Amethyst-toned velvet wallpaper lines the powder room. A would-be mother-in-law suite is outfitted with a silver shag carpet. A set of cream hide swivel chairs and an ottoman bask in a window.
This is clearly the home of a textile designer.
An award-winning artist, Cindy Avroch grew up in Brooklyn painting alongside her mother in the kitchen from a young age. Her mother, a textile designer by trade, was in the first graduating class of the Fashion Institute of Technology, back when it was located on the top two floors of the High School of Needle Trades.
Avroch attended FIT to study textile design. Early in her career, she also spent time studying the trends in Europe and Los Angeles.
“If Baroque florals were the thing, we had to become an expert at painting and drawing Baroque florals,” she says. “If teddy bears were the next trend, we’d have to teach ourselves to draw teddy bears in every single position you can imagine.”
She helped build art departments before working with Walt Disney and Warner Bros. After the birth of her second son, who has autism, she took a step back from her career.
But she kept making art, eventually foraying into lighting design and découpage tabletop accessories, distributing in stores across Europe and America.
Avroch was a single mom, dating in the city and making art.
But Aug. 8, 2008 — the first day of the Beijing Olympics — was her last first date. Avroch and Michael Rosenthal scheduled drinks in an empty New York City. They met on Match.com. Avroch, who had also been a gymnast, wanted to cancel the date so she could watch the opening ceremony, but a friend convinced her to go on the date with Rosenthal. When she got there, Rosenthal was chatting with the chef at the bar, who said they had their pick of table. The best time to make a reservation at a sought-after restaurant is during the dog days of summer, when residents flee to vacation homes.
She ignored her drinks-only first date rule once he started talking about his son, and she stayed for dinner.
“I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but it was definitely something different about him,” she says.
When Rosenthal found out she was an artist, he invited her to his newly minted apartment to help figure out what to do with the paintings that lined the halls.
“And I looked at him and gave him a shot in the arm,” she says.
She thought he was feeding her a line, but he really had an apartment full of paintings without homes. She fed him a few suggestions and told him he needed to paint the den red.
“He’s like, ‘Red walls?!’” Avroch says. “So, we painted. It was everybody’s favorite room in the house because it just made them feel so cozy.”
They dated for several years and bought an apartment or two in New York before it was time for Rosenthal to move back to Texas. His son was starting a family, and he wanted to be nearby.
“So he asked me to come to Dallas, and I said, ‘Not as your girlfriend,’” she says. “And so we got married. And here I am.”
They began searching for a house in Preston Hollow in 2016. Nothing seemed right for them, so they settled on building an 11,971-square-foot home with a reminiscent red library, theater, four bedrooms and a dressing room-style closet that convinced Avroch Texas might not be so bad, after all.
Rosenthal worked on creating the bones of the home with an architect. Then Avroch took over.
“I wanted to dress each room. And each room has its own voice and meaning,” she says. “I took each room and gave it its own personality.”
The house took three years to build, and the couple moved to Dallas in February 2019.
The foyer opens into a large formal living room with deep, plush blush velvet couch juxtaposed with a set of four gold coffee tables Avroch designed.
A custom dining room table is made of a glass slab that has been strategically crushed with a suction tool and then gilded. The focal wall uses the raw side of stone tile for texture, of course.
While the formal spaces are heavily textured and pull from many styles, the kitchen is airy and neutral.
“It’s got the green glass and the white walls and the stone, so the food becomes the wow factor,” she says. “The joy of the cooking becomes what’s exciting in that room.”
Sunday is for family dinner where she grew up, and Avroch still cooks often. She recently tried her hand at making fresh pasta from scratch. And her eldest son is a chef in New York City but spent part of the pandemic cooking in the family’s double-islanded kitchen, which boasts several ovens, two refrigerators and a rotisserie.
The couple chose to carry into the kitchen reclaimed wood flooring (which at one time had buckled due to moisture in a classic he-said-he-said contractor scenario during the build).
“It’s soft on your feet. When you’re standing on a marble or stone floor in the kitchen and you cook, it’s really hard on your feet,” she says.
The man cave, conveniently off the kitchen, is modern and moodier with rich indigos and emeralds.
Each room has sculptures and paintings curated for the space. Antiques from her mother contrast with more modern sculptures. A favorite is a piece of a school of fish swimming toward a champagne bar, with a lone fish woozily swimming away, painted on silk by an artist who used to own a French restaurant before marrying an Australian and resolving to simply spend her summers painting on the beach.
A natural painter who dabbles in most art styles, Avroch’s own work is mixed with contemporary and local artists. A handful of her large florals are scattered throughout.
A curator once noted that while Avroch paints with skill, her real passion is sculpture.
“Three Points,” inspired by stalagmites, hangs near the entryway. A life-sized unfinished metal man she’s welding lays underneath the staircase, complimented by a Greco-Roman statue and healthy monsteras.
“When we were picking the interior pieces, the architect described it as Versace meets Aspen,” Avroch says. “And that’s how I describe it.”
