DALL October 2009 : Page 89
For graphic designer Samantha Reitmayer, work and home are all about beautiful, tactile materials, even if some happen to be virtual. As a principal in the nine-person boutique branding firm Rovillo + Reitmayer, the 31-year- old routinely competes against bigger firms for business, winning over clients with luxurious and innovative invitations, brochures, packaging, websites and other collateral marketing elements. (Tink mirrored Plexiglas and stainless steel invitations.) Te company’s roster of heavy hitters includes the Billingsley Company, One Arts Plaza, the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, the Dallas Cowboys and a bevy of photographers, artists and other creative types.Tis fall, Reitmayer is launching an online invitation site for the stylish set, dubbed social/ SWOON, which will cull the talents of artists and graphic designers across the country to create a line of artistic templated invitations, including letter press. A fledgling blogger with a passion for interior design, Reitmayer’s blog, style/SWOON, was featured on the cult site Design*Sponge in July. She gets a respectable 400 hits a day, and the design for her blog,which a colleague at the firm created, is luxuriously stylish. “I just love interiors,” she says. “It goes all the way back tomy roomat home, when I askedmymomif I could paint it navy blue.” Mom wasn’t thrilled and neither were Reitmayer’s college roommates at TCU, when she spray- painted everything silver in the house they shared. “Tey stopped me short of painting the TV,” she says. “It would have looked so much better if they’d let me.” Reitmayer’s design style has since grown more sophisticated. She’s still into makeovers, but DIY is out. “I have more of an elegant aesthetic these days. I’m not into being crafty. I’m more into finding cool things and putting themtogether.” To wit, a collection of a dozen or so offbeat and beautiful chairs—purchased not for theirmanufacturer or provenance but for their looks—are stored in Reitmayer’s fiance’s tool shed, among the deer antlers, taxidermy, birds’ nests, a ’40s-era mirrored-glass ball and beautiful old books “allmerchandized like it’s a store,” she says. A couple of years ago, Reitmayer downsized from a THE WHITE STUFF Clockwise from top: In the living room, a tree stump table from Big Mango, topped with glass balls from Forty Five Ten, anchors the space; chaise from Four Hands, Austin; on the mantel, a mix of white objects from Vintage Living, T.J. Maxx and flea market finds. A bleached antler becomes glamorous when placed on a mirror for display. The dressing room is a converted second bedroom; the vintage doors are from Four Hands, Austin; the vintage chest has belonged to Reitmayer since she was 15; the mirrored table is from Target; the vintage chair was upholstered in cowhide; a display shelf is a graphic way to store a pair of Calvin Klein boots. A collection of clam shells grouped in a glass bowl becomes decorative. Opposite page: Reitmayer loves to mix unexpected elements together, such as the vintage ceramic hand, a gift from Jan Barboglio; a pony hair box from Forty Five Ten; and her grandmother’s diary. 3,000-square-foot house to a townhouse one third that size near Knox Henderson. Te mid-’80s abode had 9-foot ceilings and beautiful honey-colored wood floors, two positives. But it also had “awful orange-toned granite countertops and flesh pink travertine tile” that had to go, and no real interior architecture to speak of. Says Reitmayer: “I thought, howcan I take this boring space and make it cool?” She started with a pile of weathered wood she’d been hanging on to forever. She hired a handyman to install it on the kitchen ceiling.Te wood, along with shiny chrome pendants from Restoration Hardware and a wall that was painted with chalkboard paint, give the room the look of a “chic country kitchen,” she says. Next, her handyman put up beadboard on the bedroom ceiling “to warm up the space” she says, and converted a second bedroom into a spacious, glamorous dressing room. Instead of replacing plain door handles, she dropped big bucks on a pair of silver mermaid handles she’d found at an antique store in McKinney. “Te cool thing about living in a small house is that you can spend more money on the details. In a large house if you want to replace the door handles, there’s 16 of them.” Arestricted color scheme ofwhites, beiges, dusty blues October 2009 | 89
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