HOUSE TOUR | 90-Year-Old Interior Designer at Peak of Career

On today's episode of Homeworthy, we're taking you to Dallas, Texas, to meet 90-year-old Joe Minton, one of Fort Worth's most iconic interior designers, who says he is at the peak of his career. He lives in a beautiful and historic home and is a fascinating person and storyteller. You're in for a real treat. Remember to visit homeworthy.com slash shop to discover amazing furniture, art, and accessories handpicked by our editors. All of the items are inspired by the episodes you see here on this channel. Enjoy. You're watching Homeworthy, where we believe every home has a story. Like and subscribe for more. Hi, Homeworthy. Come in, I'm Joe. Welcome to my Dallas home. I'm Joe Minton. I've been an interior designer in Dallas and Fort Worth for 50 years. I recently lost a job because the client thought I was too old to finish the job. Well, what they don't know is I'm going to live to 100. Or more. I'll decide when I'm 100. We are in my house in University Park in Dallas, and this room that we're in is 300 years old. It was the oak drawing room at Wingerworth Hall in Derbyshire. It was 30 miles from the Duke of Devonshire's house, Chatsworth. I'm lucky that I'm in perfect health, and I continue to work. I love working. I love what I do, and I'm very good at it. I'm really at the peak of my powers right now as far as interior design. We're on a busy street in University Park. In the front and the back of the house faces, our property has a little creek behind it and a forest. So when you look out, you see it looks like Sherwood Forest out there past the garden. The architect was really brilliant in doing this house because it's got this wonderful large room and then two small bedrooms and a small study, dining room, and kitchen. And it has three bathrooms, but it's a very small house. It's suitable for one or two people. It's not a family house. It has no big playroom. It has no, and I didn't want a big playroom. This is the small foyer of the house, and this is a Chinese Chippendale piece that probably from the 19th century. It's not 18, and those are wonderful Chinese phoenix birds. And I noticed that there are some of these very similar birds are in the new Anne and Gordon Getty sail, very similar. The foyer should be a place to greet people. The larger the foyer is, the better. I would prefer this to be a larger area because people tend to congregate in the entrance hall of the house, and I love big entrance halls. But this is a very small entrance hall, but it works here. At least it's got a hall. I hate a house where you enter right into the living room. When we moved in, the room looked just like it does. It's been like this for 300 years. The room is early Georgian. The Wingerwerth Hall was built in 1720. Now we'll go into the living room. This is a 300-year-old room, exactly the size it was 300 years ago in Derbyshire, England. It is the oak drawing room from Wingerwerth Hall, which was 30 miles from Chatsworth, home of the Duke of Devonshire. This room was bought by William Randolph Hearst in London in the 1920s and sent. The house was demolished in the 20s, and the house, Hearst bought it, sent it to California to build into San Simeon, and they ended up not using the room, and he had an auction in the 1940s, and the architect, Wilson McClure, bought the room and built this house around it. This is a book of England's lost houses. It's houses that were demolished since the 1950s in England, and this is Wingerwerth Hall, where this room came from, and it tells about it in this book by Giles Worsley. This is a copy of a watercolor of Wingerwerth Hall, where this room came from, and it was right here on this corner was the oak drawing room, and I've got it in Dallas, and I actually went to the site of Wingerwerth Hall when we went to the sale at Chatsworth. I love different styles of design. My personal house and what I like to live with is very traditional. I love antiques. I especially love English antiques, although I also like French antiques, but I like working with very contemporary furniture and also rustic. I've done several jobs in Colorado in ski lodges and log cabins, and that's a fun thing to do, and I've done several houses that are completely contemporary where I don't have one single antique in there. This table is a table that we have made. I have a furniture collection called the Minton Corley Collection, and this is one of our pieces. We call it the Jocko table because it's sort of reminiscent of Giacometti. These are French reproduction chairs. That's a big old sofa that I had made that turns into a bed. I had it in my New York apartment, but I can't turn it into a bed, and I don't need to turn it into a bed here. These wonderful big windows are modern, of course. They were designed by the architect, Wilson McClure, when he built the house around the room. Oh, this is very interesting, but this room was originally dark brown. It's oak, and he bleached the paneling with all kinds of poisonous bleaches and acids, and they had to leave the two open so that the air would come in because it would have killed anyone that came into all these fumes, but it turned out to be this beautiful, the beautiful color of the wood that came from that bleaching, and it's sort of the color that everyone wants for a bleached paneling. This fireplace is Italian