The Palm Beach Sitting Room Inside a Dallas Georgian

Carrie Henderson wanted her newly built Dallas Georgian to feel a hundred years old, so she researched period moldings down to the exact height of the chair rails — a little shorter, the way they were built back then.

Carrie built and designed the house herself after moving from a career that ran from the Bush administration to medical device sales. She and her husband Brian raise four children here, and hosting is central to the family's life — the downstairs flows from sitting room to dining room to bar to living room, out through four sets of French doors to the pool.

The sitting room is her "Miami Palm Beach room," a bright nod to her childhood: poppy colors, a cowhide layered over a larger rug, a Julie Neale chandelier she couldn't resist, and pull-out benches that turn a small parlor into comfortable seating for homework or reading. The dining room mixes brand-new white chairs with a nine-foot antique table found for a steal. Rather than paper the whole room in chinoiserie, Carrie framed hand-painted silk panels and matched grass cloth to paint for a long monochromatic wash. The painting over the console is her own — reminiscent of California, and her favorite of the pieces she's made. The bar between dining room and foyer is where a friend serves drinks at parties, backed by a marble slab meant to echo an old New York speakeasy.

Carrie loves it most for the quiet conversations that happen there over a glass of wine. The living room was built extra-large, then broken into zones: rocker-gliders for cocktails, a bigger seating area for the twelve people who come for Monday Bible study. The coffee table is the last off-cut of the bar's marble slab — she tried to nudge it after installation and discovered it was never moving again. Above the mantel hangs another of her paintings, hinged to hide the television, because this is a serious football family. Her style, in her words, is a compilation: traditional modern meets grand millennial, full of $5 garage-sale finds she polished back to life, pillows and curtains she sewed, and furniture she built using her late father's woodworking tools.