Best Used Junque 2007 | The Whimsey Shoppe | Best of Dallas® 2020 | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Dallas | Dallas Observer
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Best Used Junque

The Whimsey Shoppe

Face it: Antique stores are just resale shops, offering stuff that has managed to outlive the abuse dished out by a series of households where real people ate, slept and kept up with the Joneses. In most antique stores or malls, merchandise is wide but not deep—in other words, a little bit from various eras, countries and styles. Specializing in antiques and collectibles from France, The Whimsey Shoppe gives shoppers a unique window into French history, culture and style (with a dollop of cheek) in two huge stores: 12,000 square feet on Henderson Avenue and 11,000 square feet on Oak Lawn Avenue. The owners, Suzie and Wendell Patterson, scour the French countryside, traveling more than 2,500 miles on each shopping trip, so you don't have to. (And really, who'd want to do all that French traveling, with the culture and fine food and wine and whatnot?) The Pattersons suck it up for you, God love 'em, coming home several times a year with containers of French antiques that range from rustic farm tables to beds that would be perfect in Marie Antoinette's boudoir. Then they send customers The Whimsey Report, a pamphlet of black-and-white drawings of unique items and an account of their adventures in antiquing through Normandy, Burgundy, Champagne and Provence that touches on politics, food and fashion. (Really, we don't envy them. Rubbing our noses in it? No, not at all.) Specialties include French farm tables, armoires and copper. It only takes a few pieces to make it appear as if you found them on your last trip to the Languedoc. Like you'd ever want to go there, what with Oklahoma so close.

Best Vet for Overprotective Pet Parents

East Lake Veterinary Hospital

If you refer to your pets as your "babies" and always make sure they get their dinner before scrounging up something for yourself, then chances are you know how hard it is to find a good veterinarian. We've seen them all: the unprepared recent graduate who keeps leaving the room to flip through medical journals; the good ol' country boy who's better suited to working on horses and cows; the overly cautious vet who can't take your pet's temperature for fear they'll feel a little discomfort...it's far too easy to end up at an office with one of those. But at East Lake, you can finally relax and leave your cat or pup in the capable hands of friendly experts in a comfortable, clean environment. And sure, there are cheaper places out there, but when it comes to our precious little fur-covered children, why settle for anything less than the best?

Best Video Store (Especially If You Want to Meet Jim Schutze)

Premiere Video

That last part there's not really a tease: Mr. Dallas Observer is a regular customer, always in line with a copy of Chinatown, Deadline U.S.A. or All the President's Men—or A River Runs Through It, hawhawhaw. Because, see, Premiere has all those movies—and pretty much everything else ever released on home video, in this country or any other. They also stock every British TV series not yet on BBC America. Put it another way: Go to Premiere right now with a list of your 10 favorite movies, and if Premiere doesn't have, oh, eight of them in stock right now, Jim Schutze will give you his copy of Red Shoe Diaries Vol. 12.

Best Vintage Clothing

Pandemonium

What really makes a good vintage clothing store is variety. Of price, style, era and finery. We want to peruse chiffon formals from the 1950s and rock tees from the 1970s. We want a lot to choose from but not so much that we can't push back the racks to see what's there. Pandemonium's retro fashionistas Leslie Daum and Debbie Cardenas stock their charming pink house on Henderson Avenue with gently used clothing and accessories they've painstakingly inspected and deemed worthy of new owners. Need a patent leather handbag or a pair of Jackie O sunglasses? A sequined ball gown? A vintage leather jacket? Pandemonium probably has them. And these ladies keep prices so reasonable, you can shop early and often every season. Daum and Cardenas also have their own Pandemonium line of separates made from recycled tees and other vintage fabrics. Check out the Our Lady of Guadalupe circle skirts and just pray they have your size.

Best Way to Furnish a First House

IKEA

IKEA just can't be beaten in this category because of the sheer breadth and wow factor of its (cheap) inventory. Start with (cheap) kitchen cabinets and appliances. Add the (cheap) bathroom sink, cabinets and towels. Move on to the bedroom for everything from mattresses to wardrobes, comforters to chests of drawers. Did we mention they're cheap? Outfit the media room, the home office, the dining nook. Yeah, some IKEA merchandise might fall apart after the first party, but it's possible to find everything you need to build a comfortable nest from the studs out without going broke. By the time you need to replace it, your taste will have changed anyway. And maybe you won't be so damned broke.

Best Webkinz Connection

Froggie's 5 & 10

Five or 10 times a day at Froggie's 5 & 10 on Knox, the phone rings and high tiny voices ask if the new Webkinz are in. If you're not a child or you don't know one, Webkinz are the stuffed toys that come with secret codes tying in to a Web site full of stuff to do with your new "pet." But no toy, no entry to the Web world. So Webkinz, which some kids collect by the dozens, tend to get grabbed up at toy stores as quickly as they arrive. The staff at Froggie's, however, love their little 'uns, so they limit the purchase numbers per buyer and they'll even hide a 'kinz or two under the counter for their best customers. While you're in the store, check out the massive collection of wind-up toys, old-fashioned yo-yos, board games, magic tricks, old-timey candy and booklets of temporary tattoos. And do pet Fric and Frac, the store's resident kitties, who like to catnap in the sunny front window.