statuary marble, and there's a, when we went to Chatsworth, there is a similar one, very similar in Chatsworth done by the same builder architect who did Wingerwerth Hall also worked at Chatsworth in 17, Wingerwerth was finished in 1720. This is the best fireplace that it draws perfectly, and I thought about building a fire today, but it's too hot. Oh, the architect, Wilson McClure, did this pine floor and painted it black, which I really loved, and when I got the house, we painted it black again. Well, I just put another coat on it, and I love the black floor. We can seat a lot of people in here, and we do. I can have, I've had as many as 100 people in this house at Christmas, and they go into the study, into the dining room, and if the weather's nice enough, they can go outside in the garden. We've cut that down to just family now. What is the secret to hosting a great party? It's getting the right guests, I think, is the most important, and being relaxed and having fun at your own party. We have a collection of Ming Dynasty blue and white porcelains that came from the Chinese junk, which was, it was a ship that was sailing from China to Amsterdam, and it sank in 17, before 1740, it sank in the South China Seas, and a Captain Hatcher located it and pulled back all of these porcelains, and they went on to, they took them to Amsterdam where Christie's had a big sale, and my friend Betty Gertz, who had a wonderful antique shop, bought about almost half of the collection, and I've acquired them from Betty. These are all little pieces that were, they were on their way to Amsterdam before the end of the Ming Dynasty. And how long did they live at the bottom of the sea? For 300 years, and which gave them a patina that's slightly rough. It gives it a velvety feel from the salt water. Here are the little tickets that from the, I've left the tickets on the pieces showing that they're from the Christie's sale. These are Italian Louis XVI chairs, and they're covered in an Hermes leather in this parrot green, and we've got four in the living room, and then we have four in the dining room, and the dining room table can expand or can seat any number of people, but we've got eight chairs like this. This is a very modern house with an ancient room in it and English furniture. Oh, this is a wonderful table. This is an Irish Georgian table, and the top is all one piece of wood, which is very rare that there was a mahogany plank that wide, but I love that table. I love the windows, and they, of course, open up and slide, and we can open up to the outside. When the weather's nice, we can have a wonderful party outside. I've done three tables of 10 out there and then served cold foods, like vichyssoises and sandwiches come out. We've got a creek behind the house, and sometimes we have ducks. Well, the ducks aren't there now, but there's the pond, and having this, the woods here gives us a wonderful secluded feel to the house that we're in the country, and yet we're on a busy Dallas street. I designed this garden when we first got the house. I planted the holly bushes and divided the garden into three sections. This, I love the view from here, looking through the three sections to the identical segment down there, that that's off of the, that segment is centered on the fireplace in the study, and this is centered on the dining room. I feel like that we've got Sherwood Forest behind the house. I looked out one morning, I came out here with my coffee and looked over, and there was a little, it was like a jungle. A cat was creeping along, and birds were flying around, and there was a red-headed woodpecker in this tree right here, and that woodpecker has come back two different years. I wish he'd come back again. He must have died, but maybe his descendants will come, but they particularly like that one tree. I was born in Fort Worth, which is 30 miles from here, and from an old family that had, my great-great-grandfather came to Fort Worth when it was, when they closed the fort. They had a fort there, and they closed it, and my great-great-grandfather bought one of the log cabins from one of the officers at the fort, and that was before the Civil War in the early 1850s. My great-grandfather, who was a doctor, wanted to try out this newfangled invention called a telephone, and he got nine of his patients together, and told them that they had to sign up for this telephone, or he wouldn't come to their house when they got sick, so these 10 people got 10 telephones, and they were the first telephones in Fort Worth, and my grandfather's number was one, my great-grandfather, and then my grandfather inherited it, and when my mother, after my mother was born and going to the University of Texas in Austin, their number was still one, and they kept that number one until they put in the dial phones, and Mama would call long distance to Fort Worth and the operators wouldn't believe her when she said her number was one, which amused me. This is the dining room. It's round, as you can see, and it's exactly as it was in 1950 when Wilson McClure designed it. These walls and the murals on the walls were done in 1950, and we've left them just as they are. The ceiling is domed up. It has a dome that goes up into the attic space. I bought the chandelier from a friend who was moving and had it rewired, and in the process, they lost, the company lost all of the