A massive antique French rock-crystal and smoky-quartz chandelier sparkles overhead.
We settle into a room dominated by a gleaming, nine-foot rosewood table designed by Kazuhide Takahama, the mid-20th century Japanese architect. He zips cheerfully through the showroom, looking for a place to sit and talk, but my head is spinning: The warehouse is vast, with at least a dozen rooms, each decorated more spectacularly than the last.
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At age 86, he’s full of energy befitting someone half his age and is dressed in all black, including a pair of Italian leather loafers studded with silver spikes. To celebrate the location’s 20th anniversary, Taylor invited me to visit, greeting me enthusiastically at the door. The building is kept locked, but Taylor and his team are there five days a week - just ring the bell, and someone will let you in, no appointment necessary. He gets indispensable help from Paul Sanchez, who has been operations director for almost 30 years, and Keiichi Stevens, a tech wizard who manages the computers and lighting along with myriad other details. Gremillion died six years ago, and Taylor has continued operating the business, along with the interior design firm they founded in the 1960s. Many of their clients from Mexico and China have private planes the proximity to Love Field and the Dallas Design District made sense. When the showroom closed in 2000, Taylor and Gremillion converted this warehouse into a de facto showroom. A rare cloisonné throne from the Qing Dynasty.
Rare French antiques from Loyd-Paxton made their way into Versailles when it underwent renovations, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased furnishings, including a dazzling Louis XIV Boulle desk that had been owned by the Sun King himself. Sir Elton John, Truman Capote, Saudi Prince Faisal, and the Sultan of Brunei were all customers. No doubt about it, their previous Loyd-Paxton showroom, which opened in 1985, had been a glamorous place in its heyday. Little about the industrial area seems to have changed, with number 313 still shrouded behind the same darkened-glass door and easily lost among the nondescript buildings along Irving Boulevard. On a sunny morning in early March (well before the coronavirus outbreak took hold of Dallas), I arrive at the warehouse after taking pretty much the same route as the very rich man from China. Welcome to the mysterious, hidden world of Loyd-Paxton. Inside the rambling building, room after room brimmed with Chinese carved cinnabar furniture, jade sculptures, centuries-old hand-painted screens, and cloisonné vases, along with Imperial pieces rarely seen outside the Forbidden City. The darkened-glass door to the building opened, and what unfolded must have been like a scene from The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy opens the screen door after the tornado and a dazzling Technicolor fantasy emerges.
He needed to furnish his new 30,000-square-foot house in China, and this warehouse on the edge of downtown Dallas housed some of his homeland’s most priceless heirlooms. It was hardly an auspicious arrival for this hotel and real estate magnate from Beijing, but the trip had been essential. It came to a stop in front of number 313. The car pulled off the road and into a labyrinth of parking lots winding through identical low, windowless buildings.
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Their limousine glided west, then south, past long stretches of industrial warehouses, commercial trucking companies, and empty lots with weeds sprouting from cracked asphalt. A man disembarked, four assistants in tow, and with untold billions of Chinese yuan in his bank accounts. In 2014, more than a decade after Loyd Taylor and Paxton Gremillion shuttered their legendary antiques showroom on Maple Avenue, a private jet landed at Love Field.
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