My Favorite Room
My favorite room: Franci Crane feels worlds away in her light-filled masterbedroom
From her perch on the bed, Franci has views of the South Boulevard oaks to thefront and her garden to the rear.Photo by © Michelle Watson/CatchLightGroup.com
Soothing colors, pillows and draping give a cozy feel to the large room.Photo by © Michelle Watson/CatchLightGroup.com
Needlepoint is one of Franci's bedside pastimes.Photo by © Michelle Watson/CatchLightGroup.com
Editor's Note: This is the first in a series in which Houstonians from all walks of life tell us about their favorite room at home.
Franci Crane, board chair and a founder of the Houston Cinema Arts Society, hasn't truly decided which room in her expansive new home is her favorite. Although the house was completed in May, she spent most of the summer in Nantucket in the vacation home she shares with husband Jim Crane.
And between summer away and international travel, Franci estimates that she has actually spent only three weeks in the splendid mansion on South Boulevard.
But if pressed, she focuses on the master bedroom, a second-floor aerie with banks of floor-to-ceiling windows on both the north and south walls.
"It's the light. It's the transparency of light. It goes right through the room," she says from her perch in the middle of the four-poster kingsize bed.
"It's the light. It's the transparency of light. It goes right through the room," she says from her perch in the middle of the four poster king-size bed. "I look out and we have this landscape that we borrowed from the trees that were planted like 90 years ago. These beautiful oaks. So that's happy-making to me to see those beautiful trees on South Boulevard."
"Then the colors of the room and the patterns of the room," she adds. "It reads very ethnic to me in the patterning and that is something that is near and dear to me because I love exploring other cultures. And I feel like I'm sort of in one even though I know I'm not, here on South Boulevard.
"In this room, I can be slightly in a different world that's like Italy a bit, but with Moroccan and Indian and some Islamic influence to it . . . I love exploring Islamic art and cultures. I've been fortunate enough to travel a lot in that world and I have many friends that are Muslim."
The room's palette is a soothing with a gentle blend of ecru, mocha and a pale robin's egg blue. A fireplace on the far wall from the bed adds a special warmth.
From the comfy four-poster bed with its bounty of pillows, Franci reads, does needlepoint and continues working on plans for the Cinema Arts Festival which runs Nov. 9-13.