crystals, so I replaced all of the crystals with rock crystals, so all of those crystals are actually the mineral rock crystal. Then after I'd done that, they found the original crystals, so I had to do another chandelier and put the originals on that, but I'm actually glad it all happened because I love the rock crystals. I like them much better than the glass crystals, and we have, because of it being round, we've ended up with these spaces on the side. This is a silver closet, and over here, we've got a china closet, and behind this section here is the pantry for the kitchen that opens into the kitchen, which the kitchen hadn't been changed since 1950. This table has leaves that extend, so it's a very comfortable room to have a small dinner party, and we have had, it's possible to have 12 people for dinner for a party and put six of them, actually, we could have 16 people. We could put eight in this room and then take the desk out of the study and use the study as another dining area. These are crystal balls of rock crystal, which I love. They weigh a ton, but that's a beautiful, I love the crystal. I like collecting things in multiples. I think that several of them is much more important than one. Oh, this is a 1950s piece from a company that was originally Crumpy, and then it became Karamos, but I love this rock formation, and I've had this a long time. Sculpture over on this pedestal that is actually a period piece of one of the Caesars. Now I'm gonna take you to the kitchen through this wonderful curved door that Wilson McClure designed, and here we are in a 1950s kitchen that hasn't been changed since 1950, so it's a period piece. I guess it's 70 years old. Amazing. This is all original to the kitchen, and we've just left it as it is. One thing, I don't care a bunch about the kitchen. I don't cook, and it's a small kitchen, and it's not a live-in kitchen. It's just a place to cook and serve the food in the rest of the house. I sleep rather late. I usually get up about 8.30 or 9, and I have to have two coffees before I can function, and I have to read the paper, and sometimes I have to read two papers. I read the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News, and then I'm ready to go. By 11 o'clock, I'm ready to meet clients, and then I tend to, I'm at my best in the afternoon, so I try to get client meetings in the afternoon, and I sometimes work until six or seven. This is my trusted coffee machine. It's a Nespresso, which makes wonderful coffee. I should do an ad for Nespresso. Oh, that's a mess. Let's don't go there. I've been in the ROTC, and I finished that, and the Air Force said I have to go into the service. I have my commission as a second lieutenant. I got sent to England, which is what I wanted to do, and I had the most wonderful two-year career in the Air Force in England. I ran the officers club, the service club, the movie theater, and I was on a little base called Chick Sands Priory that didn't even have an airfield. This was in the 1950s during the Cold War. There were no bullets during the Cold War, so I missed a war with bullets. The base commander of the Air Force base called me in with two other single lieutenants and said that Lord DeRamsey was having a big debut party for his two daughters, and he wanted three Air Force officers to come to the party. So we said, oh, good, we'll go and we'll wear our tuxes. He said, no, you won't. You'll have to wear your uniform with a black tie, and I thought, oh, Lord, we'll stick out like a sore thumb. Well, sure enough, we did stick out, but that was a very good thing. We met several debutantes that invited us to more parties and we sort of got on a debutante circuit of going to parties. The experience of those beautiful country houses did influence me. The house has two bedrooms, one downstairs and one upstairs just above it. This is the downstairs bedroom, and here we have two bathrooms, and this bathroom here doubles as a powder room, and I had a faux painter do this wonderful mural from Brighton Pavilion, which I love Brighton Pavilion, that was done by, oh, I can't remember which king, but he was one that waited forever to become the king, just like Charles. That's not paint. It's a gold leaf, and in here, it's a silver leaf, and I did these mirrors, the blocks of mirror. I'll show you. The doors are hidden with using the blocks of mirror. You can't tell. Here, I'll close this one. Because this room has so many doors, by doing the wainscoting on the bottom of the door and doing the mirror lining up with the top of the door, they're sort of hidden when they're closed, and the same over here. There's another one over here. That was broken. This room was so small that I thought it needed the mirror to get more light and just enlarge the space. I bought this bed in Paris in the flea market, and this wonderful little chest belonged to, well, it was at a shop called Vivian Watson, who's since deceased, but it's a wonderful little secretary. This is a French 19th century commode. Carpet I had made, and I love this leopard pattern. All of the wood in here was painted white when I got the house, and this wonderful faux painter managed to match the old wood in the 17th century living room. The curtains are Fortuny, which is a very pretty shades of green and pale gold, and actually we used this pair in a show house. Oh, it was the last Southern Accents show