Dallas – Derrill Osborn has a neatly lettered placard on his stately front door: “Beware of attack cow.”
Granted, there’s no threat of assault as you step inside Osborn’s hushed suite of rooms swathed in red and green. But as your eyes adjust to the ambient glow of a crystal chandelier and silk-shaded lamps, prepare to face a furious decorating stampede. Or, as Osborn describes it: “There may be no cows left in Texas, because they’re all inside my townhouse.”
This is a bold collection from a man who wears bold well. As the longtime director of men’s clothing for Neiman Marcus (he retired in 2002), Osborn has been celebrated for his impeccable, eccentric sense of style.
His mustachioed face, typically framed by a wide-brimmed hat, has graced the pages of GQ, Esquire and Vogue Hommes. He has raised a glass with movie stars and presidents. Dressing down for him is a starched shirt, tailored vest and britches tucked into custom-made cowboy boots. And you’ll almost always find him wearing his signature fresh boutonniere.
So it seems appropriate that Osborn’s living quarters would be as gussied up as he is. One glance around the living room confirms that the cattle here are anything but out to pasture.
Every available surface in the two-bed, 2 1/2 bath space holds an objet d’ vache, from folk art to antiques.
There are standouts. Displayed on one table are two 1830 Staffordshire porcelain cows, considered especially rare for their prominent size.
In a corner is a substantial-
looking 150-year-old majolica cheese dome, which Osborn loves for the lone cow perched atop. In the powder room, guests can check their makeup in a mirror with a cow-themed frame of carved wood from Germany’s Black Forest.
The collector even has his own version of bovine bling in the form of two near-life-size golden cow heads mounted above the sunroom entry.
“My great-grandfather whittled me this piece when I was 8 years old,” Osborn says of his first bovine object. “He was a rancher and whittler.”
He pulls down a smooth, red-painted cow, which has been dangling by a ribbon from the living room’s low-hung chandelier. There are other figurines draped on the fixture, as well, forming a sort of haute lite-brite Christmas tree.
“I remember as a boy watching cows, studying cows,” says Osborn, a New Mexico native who spent his early childhood on the family ranch. “It was quite a sight – those many cows roaming the grounds, which were cut through with streams and no fences, and then I’d watch them do the brandings.”
Other furnishings are mostly antique, including several original gilded Louis XVI chairs. Osborn tries to sum up his home like this: “There’s a little Oriental here, a little French thrown in there, red and green, and a whole lot of cows.”
