Before Joyce Fox moved to Preston Hollow, she was a weather announcer for a Phoenix television station. She must have gotten used to all those balmy temperatures and cloudless skies, because her home here in Dallas is nothing if not warm and dazzling.

 

          But it didn’t start out quite that way. Fox, who’s gone from forecasting the occasional cloud to forming an interior design business of her own, has put a lot of work into it.

 

          The result is a culmination of her life: her travels, her love of all things sumptuous, her perfectionism and her personality.

 

          “It’s very much a collected, eclectic look,” she says of her style. “And every piece has a story.”

 

Take, for instance, the heavy iron, 18th-century French campaign bed she found in San Francisco and uses as a couch in her living area. It’s witnessed the peaceful (and possibly not-so-peaceful) slumbers of cunning European noblemen on the trails to government rule.

 

Fox finds many such treasures in her travels. Folding screens and dozens of blue and white porcelain pieces from the Orient adorn her home. Ironwork crosses from Taos hang over the fireplace. An intricately detailed Italian desk she found in La Jolla, Calif. sits in her living room.

 

“ Hong Kong is my favorite city,” says Fox, who has traveled extensively. “I’ve been there 10 times at least. It’s just so cosmopolitan. I’ve been to Bangkok, … I love . I’ve traveled throughout Europe and I love . Of course, as soon as I say that I think of London . I love London too, with its 4 a.m. markets. I go there with my flashlight.”

 

For a woman who’s journeyed the world, designed the interiors of numerous high-end clients and who’s been a semi-regular fixture in the Dallas social scene, she’s surprisingly accessible, and so is her home.

 

While she chats with a visitor, her cat Boomer rubs against her black pants and pads all over the campaign bed. There are, of course, people with pieces of furniture a fraction of the bed’s worth who wouldn’t let their animals do that.

 

But Fox’s sense of comfort is well won. In the six years since she moved to Dallas to be with her children, both of whom attended Southern Methodist University, she’s transformed the home’s details.

 

          Ten-foot ceilings in the living room gave way to a two-story rise. Clawfoot-like detailing was added on the fireplace. Windows and mirrors in the master bath give a feeling of airiness and an outdoor view. Wood floors were installed. An atrium was excluded to make a larger dining room. Six to eight coats of aqua-colored Venetian plaster was coated onto the walls of the guest powder.

 

          In the kitchen, a sunny yellow Venetian plaster was applied, salvaged butcher block countertops were brought in from a closed Fort Worth restaurant, marble floors were put down and sycamore cabinets installed. A sign reading “The Old Fox,” bought in London , is hung up at one end.

 

“Our homes should be a reflection of who we are,” Fox says. “And I like to think of mine as having a lot of intrigue and glamour.”

 

She says she’s been impressed with the city she’s adopted as home.

 

          “I’m so accessible to everything. I had no idea when I moved here that it would be like this. I can be anywhere so quickly,” she says.

 

          Fox works with clients in Dallas, Baltimore, Phoenix and Los Angeles and is also working on getting her master’s in liberal arts from SMU. But even with all this going on, she still finds the time to keep working on her own home.

 

“There’s just a thrill to an interior that’s always evolving,” she says. And, she adds with a dreamy look in her eye, this might not be the last home she transforms.

 

“If I only had a ranch in Montana . It’s all decorated in my mind.”