DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
“We like older houses and trees,” said Kathy Wise, whose home will be featured in the upcoming Heritage Oak Cliff Fall 2025 Home Tour.
Wise said her wife had just taken a position with American Airlines in 2004. They were moving from Ohio where they had a house built in the 1800s and knew little about Dallas.
They found lesbian real estate agent Deb Elder who showed them a number of homes in various Oak Cliff neighborhoods.
She said she and her wife came to Dallas for a weekend and stayed at the Melrose. Back in Ohio it was snowing, but in Dallas, they were eating outdoors with just a patio heater running.
They texted a picture of themselves eating outdoors in winter to friends back home and knew their move was the right thing to do.
That weekend, they found the house that they’ve been in ever since and Wise said, “When we saw our house, we fell in love with it.” And what they found was a house built in 1923 in the Kings Highway Historic District, an area surrounded by Winnetka Heights.
For 14 years, she said, they really did no work on the house but the longer they lived there, the more they realized, “We knew we didn’t need more living space, but we needed more entertaining space.”
The house is a traditional bungalow that had a hallway that ran through the house taking up quite a bit of space. The master bedroom had five doors and what she described as “two weird closets.” And there was only one bathroom.
The backyard she described as an overgrown jungle. They contacted a landscape architect, but he “didn’t understand our vision.”
Then, they reached out to Jessica Chiles of Thckt residential design studios.
“She came up with the master plan,” Wise said, for both inside and outside the house.
She turned a sunroom into a new master bath and the old bathroom became the new master closet. Removing a pantry closet opened up the kitchen. Moving some walls around and getting rid of that long hallway gave them more usable space.
Wise’s house is one of seven that will be featured on the Heritage Oak Cliff Fall Home Tour on Oct. 25 and 26. The home tour has been around since 1974 when it was created to save the deteriorating but historic Winnetka Heights neighborhood.
Today, more than 30 neighborhoods make up Heritage Oak Cliff stretching from the Kessler neighborhoods near downtown to Oakland Terrace southeast of Red Bird Mall.
The home tour raises money to promote preservation of significant homes and other buildings, to fund neighborhood projects and works with the city council on appropriate development in the area, according to home tour chair Ryan Stepp.
“Money raised from the tour goes back into grants for the neighborhoods,” Stepp said.
Those grants have gone for things like sign toppers, landscaping islands and Stevens Park Village has a new brick sign at the entrance to the neighborhood. Some neighborhoods have websites that are funded through Heritage Oak Cliff. And some alley work has been completed thanks to the organization. In Stevens Park Estates, original street lights were restored with new electrical wiring and painted. North Cliff funded curb number painting through a grant.
And neighborhoods get better when neighbors get to know each other. So some grants help fund events like the Sunset Hills fall picnic, the West Kessler Crawfish Boil Block Party and Brettonwoods National Night Out and chili cook-off.
The success of the Bishop Arts District has spawned a lot of development and with development comes loss of trees. So Stephens Park Village received more than $2,000 for reforestation.
Stepp said Heritage Oak Cliff will pay up to 60 percent of the cost of a project. Proceeds from last year’s home tour funded $35,000 of a total of $59,000 in neighborhood projects.
Most of the neighborhood associations have gay founders but Stepp said the success of creating so many neighborhood groups is Oak Cliff’s LGBTQ community working so well with everyone else.
Stepp said he looked at more than a dozen homes before choosing the seven that were on the tour. The homes selected represent seven different neighborhoods throughout Oak Cliff.
A few were disqualified for this year because they were still in the process of being upgraded.
He said some of those will top the list for next year.
He said he found the homes through Oak Cliff real estate agents and designers. One of those designers is Josh Petty of Josh Petty Designs whose own house is part of the tour.
Petty said he was already signed to be a sponsor of the home tour and then decided, “I’d like to be on the tour.”
The Dallas native moved to L.A. for a while and when he moved back, he said, he knew he wanted to live in Oak Cliff. He and his husband bought a house in Kessler Plaza off Hampton Road.
“It’s a very social neighborhood,” he said. “Diversity and inclusion is a big part of it with a very mixed crowd — gay, straight, young, old. It’s the coolest neighborhood in the city.”
He said most people in his neighborhood take pride in their properties. Most houses decorate for the holidays. With quite a few kids in the neighborhood, most decorate for Halloween, and that night, he said, he and his husband sat out on the porch and gave out candy.
“We do wine crawls,” he said. “And our neighborhood Christmas party has been going on for 30 years.”
And when COVID hit, they held lots of front yard parties.
But what about the house?
“My husband is really into landscaping,” Petty said. “So the outside is his and inside is mine.”
Outside has won the couple Yard of the Month honors multiple times.
Inside features a dramatic black and white kitchen and equally dazzling black and light brown bathroom.
As a sponsor, Petty said he is giving away two $500, 30-minute consultations — one each day of the tour — for properties anywhere in the DFW area.
Stepp said the homeowners are usually in the house throughout the tour, telling stories about the property and answering questions about any of the upgrades they did. But quite a few people participate in the Oak Cliff home tour.
“I’m a little nervous having 800 people come through the house,” Petty said. Wise had similar qualms. But Stepp said former home tour participants have told him they had a wonderful experience showing off their part in preserving Oak Cliff.
Heritage Oak Cliff Fall 2025 Home Tour takes place Oct. 25-26 from noon-5 p.m. Tickets are available at HeritageOakCliff.org and are $35 for Heritage Oak cliff members, $40 for the general public, $20 for seniors and $75 for patrons including the patron party on Oct. 23.