STYLE WITH
SUBSTANCE
Southwestern look
has its won appeal

By SUSAN SHEFFLOE SPEER
Photography ROBERT FRENCH

San Antonio’s style is a little hard to define. Geographically and aesthetically, it’s a blend of Southern
and Western influences, with a hearty helping of European practicality, an injection of Old World elegance and a dash of Latin flavor. You can pick one and run with it, or mix them all together for a look you just can’t find anywhere else.

It may be hard to put a finger on the style, but whatever it is, it’s what visitors crave when they come here, and it’s the reason locals stay. It’s also a very successful business niche for several local women who make a living helping people cultivate the look with their wardrobes and in their homePace.

SHAWN BEACH
Calamity Jane’s Trading Company
Shawn Beach has always loved homes, inside and out. Over the years, she’s planned them at an architect’s drawing board, she’s bought and sold them as a real estate agent, and she’s decorated them as an interior designer.

Beach and her family moved to Texas after living in Las Vegas and Arizona. She was selling real estate and decorating a few homes for clients. Her search for distinctive home furnishings and accent pieces wasn’t turning up quite what she was looking for, so she went out on a limb. “I decided to open my own store,” she says. It was really on a whim, but Beach’s real estate experience told her she was on the right track: “With so many new homes being built here, I knew I could do this.”

Calamity Jane’s Trading Company opened on Boerne’s Main Street in 2004. Beach liked the spirit of the woman in Western folklore who was known for her spirit, resiliency and, perhaps above all, the confidence to try new things. “I wanted a name that reflected what I wanted the store to be,” she says.

The shop attracts diverse customers — from one-stop tourists to builders and designers to local residents — with a mixed array of furniture and accessories. Though Calamity Jane was known throughout the Old West, Beach has cast a broader net, with pieces from India and Peru mixing with finds that are purely Texas. The result is exotic, with a richness that is built in layers of wood, metals, skins and silks. Beach still satisfies her love for design by working with homeowners and builders to make some early design decisions that influence the home’s functionality.

Even though Beach loves home design and décor, and her business is doing well, she readily admits to the
challenges. “I had this picture in my mind of what I wanted to sell here,” she says. “The hardest part was actually finding quality pieces without going overboard on pricing.” The other challenge was insisting on originality. “I wanted to offer customers pieces they can’t find anywhere else,” she explains.

Beach also relishes the business aspect of Calamity Jane’s. “I like to have a grasp on all of that,” she says. Beach is the shop’s buyer, and she prefers to be hands-on with the administrative tasks. “I go through a lot of paperwork in the evenings,” she says. “You have to have the heart to stay with it because it’s a lot of work. You have to apply your creativity and be able to stumble once or twice.”

Beach reserves free time for her husband and two teenage sons. “This would have been harder to do when my kids were smaller,” she says. “My family is just as much a part of the success of the shop as I am.”

If it all went away today, Beach says she’d be back to selling real estate and decorating homes on the side, but she sees a full-circle connection between all of her career experiences. “Everything I’ve done has been connected to homes, from designing them to decorating them to selling them,” she says. “I never thought I’d be in retail, but I love every minute of this.”

JEAN PACE
Angelita
Jean Pace was a young wife and mother with a passion for folk art and colonial pieces that she acquired on frequent trips to Mexico when she was asked to run a small La Villita gallery owned by the Southwest Craft Center. When her marriage ended in divorce, the California native needed to support four young children. “I was all alone, and it was up to me to put those kids through college,” she recalls.

Pace decided to open a shop of her own to sell artistic pieces she truly loved and knew how to acquire from her frequent trips to Mexico. She knew of a tiny, one-room adobe house in La Villita that was vacant and she rented the modest space. She was driving in the mountains of Mexico with her daughter Dodie, when she decided to name the shop Angelita for her daughter. “My little angel,” Pace says of her daughter, who now lives in Florida with her family.

It was the 1970s, and young women in San Antonio wanted the natural look of the Mexican cotton camisas, so Pace added those, as well as other textiles to her south-of-the-border shopping list. As Pace added to her offerings, she outgrew her one-room shop and moved to a larger location, still in the historic neighborhood that’s known for eclectic shops and galleries and the promise of unusual finds.

The success of the shop was sufficient to put all four of her children through college, “two of them with master’s degrees,” she says. With her children grown, she met and married picante sauce baron David Pace and split her time between running the shop and traveling with her new husband.

Their happiness was short-lived; they were married only a few years when David Pace passed away, in 1993. She took refuge in her shop. “The store was successful, but it never blossomed until after David died. I was in such grief that I plunged myself into the store,” she says wistfully.

Over the years, Pace continued to add items that reflect her love of craftsmanship and her enthusiasm for travel: silver pieces from Taxco, jewelry from far-flung places like Tibet and Nepal, woven art and turquoise from the Navajo and handcrafted “ranch wear,” clothing and accessories that reflect the regional heritage. It’s a diverse mix, but Pace attracts customers by following one very simple rule: “It has to be beautiful,” she says.

