If you haven’t been to Dallas lately, you’re missing a lot. The city is undergoing massive changes, and all for the good. I was there last month to address a meeting of Design Centers International, and I was impressed with the new energy coursing through old Dallas.

Before my talk on Friday morning, however, we had other business to attend to. On Thursday morning our Regional Manager Annette Lentz picked me up bright and early and we headed out to meet with Bentwood Kitchens, just north of Dallas in Lancaster. Bentwood president Kevin Bryant and Todd Henson gave us a tour of the facilities, where Bentwood creates custom cabinet orders, custom paint finishes, you name it, right there in a hangar-like structure filled with talented (and loyal) craftspeople. I love to see where and how products are manufactured, so the tour was a treat for me.

We then headed back into Dallas for a meeting at the Nasher Sculpture Center, which is at the heart of Dallas’s cultural scene. The Renzo Piano building housing Raymond and Patsy Nasher’s remarkable art collection opened five years ago, and it’s an exquisite piece of architecture. As Western Interiors & Design is also celebrating its fifth birthday, we’re partnering with the Nasher for special events in Dallas this fall. Jane Offenbach and Martha Hess met with us in a beautiful conference room that looks out onto the sculpture garden, an extraordinary oasis in the urban center. We’ll reveal more details about our partnership events soon, but they will be glamorous and fun, and I’m excited about our new relationship.

It was time for lunch, so we walked from the Nasher to the Dallas Museum of Art’s Seventeen Seventeen restaurant, where we met Nickie Murchison, Executive Director of the Dallas Arts District Alliance. Did you know that Dallas has the largest designated arts district of any city in the country? Neither did I. But Nickie educated me, and I’m excited that Western Interiors & Design will be a sponsor of the Arts District’s September fund-raising event. More on that later.

Annette has a lot of energy, so we embarked on a few quick hits after lunch. At the Dallas Decorative Center we dropped in on George Cameron Nash, who is celebrating his twenty-first year in business. He had planned to take his staff on a surprise outing that evening, and Champagne was being poured as the staff gathered for the unknown adventure. George, however, was gracious enough to sit down with us and talk for a bit. He keeps adding new lines and twists to the showroom (I love his new outdoor sculptural pieces!), and he’s built a remarkable business in Dallas. I never did find out where they all went off to that night, but I’m sure it was memorable.

We made a stop at the Renaissance Tile & Bath showroom, where John Lane showed us the new installations, and then visited with Ramon Longoria at the Henredon showroom. Ramon has all the inside information on what’s going on and who’s doing what in Dallas, so we had an enjoyable and enlightening time catching up with him. We also stopped by to see our friends at Scott + Cooner, who were throwing a Spring Thing bash. Lloyd Scott is always a superb hostess, and the showroom looked marvelous (who needs to go to Milan when Lloyd has culled the best of the Italian collections?). We saw lots of other friends there but could only stay for a quick drink as we had dinner plans (how did it get to be dinnertime so quickly?).

Dallas wouldn’t be Dallas without David and Ann Sutherland, and I’d been looking forward to seeing them at Nobu along with their colleagues Tim Shaw and Wesley Vice. Sutherland’s new line with Philippe Starck is the talk of the furniture world, and I was interested to hear David talk about working with the renowned designer (it all went smoothly). Ann continues to oversee the remarkable fabric company Perennials, which sets the pace for so much of the outdoor fabric market. For one of the hardest-working couples in the industry, though, David and Ann always know how to have fun, and our dinner was no exception. (I had to remind myself that I had to get up and address a distinguished design group in the morning.)

On Friday morning I reviewed some notes, drank a venti iced latte and headed over to the Herman Miller showroom conference room, where my talk was scheduled. Design center heads from around the country were in Dallas, and I wanted to talk about the western marketplace, and Texas specifically. The West is a huge and under-served marketplace, and (incredibly!) many design companies are just beginning to figure out that our region isn’t just a provincial backwater. I pointed out that the West is an international marketplace for contemporary design of all stripes, and used our coverage of Texas over the past five years to illustrate my point. The hour flew by quickly (for me, at least!), and I was grateful to the Dallas Decorative Center for the invitation.

Annette and I then looked in at the Gerald Peters Gallery, where we spent a while talking about art and artists with Director Karen Fedri. Contemporary art in the West has been a big part of our coverage, so it always gets the wheels turning to spend time in a top-quality gallery. We also visited with Deborah Manning, who with her brother, Steve Bracken, opened Hermitage Antiques in Dallas six years ago to great success. Excellent inventory, interesting pieces, great prices. It was a pleasure to meet Deborah.

Lunch was at Charlie Palmer’s at the Joule Hotel, which has just been renovated by Architexas. We met with John and Irene Allender of Architexas, and Diane Collier of the AIA, to discuss sponsoring the AIA Home Tour in Dallas in November. There’s so much great architecture going on in Dallas that the tour has been a great success, so it was exciting to explore the possibility of working together on this year’s tour. And Charlie Palmer’s was a great room to relax in, with delicious food.

I was flying back to Los Angeles in the afternoon, but Annette wanted to show me a very cool house being built by Morrison Siefert Murphy architects before we headed to the airport. We drove to the site and got out and explored the construction site, which is another thing I love to do. The bold contemporary house seemed to signify the excitement and possibility that’s afoot in Dallas these days, and I was happy to have been able to soak some of that up in my brief two days there. I was happier still to know that we have such interesting partners in Dallas, and that we’d be returning in the fall for some very special cultural events.