A Toast to the Hunt

The road to roundtop goes through Jan Showers’s Hillsboro, Texas, home, with a spring luncheon for fair-bound friends.

- By Stephanie Hunt. Photography by Stephen Karlisch

Jan Showers has a serious eye for antiques. The designer, renowned for her Dallas showroom filled with French period pieces and Louis XVI glamour, also knows that when it comes to antiques shopping, the eye is only as good as the stomach. “If you’re hungry, forget it,” she says. That’s why hosting a luncheon at her Hillsboro, Texas, home is both fun for Showers and a strategic godsend for her friends headed from the Dallas environs to the biannual Round Top Antiques Fair.

For more than 50 years, this legendary roundup of antiques dealers and buyers has been taking place in the quaint Texas town smack in the middle of nowhere. And it has been 50 years since the designer and her husband bought the white-columned house that Showers had coveted since she was a little girl, growing up a few doors down in this rural crossroads almost midway between Dallas and Round Top. “This house always appealed to me. It has such presence, a warm grandness,” she says. In fact, the circa-1938 home, designed by Dallas architects Goodwin & Tatum, became an effective bargaining chip for the newlywed Showers after her husband announced he wanted to begin his law practice back in Hillsboro.