Portrait by Corrie Aune
It was after 10 p.m. when Malina Pearson saw the listing for a Charles Dilbeck-designed house with original murals, priced around $200,000.
She told her dad, Gary Calmia, to get on the phone right away with their real estate agent.
“Make an offer! Make an offer!” she says. “I don’t care what time it is. I’m texting him right now.”
Calmia had sold a vacant lot that he owned near the Bishop Arts District, and he wanted to put the profits into another real estate investment.
Prices were already high then, a few years ago, but everyone in the family was on the lookout for something affordable.
Pearson lives in a home she renovated over 10 years ago in Oak Cliff’s L.O. Daniel neighborhood, and this 1940 L-shaped ranch house on Jefferson Boulevard, a few doors down from the Cedar Crest House, is less than a mile away.
Her parents, Gary and Kathy, live in Las Colinas and went to look at it the next day without an appointment, just peeping into the windows of the empty house.
“He came around the side of the house and said, ‘Get in the car,’” Pearson says.
Kathy quickly got in, thinking there was a loose dog around, and Gary said, “This place is uninhabitable!”
Still, they made an offer a few days later and wound up buying it for $215,000.
“Uninhabitable” was an exaggeration, but it did require a lot of work.
They reconfigured the kitchen, adding butcher-block countertops and making room for a dishwasher. They had cabinets custom made to match the original ones they kept and removed a corner sink that made the room look small. They put in a new HVAC system and updated plumbing and electrical systems, which didn’t require a full overhaul.
In the two bathrooms, they kept as much original tile as possible, adding new toilets and vintage sinks, replacing a shower and resurfacing a bathtub.
There were oddities, like seven exterior doors in a 1,600-square-foot house. There are now only six.
Pearson thinks that could’ve been architect Charles Dilbeck being Dilbeck.
“I’ve read that he would do stuff just to be quirky,” she says. “Clearly he had a thing with scale because the fireplace is castle-sized in a tiny little house.”
They agonized over whether to paint the stone fireplace, but it had already been covered with a shiny lacquer, and their other option was to sandblast it and risk damaging the stone. In the end, they painted it white, along with all the beams.
They also shored up an enclosed porch, rebuilt wooden porch railings that were rotting and built a pergola on the slab where a shed used to be.
The mural, which sold Pearson and her parents on the house, is on three walls in one of the bedrooms, where there is also a built-in bunk bed and desk. They hired Oak Cliff-based artist Kim Cadmus Owens to restore it.
The mural was covered with thousands of pinholes and had a few larger holes and wall cracks that had to be repaired and repainted.
Handy person Wendy Hammer color-matched and painted over chips and cracks in some of the home’s original tiles.
In all, the renovations cost about $110,000. Pearson’s dad not only put up the money, but he also went to the house almost every day it was under construction, running errands as needed — although they did none of the work themselves.
“We are not DIY people,” Pearson says. “I’ve got all kinds of ideas but no skills to back them up.”
Kathy Calmia has been an antiques dealer since the ’70s, and she had a garage full of cool furniture and nick-nacks. Pearson has decades of experience as a photo stylist.
Furnishing and decorating the house was a joint effort between them, and the result is a rental that feels like it could be a Marfa resort, with its mix of traditional and contemporary esthetics.
They first put the four-bedroom house on Airbnb in December, and one of their first clients was a family from West Texas who spent Christmas in the house. Kathy got to put up a tree decorated with her vintage ornaments.
Then they had two back-to-back guests who rented the house for monthlong stays.
Pearson, who was laid off from her corporate job in July 2020, has been freelancing since then. She is the house manager, and she does all the cleaning and bed-making herself. So far, the house is turning a profit after the mortgage and bills are paid.
Gary and Kathy Calmia, who married in 1981 and are both retired, are planning their next project, the restoration of his grandmother’s 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne, Viv, with 29,000 original miles.
