Where Time Stands Still

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Like many city slickers, Michael and Emilie Bolton fantasized about trading their hectic Fort Worth, Texas, existence for a slower pace. But unlike other dreamers, these two up and moved to the Hill Country for a new start in a tiny old barn.

WRITTEN BY SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBIN STUBBERT

STYLING BY BRIAN ANDRIOLA

In the barn's kitchen, a plank from Michael and Emilie Bolton's former house (propped against the cupboard) charts the growth of children and dogs. The table and chairs came from Homestead and Friends, a shop owned by Michael's brother.

Salvaged clock- faces hang by the stairs.

Michael and Emilie relax with Kylie the Weimaraner and Thula Grace, a Great Dane.

Vintage dishes turn a plate of figs into an elegant still life.

A pair of slipcovered Lee sofas, along with leather hassocks from the Arrangement in Dallas, furnish the Boltons' new living room; on the coffee table stands a classic Bolton detail, a vintage toy horse made from papier-mâché and horsehair.

A hallway coatrack becomes a creative composition of safari hats and photographs.

A $500 iron bed -- one of Emilie's most expensive purchases -- anchors this whitewashed bedroom.

Tucked behind these portraits of her parents, an empty frame creates a 3-D tableau.

The couple found both the hutch and vintage sign on antique-hunting jaunts.

This painted wooden dresser represents the only piece of furniture the Boltons brought with them from Fort Worth. Emilie picked up the wall hanging at Homestead and Friends. "I have no idea what it says," she admits. "I just like pigs."

In the mid-1990s, Michael and Emilie Bolton lived in a pleasant four-bedroom home in a pleasant neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas. Both enjoyed successful careers as sales reps for large furniture manufacturers, and with their two kids off at college, they spent weekend afternoons at the country club playing golf and tennis. "If you wanted a portrait of a contented couple," says Emilie, "we were it."

Then Michael suggested they move to an abandoned 850-square-foot hay barn in the Texas Hill Country, near Fredericksburg, about four and a half hours away. Located on the property of Michael's brother, Tim, the barn was a century old. It had decaying floors, a rotted roof, and no electricity or plumbing. "Honey," Michael told Emilie, "this could be our dream house."

Their friends, of course, thought they were crazy. "You want to move to a little barn?" said one. "You'll kill each other in such a small space." Another wondered where the couple would shop -- Fredericksburg, she pointed out, had no mall.

But the Boltons -- together since the day they met in Austin at the University of Texas in 1971 -- "realized this was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure," as Michael puts it. Their jobs allowed them to live anywhere they wanted, so in late 1997 the couple sold almost everything they owned, threw their dogs in the car, and off they went.

Michael's brother helped them hire a contractor to get to work on the barn right away, adding electricity, plumbing, new pine floors, and corrugated steel siding. Once the couple moved in, they began putting their stamp on the place. Emilie wanted a bank of French doors for the downstairs sitting area -- "What's the point of being in the country if you can't see it?" she says -- and also suggested painting the pine-wood ceilings and rafters white.

Emilie liked the results so much, she decided that "absolutely everything" that went into the barn had to be some shade of white: plain white, off-white, creamy vanilla, taupe. "And I wanted things that looked, well, distressed -- the more knocked-around, the better," she says with a cheerful grin. "Just so long as they were white."

Was this design scheme based on consultations with professional decorators? "Oh, heck no," says Emilie. "My mother always said that if the color is light, you're in a better mood, and I thought, Sounds goods to me."

The only new pieces of furniture Emilie purchased, which she put in the downstairs sitting area, were a white slipcovered sofa and two chairs by Lee Industries, the furniture company she represents (her husband works for Natuzzi). She found almost everything else while wandering through Fredericksburg's flea markets -- and Homestead and Friends, her brother-in-law's store. "Oh, man, he regretted giving me a family discount," she says, laughing. Emilie lugged home a dining table and mismatched chairs, old storefront signs, lamps, a collection of coffee cups -- even a wasp's nest that was, of course, off-white in color. Being on a limited budget, she wasn't searching for pricey antiques. "I liked the challenge of finding those odd little things that make a room come alive."

Over the years, the tiny barn became a sun-filled rustic cabin, brimming with enchanting and surprising arrangements of Emilie's purchases. She hung a cluster of salvaged clockfaces by the stairs -- "My way of letting people know that time here stands still" -- and placed a vintage wine rack next to the bathroom sink, where it holds rolled-up washcloths instead of the expected bottles of Chardonnay. "A lot of what I found cost just a few dollars," says Emilie. "I loved putting things together to see what would happen. I was having the time of my life. I didn't want to stop."

In fact, the Boltons didn't stop. In 2002, they built a 2,500-square-foot home next door, "to keep the adventure going," Michael says. The barn is now a guesthouse. As for those Fort Worth friends who said the Boltons would kill each other in the 850-square-foot space? They sleep out there -- quite happily -- whenever they come for a visit.