Restoration Over Replacement: A Bodron Fruit High-Rise

Starting With What You Already Own: Inside a Bodron Fruit High-Rise

Most designers start with a blank slate, a clear canvas, an empty room. Bodron Fruit often starts with what a client already owns, and at Villa D’Este in Houston, that meant building a 3,500-square-foot high-rise around a collection of furniture that a longtime client carried from her family home on a Louisiana bayou. Here, the Dallas interior designer and architect chose restoration over replacement, and every piece in the apartment carries the evidence.

The relationship ran deep. Mil Bodron had known the client since childhood in Monroe, Louisiana, where a friendship that began in the 1960s lasted a lifetime. She and her husband, an architect, kept a home on Bayou DeSiard that became a gathering place for the neighborhood, and Bodron spent enough time there to absorb its mid-century rooms firsthand. Years later, after she was widowed and relocated to Villa D’Este high-rise, her only request was to make maximum use of the family’s furnishings. That set of the brief, and it fit the firm’s guiding lifestyle-first design approach: how the client wanted the home to work, not what she wanted it to look like.

So the modern Dallas interior designer went to work on decidedly mid-century modern furniture. This was vintage furniture restoration in the truest sense: a Paul McCobb credenza, Billy Baldwin slipper chairs and an étagère, an Edward Wormley love seat, Philip & Kelvin LaVerne cocktail tables, and a custom nine-foot Widdicomb sofa reupholstered in Romo. A Gio Ponti and Bertha Schaefer dining table paired with Singer & Sons chairs, along with a rare set of Maison Jansen palm-tree floor lamps, carried the same era through the rooms.

The home was remodeled around what the furniture offered, not the reverse. This was high-rise interior design driven by the collection: Bodron Fruit reworked the entryway, kitchen, master bath, bedroom, and closets; added sliding glass doors that can close off the dining room when needed; kept the original classical panelized columns; and installed new lighting throughout. The client’s art was given room to breathe, too. Work by Louisiana artist Sam Wiener, along with pieces by Marilyn Baum, Losi Cinello, and Terence La Noue and a glass sculpture by Gene Koss were displayed prominently across the living areas.

None of it was improvised. For this Dallas interior designer and architect, designing around a collection is a proven method rather than a one-off. Bodron Fruit measured and cataloged every piece from the original home and working-out scale and placement on paper before making a single concrete move. Room scale was helpful even so no one object could dominate, and the result reads like a New York salon, where guesses take in the feel of the whole space rather than any one piece. 

What makes Villa D’Este work is not the newness. It’s the familiarity. By choosing restoration over replacement, Bodron Fruit gave the client her own furniture back in its best condition, making it feel brand-new. This is the goal behind designing around a collection instead of around a blank room. In the end, the client did not feel like she moved. She felt like she came home, which is what sets Bodron Fruit apart.