. It’s about creating spaces that are gracious and welcoming — that’s what makes my work different, the sensibility that comes from being raised in the South,” says Moore, a Kentucky native. “It’s something I can’t shake out of my boot if I try.”
These are highly personal interiors furnished with cherished pieces that evoke memories and a mood. The living room’s leather wingback chair from Jean de Merry is reminiscent of an original by Frits Henningsen he’d coveted for years, and a Deco-inspired desk in his study, originally designed for the show house, is a stunner in goatskin stained an oxblood color and lacquered. In the studio lounge, a LaVerne bronze coffee table is acid-etched with a chinoiserie motif that reminds him of the chinoiserie fabrics he saw while growing up in the South in the ‘90s.
A massive 1960s Danish rosewood bookshelf discovered on 1stdibs turned out to be almost the exact length of the lounge wall, and Moore collaborated on a hair-on-hide rug with Kyle Bunting, the pattern of which is a study in curves and circles that reference his astrological stars.
“I like to have fun with design in ways that are really personal but not necessarily something others would notice,” he says. The room’s tufted, tailored sofa was also his design, and he gets comments about how cozy it is. “I like my upholstery to be refined but crazy comfortable — like ‘smoke a doobie on a Saturday’ kind of comfortable,” he says.
Doniphan Moore’s Studio: Art Deco Meets Bauhaus
Doniphan Moore’s days of working solo from a cramped bedroom are long behind him — he now employs a team of designers from his stunning new design studio — but getting there was a test of hard work and perseverance. The interiors of the old Art Deco-style building on Fairmount Street had been a warren of small rooms with bad carpeting, and moisture under the floors had ruined the trusses.
“It was a complete mess, a huge undertaking,” he says. But the foyer’s original 1940s glass-brick walls were gorgeous. “I just leaned into this industrial Bauhaus sort of idea for the studio, and tried to bring a level of architectural integrity the space that wasn’t there before,” he says.
Beamed ceilings were added, along with beautiful custom millwork, coffered paneling, and hardwood floors. The curved and fluted foyer walls, designed by Moore and created by Casci Ornamental Plaster, feel at once classical and contemporary. Some of the original glass blocks were repurposed in the back of the studio facing the alley — a clever way of letting light in without visual clutter.
“Research and thought went into every detail,” he says.
The interiors are furnished with vintage pieces and custom designs, and the kitchen and bathroom feature a variety of stones and woods, tiles, plumbing fixtures, and other elements. Mexico City-based OMR gallery curated a selection of art for the studio, and Moore commissioned San Francisco decorative artist Caroline Lizarraga to paint a mural of a majestic live oak, based on a tree that once flourished out front. The arbor design is painted on a solid background of pewter-leaf Gracie wallpaper, and when light hits it, the whole studio glows.
“The prettiest time is just about when everybody leaves for the day, but it makes for a really nice send-off when the building starts to light up,” he says.
Interior design Doniphan Moore. House photography Kristopher Ellis. Studio photography Douglas Friedman. House Styling Russell Brightwell, Jimmie Henslee. Flowers Lauren Lightfoot. Studio Styling Jenny O’Conner.
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