Pace consciously resists fads. “I never listen to anyone else; the store has never been about selling the latest thing,” she says. “I buy the best and sell it as low as I can.” She makes decisions based more on artistic value than a dollar figure. “It works, and I don’t know why,” she says with a laugh.

CATRINA HOELKE
Catrina’s at the Ranch
Everyone told Catrina Hoelke that the run-down building she wanted to buy wasn’t worth saving. With too many problems to count, the structure was devalued, condemned and scheduled for demolition. Hoelke didn’t care about any of that, and she was willing to put her last dollar down to prove it.

At the time, she had a successful business on Boerne’s busy Main Street, selling furniture, home décor and unusual finds. “Nobody in their right mind would want to move away from a prime shopping and tourist location to a run-down place out on the Interstate,” she says. “I was scared to death, and nobody else thought it was the right thing to do.”

But Hoelke saw the possibilities: Creating and selling her wares in a place with the warmth of an old ranch house, complete with a roaring fireplace, weathered Saltillo tiles and chickens. The place had history: It was an old barracks building, constructed in 1935. When the military no longer had use for it, it was a popular Boerne restaurant for years.

That history was nostalgic for Hoelke: The restaurant was her first commercial design job more than 30 years ago. So she pulled out all her resources to get the property, which she has since gutted and restored. “I’ve always been drawn here,” she says. “I really believe I’m home.”

Catrina’s at the Ranch is a place where ideas come to life. Hoelke’s motto: “If you can dream it, we can build it.” After years of working in both commercial and residential interior design and running a small design studio with her sister, Hoelke wanted a place where she and other artisans could design home furnishings that appealed to people looking for something different. “A group of friends build furniture with me, and we’re committed to creating magazine-gorgeous décor at affordable prices,” she explains.

Most of the creations are custom projects that are imagined by Hoelke’s clients and brought to life through a
series of her chalk and pencil drawings that become client proposals and working plans for designers. Hoelke knows that most people rely on computers to deliver the kind of structural precision her projects require, but she trusts her spatial sense and her artistic eye.

“I go into my clients’ homes, and the first thing I look for is their treasures,” she explains. “I like to blend the old with the new.” She also advises her clients that beautiful home décor comes about in layers of varied media and textures. “When you go into a home that’s decorated in a single style, it’s one-dimensional. My clients want something that doesn’t look like it was recreated from a newspaper ad.”

Hoelke is challenged by the fact that there is only one of her, and she’s given to multi-tasking to compensate. It’s not unusual for her to carry on two phone conversations while she answers a customer’s question in the store and provides direction to the craftsmen on her team. As harried as it may sound, Hoelke wouldn’t have it any other way. “Everything I used to do for other people I’m doing for myself with this business,” she says. “This is exactly the life I imagined for myself.”

MAGGIE HUDSON
Rhinestone Cowgirls
In small towns, it’s not unusual for one business to co-exist with another. Such was the case with Rhinestone Cowgirls in Jourdanton, which was connected to the beauty shop next door. Customers would wander in to look at clothing with rollers in their hair.

The owner of the two shops became too busy juggling both stores and decided to sell the clothing boutique. Maggie Hudson was driving in to San Antonio every day to her job as a paralegal with a downtown law firm. When her second child was born, she grew weary of the commute, and she and her husband, a dentist, agreed that she should find a job closer to home. “We knew that even if it meant taking a pay cut, I needed to be closer to home,” she says.

“I didn’t know anything about owning a retail business, and I know nothing about fashion,” she laughs. “I mean, I wear clothes, I like clothes, but I don’t consider myself a fashion expert.” Her sister knew the shop’s owner and arranged for the two women to meet. After talking about it for a year, Hudson took a leap of faith and walked away from her legal career to buy the store in 2006.

The shop offers clothing and accessories that combine contemporary style with Western twang. Hudson carefully blends high-end designer items with more affordable pieces. The formula is a hit with women of all ages and backgrounds. “My customers are ranchers, stay-at-home moms and professional women,” she says. “The common thread is that they care about how they look. They’re confident women, and they’re not afraid to stand out.”

Hudson, who prefers a jeans-and-Tshirt sensibility to haute couture, trusts the fashion advice of the shop’s longtime employee. “I’ve never been one to coordinate my purse with my shoes. I’m more comfortable behind the scenes,” she says. Still learning how to make buying and inventory decisions, she relies on her employee and the shop’s former owner for advice.

“They’re both very honest, and that’s great,” she says. “If I make a bad purchase, they’ll tell me, and they’re supportive when I make mistakes. I’ve got a lot to learn about running the business, and they’ve been so helpful.

” Hudson’s confidence is increasing. She recently moved the shop to a new, larger location that promises heavier traffic. “I want it to be my store now,” she says. She’s carrying over the original store’s signature cheetah print look, and she’s adding zebra and camouflage, pulsing disco balls and a catwalk for the mannequins. “We’re giving people a little bit of the wild side when they come in here,” she says.

Another feature of the new shop is dedicated space for her sons, ages 7 and 3. “They have a place here where they can relax, do homework and play games and not feel like they’re in the middle of a women’s clothing store,” she laughs.