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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen Laura Hunt was a newlywed in Dallas in the mid-1970s, most of her friends coveted jewelry and cars as birthday and Christmas presents. She requested antiques and paintings. \"Laura has always had a great eye,\" says Loyd Taylor, the owner\u2014with Charles Paxton Gremillion\u2014of Loyd Paxton, an antiques shop in the warehouse section of Dallas. \"She bought an incredible set of eight early-18th-century English chairs for herself from us when she was very young.\" Hunt left Dallas in 1989 and became a designer in 1998. She has an apartment in Manhattan but maintains a residence in Dallas and returns frequently to visit her parents and to shop. \"I was born in Brooklyn, but my parents moved to Texas when I was 11 months old,\" she says. \"At heart I'm still a Texan.\"\n\nIncredible is an adjective Loyd Taylor often uses to describe the furniture he and his partner sell. One of the pieces in the shop is a mid-19th-century four-poster canopied bed of sterling silver over wood surmounted by a pair of peacocks, made for an Indian royal family. \"It's from the dowry of a family in Gujarat,\" Taylor says.\n\n\"The lady who had been leasing the house moved out in the night. By nine o'clock it was mine.\"\n\nThe East Orient Company is another shop that Hunt has frequented for years. \"I named my place after a colonial hotel I loved in Penang,\" says its owner, Elizabeth Gertz. \"The name was appropriate when I opened in 1978 because back then I specialized in Asian art. I had a lot of lacquerware and Ming. After I changed my focus to fine European furniture, people advised me to change the name, but I couldn't think of one, so I didn't.\" Hunt has purchased a good deal of furniture and accessories from East Orient. \"I just bought a collection of antique quill boxes for a client,\" she says.\n\nJan Showers Associates is a block away from East Orient on Slocum Street. \"Jan has a lot of fine French furniture from the 1930s and '40s,\" Hunt says. Her showroom vignettes feature a set of six Ruhlmann chairs, a pair of Jacques Adnet berg\u2022res and a stamped House of Jansen mirrored writing desk. \"Jan also carries wonderful Venetian and French lamps,\" Hunt says. \"And in every vignette there's at least one mirror. Her store twinkles. It's airy and has the same glamour as the movies of the 1940s.\" Hunt buys many lamps from Jan Showers, as well as pieces from Showers's own line of furniture.\n\nTwo miles from Slocum Street, near downtown Dallas, is John Robert Clark Antiques, a shop John Clark opened in October 2003 after working for others in the antiques trade. \"I'm in one of the two oldest mud-brick Victorian houses in Dallas. It's always been one of my favorite spaces in the city,\" Clark says. \"The lady who had been leasing it moved out in the night. A friend told me about it at six o'clock in the morning. By nine o'clock the space was mine. I'm the only one in the city specializing in Empire and the Neoclassical period, and I have one of the largest sticks and sconces.\" Because Clark's shop is located in close proximity to two of Dallas's finest hotels\u2014Crescent Court and The Mansion on Turtle Creek\u2014he has more of a retail clientele than most antiques stores. \"I meet major pols and celebrities, and I sell to them,\" he says. \"Some of my most fabulous pieces go to people who want to make fabulous statements.\"\n\nLike Clark, a native of Dayton, Robert Rutherford is a transplanted Ohioan\u2014from Columbus. In 1989 he opened Rutherford's in a small retail center at the edge of Highland Park. His wife, son, daughter and son-in-law are in the business with him. He has 80,000 trims in his store and in his warehouse. \"When I'm in Dallas, I like to go to Rutherford's,\" Hunt says. \"It's on Lovers Lane, right down the street from Sonny Bryan's, which has the best barbecue in the United States.\" The metallic trims, crystal trims, lace braids with rosettes, tassels, ties, braids, gimp, fringe and bullion are arrayed by style and shade. \"If I'm in New York and I need trim really quickly, I pick up the phone and call Rutherford's,\" Hunt says. \"After an exchange of color faxes or digital photos, I can have 50 yards of beautiful trim Fed-Ex'd to me in a couple of days.\"\n\nWhen Laura Hunt wants to provide her clients with the finest wallcoverings and window treatments, she turns to Robert Turner Associates. \"Bobby Turner is someone else I've known forever,\" Hunt says. \"He did a stair hall out of Gracie silk for me when I was 22. No one is better at putting up hand-painted panels.\" \"Designers like Laura know what they want,\" says Turner. \"I come in at the end of a project, and I get to turn a house into something exciting.\"\n\nOr, as Laura Hunt says, \"Bobby is the icing on the cake. It's no wonder he's asked to work all over the country. I shop in many cities, but I'm delighted that Dallas has world-class craftsmen and antiques dealers. I'd put them up against their counterparts anywhere.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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