Artful Adaptation

For a couple transitioning into life as empty nesters, the firm Bodron/Fruit updates a Dallas apartment where comfort and sophisticated collections take center stage

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by Douglas Friedman

Winter 2025/26

https://galeriemagazine.com/an-artfully-composed-dallas-apartment-marries-quiet-luxury-with-bold-contemporary-art

Interior designer Mil Bodron and architect Svend Fruit have well-earned reputations for balancing impactful, expansively scaled spaces with nuance and exquisite detail. The founders of the Dallas firm Bodron/Fruit are as adept at masterminding airy, elegantly modern residences from scratch as they are at executing refined updates to historic homes by Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Among the duo’s latest renovation projects is a 9,600-square-foot apartment occupying an entire floor of a luxury high-rise in the Turtle Creek neighborhood of Dallas. The art-collecting clients, transitioning from a longtime 1930s home where they had raised two children, wanted a place that felt “elegant and classic, somewhat formal, but that read as definitely modern,” says Bodron. He adds that a top priority was having a variety of spaces that could be tailored for intimate entertaining as well as for hosting larger gatherings for organizations they support, including the Dallas Museum of Art.

Bodron and Fruit spent ten months devising an end-to-end overhaul of the apartment. “While room locations stayed more or less the same, most of the walls were taken out and everything was reconfigured,” explains Fruit. The most significant alterations to the layout included replacing the closed-off kitchen used by staff with a welcoming eat-in space that opens directly onto a cozy new family room. The primary suite, meanwhile, now features generous his and her baths and dressing areas. And just off the elevator vestibule, the designers created an art-lined, minimally appointed foyer that serves as a reception gallery with a walk-in bar.

Throughout the residence, Bodron and Fruit married formal rigor with material refinement. Ceilings feature crisp rectilinear coves. Walls are finished in subtle hand-troweled plaster, clad in soft upholstery, or paneled in bleached walnut. That same honey-tone wood was used for the clean-lined door and window casings and baseboards, adding warmth and textural detail. Dark bronze doors are inset with reeded glass. In the baths, walnut millwork is paired with marble. “There is a lot of craftsmanship in this place,” says Bodron. “It was a huge amount of delicate, detailed work.”

Taking advantage of the building’s raised floors, the designers were able to sink the living room by a couple of steps, extending the ceiling height to 13 feet. To break up the voluminous space, Bodron composed two separate seating areas, both mixing sculptural contemporary furnishings with choice vintage designs. Among the highlights are chairs by Ico Parisi and Carl Malmsten, a Philip and Kelvin LaVerne cocktail table, and a sensually curved Jules Leleu sofa that anchors a circular grouping near the windows with “money shot” views, as Bodron puts it, of the Dallas skyline.

Arrayed around the living room are large abstract paintings by Adolph Gottlieb, Antoni Tàpies, and Mary Weatherford, the latter featuring an eye-catching strip of neon tubing that “adds a little jolt of electricity,” Bodron notes. Lauren Ryan, a partner at the Anthony Meier gallery in Mill Valley, California, advised the couple on their acquisitions, nudging them away from checking boxes with trendy or obvious market darlings.

“Lauren said, ‘Hey, you don’t want to just run out and buy blue-chip names from the auction houses,’ ” recounts the husband. “She urged us to consider emerging artists as well as mid- and late-career artists who maybe have been a little overlooked.” The homeowners have also prioritized getting to know artists they collect, visiting with Larry Bell and Joel Shapiro in their studios, even playing pickleball with Mary Weatherford in Aspen.

Among their favorite acquisitions is a group of clear-glass sculptures created by Ritsue Mishima as a special commission for the dining room, which also displays incandescent abstract paintings such as a Mary Corse canvas embedded with glass microspheres. Perched atop the room’s bespoke William Haines Designs table and the Stéphane Parmentier travertine console alongside it, Mishima’s radiant sculptures are made of blown glass in Murano, creating a subtle echo with the luminous, midcentury Dahlia chandelier by Max Ingrand for FontanaArte that Bodron installed above.

On occasions when the owners are entertaining just a few guests, they often gravitate toward the library, where the designers swapped out the traditional oak paneling for sleek, richly grained panes of rosewood with bronze details. “You’re drawn in there,” says Fruit. “The proportion of this space is really nice and calming—it feels intimate.”

Bodron outfitted the library with an array of upholstered, largely vintage furnishings, not least a second, graceful Leleu sofa complemented by a Frits Henningsen wing chair. There’s also a built-in bar, a TV, and a Jean-Michel Frank–style game table, where the wife likes to play mahjong with friends. “We felt it was important to have spaces where people feel like they can relax,” she says.

The designers concur. “In a home with a lot of heavy-hitter furniture and art,” Fruit says, “having moments that just feel comfortable, places to sit and maybe put your feet up on the table, is key.” And just in case, Bodron notes, “we made foot pillows for them to use.”