Best Western Store

El Nuevo Estilo Western Hats

This ain't no Western store for gringos, unless you're the sort who likes pink Mexican wedding shirts with scorpions stitched on the sleeves. Whatever your ethnicity or fashion bent, the folks at El Nuevo Estilo will welcome you like family. The store opened 16 years ago as a hat shop, and cowboy hats are still its specialty. Customers drive in from Amarillo and Midland to buy hats here that aren't sold anywhere else. Ask the owner to show you the lid with the hidden weed compartment (it's called El Dealer) or the style with the 18-karat gold "placa" on its brim (it's called El Mafioso). You may think it takes a touch of sunstroke to drop $500 on a straw cowboy hat. But for rancheros from Durango and Sinaloa, that makes perfect sense.

Best Women's Casual Clothing Store

Cotton Island

What do you wear when the vibe is casual but you don't want to look like car-pool mom? When you want to have a kicky style but not seem like you're masquerading as a 15-year-old cheerleader? At Cotton Island on the southeast corner of Snider Plaza, you can find colorful 100 percent cotton tops and skirts that not only are cool and flirty but feel that way too. Cotton breathes. As the swelter of summer's end makes a transition to the warm days of autumn, it's great to have clothes that don't stick to the sternum. The shop also carries trendy handbags and Bernardo sandals, de rigueur for a stop at the country club or a weekend at the lake house. And hey, go ahead and take your teenager too. She'll like Cotton Island's minis, T's and flippy skirts.

MARKET: Not-So-Mad Hatters

Neither Stefani McMurrey Watters nor Nicole LeBlanc are, as far as we know, mad. Milliners long ago gave up the nerve-damaging mercury compounds they used at the beginning of the Industrial Age to stiffen felt hats, so unlike Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, Watters and LeBlanc don't appear to be crazy—except that they make hats. In 2007.

But that's not necessarily madness. Hats are a home-based Internet business for Watters and a former career and art form for LeBlanc. And besides, they just like hats.

"The only place a lady doesn't wear a hat is in her own home, because then you look like you might have someplace to go," says LeBlanc, sitting with a wooden head-shaped block at her feet among boxes of vintage ribbons, feathers and bows in her home near Mockingbird Lane.

You might be going to a rodeo or a country-and-western-themed nightclub, for instance, and feel the urge to express your inner cowgirl princess. In that case, Watters has just the topper for you at SMartHats.com.

"My signature look is the tiara on the hat," Watters says, referring to the crystal bling she applies to colorful straw hats she imports from China along with most of the tiaras. A woman who might feel silly wearing a tiara, which would be just about any woman not named Queen Elizabeth, can mount her crown on a cowboy hat and look just fine. The garage shelves in Watters' home just north of LBJ are lined floor to ceiling with a rainbow of Chinese straw and silvery jewels, ready for Watters to mix and match and add a "rock-star roll" to the brims—two tight tubes on either side of the head.

There are no bubbling steamers to soften felt, no tiresome stretching of material over a wooden block, but like we said, it's 2007, and hat traditions aren't what they used to be. Today, unadorned hats are usually manufactured by cheap Chinese labor or in Europe. The milliner does the designs and adds the decorative touches. If you think about it, Watters' business, which she started in 2002, is the epitome of the new American economy—foreigners provide the manufacturing, we do the designs and selling, and the Internet and rapid shipping link the maker to her customers.

And if you can get a magazine to publish a photo of a celebrity like Jessica Simpson wearing one of your hats, the next thing you know, you have boxes of hats stacked in your yard awaiting shipping. That happened to Watters, who quickly found out that the combination of celebrities who like free stuff plus publicity can add a kick to your start-up, one-woman business.

But that was early on, when Watters was making hats full-time, hauling them in her car trunk to clubs, where customers would buy them off her head, and phoning up fashion editors to pitch her brand. Now a new mother, she runs the business part-time, mostly online, though her hats are also on sale in boutiques here and nationwide, as are some knockoffs made by people who cut corners with cheaper Chinese hats and plastic bling, she complains.

Even the sort of high-end traditional hats that were once LeBlanc's career at Fleur de Paris, a custom millinery and couture shop in New Orleans' French Quarter, rely on foreign labor. "Most everything I use comes from somewhere else," says LeBlanc, who made hats at the shop for 24 years, the last 15 spent commuting to her job via plane from Dallas.

She quit Fleur de Paris in May, but she still makes hats, either blocking them herself—a steamy, labor-intensive task she hates—or ordering them blocked and then completing them with ribbons, flowers, feathers, etc. Think of it like a painter buying a pre-stretched canvas rather than framing and stretching it herself. Do you care if Picasso tacked his own cloth?

Many of the hand-crafted cloth flowers, stitched ribbons and intricately shaped feathers LeBlanc uses are antiques she has recovered at sales. "Like every labor-intensive craft, it's just not done here anymore," LeBlanc says of her collection of cut feathers, but she might as well be talking about the entire craft. The demand for a stylish cloche hat isn't big enough to support more than the handful of remaining craftspeople who make the basic hat shapes she finishes.

Which is a shame, really, because LeBlanc can think of lots of good reasons to wear hats. "Nobody knows when I'm having a bad hair day," she says. "And people will hold the door open for you."

And if you're a lady wearing a hat—or at least a really stylish hat—"a smile will get you things" you might not otherwise get, like politeness.

And there's nothing crazy in wanting that. — Patrick Williams

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