house that we did. We did the whole house, and then the Southern Accents went out of business right after that. My parents thought I should get a law degree after I finished undergraduate school, and I didn't know what I was going to do, and they said I should be a lawyer. I wanted to be an architect. They discouraged that. They said architects don't make any money, and architects, you'll hate the math, so I did what I was told and went to law school. I graduated from law school. I passed the bar, and it was so much trouble passing the bar and finishing school, I thought I've got to go ahead and practice law for a little bit, so I got a job with the city attorney's office in Fort Worth, and he immediately made me the tax attorney for the whole city, which was a hideous job of suing people who didn't pay their ad valorem taxes, and I did that for a year. No, I did it for two years, and then I was married, and my wife's family were big stockholders of a bank in Fort Worth, and they thought I should go work for the trust department of the bank as a trust officer and vice president, and I dutifully did that, and while I was working at the bank, the chairman of the bank asked me if I could do over the two top floors of the tallest building in town, which was the bank building, and I said, oh, yes, I can, but I'm gonna need someone to help me because I didn't know the sources of all the things that I was going to need, and he said, get anyone you need, so I got David Corley, who had been a friend at SMU in my ROTC class, and so we worked on the top two floors for a year, and it turned out beautifully, and the bank was thrilled. They said, what can we do to reward you, and we said, we want to have the first party in the space, and the bank paid for it, and they said, okay, so we had this big party, and we invited all the social people in town that we knew, well, all the social people, period, and all the Bass's and the Fortson's and the big-name people, so at the end of this party, David and I decided that we should go into business, and I would leave the bank, and he would leave his father-in-law that he was working for, who happened to be, it was Ben Hogan's brother, so we started, and immediately, we're successful. We got jobs immediately, some from directors of the bank. We ended up being hired by the bank to do the lobby, and we got the job of doing the Midland Country Club, and through this hidden door, we go into the other bathroom, which, as you see, connects. It's very brilliant that this connects. This sort of becomes a hallway and connects to the study, and in here, we've got more closets and chest of drawers, and then in here is the toilet and the shower and another big closet. I used this brush the other day to try to clean some fabric. I don't use it on my hair. Maybe I should. Now we'll go in the study through this door, and the study connects. We have a wonderful wood-burning fireplace in here that also has wonderful draw, and we use these wood-burning fireplaces all the time in the winter. This is the only TV, so you sit in these wonderful old leather chairs and sit here and watch television. I don't like seeing them. That one, we were so lucky to get a television that fit exactly between the styles of the bookcases. Oh, this is interesting. These, I was in Paris in the flea market, and I saw these two Georgian bookcases. They're George III, and I thought they would be perfect for this room, so after I came home, I called the dealer. It was an English, actually a Scottish dealer in France who had them for sale, and the French aren't crazy about English furniture, which is nice, so we got a good price on this pair. I think one tends to run out of book space, so we normally have, they're piled around in stacks, which I don't mind. That's a French painter, and he's listed in the Benezet book, and I've forgotten his name, but I love dogs, and I love dog paintings. I do some on the computer, and this is a laptop, but it just stays there. I don't pick it up and take it with me. I use my iPhone and iPad sort of like a computer. I've always got my phone, and if I get the magnifying glass, I can read articles out of the newspaper on this little bitty phone. The laptop connects to the television, so we can use the television monitor there as a screen. It's hard to keep up with it. I need a IT person to constantly be working on it because things seem to go out of whack. I didn't kill these tortoise. I got these in Europe in the flea market, and they're very, very old, and I think that it's bad people collecting tortoise shell because I like the turtles, but I had these, so I hung them. There's no point in getting rid of them. Those are 18th century turtles. Now we're gonna go upstairs to the little guest suite or the other bedroom through this little hall here, we go up. I've covered everything in a mattress ticking, which you'll see upstairs. This is a little trick I did with mirrors. I mirrored this little wall space and did the portier curtains so that it opened this hall up and added more light, and this room is covered in the same ticking, and the day bed. Home means a secure, not maybe secluded place where you are comfortable, protected, happy, and it should be beautiful, and that's really my job is making these houses beautiful homes. Thanks for watching. For more homeworthy content, be sure to like and subscribe.