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Home & Garden

A Highland Park Love Nest

Art, antiques, and family heirlooms fill the home of Dallas Flea founder Brittany Edwards Cobb.
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A Highland Park Love Nest

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When it comes to home decor, Brittany Edwards Cobb is sentimental.

Family heirlooms fill the Highland Park house she shares with husband Michael and 16-month-old daughter Landry. She’s also determined. Tell her that the perfectly sized Chesterfield she found at an L.A. shop can’t be shipped to Dallas, and she will not rest until that sofa is safe and sound in her living room. More than anything, though, Cobb is resourceful.

The interior designer and founder of the Dallas Flea shops far and wide and high and low for her clients and herself. In her living room, chairs from an antiques store in East Texas sit on a rug she found on a trip to Morocco. A mirror from the Salvation Army on Inwood Road and art from a North Dallas estate sale adorn the walls of the entry. And every room in the house features items she acquired on shopping excursions in her Southern California hometown.

“Everything in this house is vintage or an antique find usually on the thrifty side,” Cobb says. “There are very few new items. That’s a major thing for me and the way I shop. I think it’s what makes a home one of a kind.”

It’s a good thing Cobb likes to shop—and likes to shop with thriftiness in mind. Three years ago, when she and her husband bought the converted duplex on Westway Avenue, they were living in a condo in Uptown. “It was a big leap in square footage,” she says. “I needed to buy everything.” That buying spree included several trips to a place close to Cobb’s heart.

“A lot of my items are from the Dallas Flea,” she says. “I shop with my shoppers. That’s why I started it. I’m the biggest fan—I probably spend the most money of anyone.”

Everything in this house is vintage or an antique find usually on the thrifty side. There are very few new items.

Brittany Edwards Cobb

The curio cabinet in the living room, the big metal “C” in the backyard cabana, and the Hermès print in the dining room are from the Dallas Flea, as is much of the home’s art.

Speaking of art, that’s another item that is always on Cobb’s shopping list. “I love all sorts of art,” she says. “It’s my biggest weakness.”

She’s quick to add that the art she buys “doesn’t have to be fancy.” The gallery wall in the wine room, for example, features pieces by Cobb’s great-grandfather, art projects she and her husband made in elementary school, artwork she found in antiques stores, and, of course, a few purchases from the Dallas Flea. A horse painting she snapped up for a whopping five bucks has even snagged a prominent location in the dining room.

In addition to furnishing the place, Cobb and her husband also had to get to work on the exterior. “When we bought the house,” she says, “we decided to focus on the first floor and the outdoor landscaping.” So while the team at MORE Design + Build was reworking the interior, Robert Bellamy of Bellamy Design was busy revamping the backyard.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of original landscaping, but it was pretty special,” Cobb says. “We just tried to enhance it.” The pool, for instance, is original to the house, and because it takes up a great deal of space in the backyard, Cobb and her husband had Bellamy make its colors more neutral so the pool is no longer the center of attention.

We saw this as a house where we would raise our family. We wanted it to be a home we would live in forever.

Brittany Edwards Cobb

“It doesn’t go away,” she says, “but it kind of mutes it a little bit. We wanted to enjoy the pool but not have it be the focal point of the backyard. We wanted the focus to be on the living space and the cabana.”

That cabana used to be an enclosed room that the couple opened up and turned into their own private retreat. Now they spend as much time in there as possible. “We live in that room when the weather is nice,” Cobb says. “We eat every meal out here that we can. We’re big outdoor living people.”

Author

Rhonda Reinhart

Rhonda Reinhart

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Credits

Styling by Jenny O’Connor
Flowers by Haile Wossen

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