How long does it take to move into a new home? To really move in: find new furniture, hang your art, update landscaping, make a mark. Less than a year ago, Kristie Ramirez and her family moved from their Spanish Mediterranean home in Lakewood to a renovated mid-century North Dallas home. But you wouldn’t know it. After such a short time in the space, the only cardboard here contains discarded crusts.
The pizza deliveryman has just left, and Kristie’s children, Cruz, 8, and Pilar, 5, are chowing down on pepperoni pie. Now Ramirez, a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, answers the door, revealing pops of bold color behind her. “I’ll tell you the dirty little secret about my husband,” Ramirez says, playfully turning her head away from her kids. “He loves to move. He likes the new experience of it – of being in a fresh place and making it a home.”
Built in 1954, the home received a makeover before Ramirez and her husband, television producer (Texas Music Scene) and artist Tom Hoitsma, nabbed it. It has a comfy open layout with a breakfast bar transitioning the kitchen space into the family room. Ramirez says one of the reasons the home was a good find was because the bar was high enough to accommodate Hoitsma’s very tall stature. The separate laundry room and finely finished walk-ins didn’t hurt either.
With the kids in the kitchen are their own works of art. Original pieces by their father hang nearby. That’s another selling point: wall space. The Ramirez-Hoitsma clan are not only creatives but collectors. Hoitsma received his B.S. with a concentration in studio arts from Skidmore College and went on to work with well-known artists in the New York gallery scene in the 1980s. The presence of Keith Haring’s work in the home, then, is as natural as it is joyous. Over the years, the pair – before their 12-year marriage and throughout – have acquired some impressive pieces, but there is a standard.
“For art, Tom and I totally agree, it has to make us happy,” Ramirez says. “We find humor in just about everything; we’re constantly giggling at the absurdity of things. I want art to make me feel good – I don’t want it to make me sad.”
That sentiment about art-happiness carries throughout the home – from the formal living room’s enormous David LaChapelle photo of a mildly exposed Paris Hilton on the beach, to the tongue-in-cheek mock advertisement illustrations by Hoitsma’s late brother in the hallway. Even the powder room gets artist James Gilbert’s one-line portrait of a barefoot Ramirez – with an added bit of humor thanks to an extra toe.
But art doesn’t have to hang. A gold-painted tumbleweed brought back from Marfa, Texas, offers as much of a smile as a Tufenkian rug topped with a gray Barcelona chair that Ramirez’s friend, local designer Shelby Wagner, located (he also scored several other key pieces for the home). Recognizable Jonathan Adler accents span the equine to the solar.
One can’t help but beam as Ramirez offers a tour into the kids’ rooms. Cruz’s headboard, built by her handy husband, leaps wildly from the proverbial box – Ramirez gave her son and his pals carte blanche to graffiti the nailhead-trimmed white material.
Often found in plastic playhouses, the ubiquitous pink is present in Pilar’s room but in a worldly way, via a mixture of vibrant ikat drapes and a James Sasso print of cowboys.
Ramirez and Hoitsma have a knack for mixing in the natural with the gallery-worthy. In the family room, a side table made with beaded Mexican movie posters holds court with a leather-upholstered Louis XVI chair and a coffee table that is actually a gloriously large, polished cross-section of a tree. In the kitchen, antlers anchor the bottom of a planter bowl while in the media/guest room, three mounted buck heads (gifts from Ramirez’s uncle) keep watch over visitors. Meanwhile, a hand-carved wooden bedstead so large it makes movers laugh is the focal point of the master suite (Hoitsma co-designed it).
The laughter, love and artistic inspiration also made the move north from Lakewood. Ramirez says they just need something to hang on the expansive wall in the formal living room. She’s thinking an installation. Maybe a box of a different sort … perhaps one shining with neon. Definitely something to incite a smile.
