When Gina Miller was growing up in Lakewood, back in the 1980s, her family kept horses on their property at 6835 Westlake Ave. As a teenager, she’d bottle-feed foals, ride her horses on the front lawn, and take a trailer down to Dallas Animal Services when one of them escaped.
One afternoon, Miller recalls, she went to check on their old Arabian stallion named Demetrius, but he wasn’t in the barn. Frantic, thinking she lost a horse again, she searched all over the property. Eventually, Miller found Demetrius.
“He somehow nudged open the door to this guest bedroom in the guest house and was laying on the floor there,” she laughs. She called her mother, the late renowned real estate agent Marilyn Hoffman, to figure out how to get the horse out of the house. Hoffman replied, “‘Don’t tell your dad, just let him be there,’” Miller says. “We realized he wasn’t doing any harm. He just went to cool off.”
The grand Tudor estate made headlines earlier this summer, when hundreds of folks filed up the long drive and around the fenceline under the hot Memorial Day weekend sun for a chance to shop the massive estate sale that was held following Marilyn’s passing. But for Miller, it’s memories like finding Demetrius in the guest house or playing on the third floor—which the family jokingly called the “ballroom”—that make her childhood home unforgettable.
The family bought the house in the early 1970s, before Miller was born—“I came home from the hospital in that house,” she says—but its life began much earlier than that.
Now on the market for a cool $5 million, the house was designed in 1927 by famed British architect Sir Alfred Bossom, who also designed commercial spaces like American Exchange National Bank and the Magnolia-Mobil Petroleum Building. “You feel like you’re in London,” listing agent Cliff Kessler says of walking through the home. “It has this great presence to it.”
Neighborhood Spotlight
Lakewood
Built for Arthur Kramer, who ran the A. Harris and Company department store, the Lakewood property originally sat on 22 acres, stretching back to Bob-O-Link Drive.
Over the years, though, the property was sold off in various parcels as Lakewood grew. The part with the barn was sold in the early 2000s. “Our old gazebo is in our neighbor’s backyard,” Miller says. “Pieces of our property still exist all over the neighborhood.”
Today, the lot is just 1.2 acres, but it feels much larger, Kessler says. The house has three sprawling stories, plus a full basement; between the main house and guest house, which Hoffman added, there’s more than 9,000 square feet of living space. The property has eight fireplaces, eight bedrooms, and 35 closets.
All that space is great for anyone who likes to host, Miller says. “You can really entertain in that house and maximize the space really creatively.”
The main floor has two formal living rooms, in which Hoffman used to throw fabulous parties, Miller says. The Dallas Ballet performed here once; her mother hosted The Partridge Family alum David Cassidy, actress Pam Dawber, and other celebrities. “We just had so many parties for various things,” she says, even school pool parties. “Anyone who went to Lakehill until 1992 has a memory of that house.”
The upper floors are a maze of bedrooms and closets—and closets behind the closets. Miller says her bedroom, which had a fireplace, was her favorite. She had a small set of stairs from her room into her closet. As a kid, Miller says, she’d slide down her closet stairs into a pile of stuffed animals.
When she was in trouble with her parents, Miller recalls, the third floor was “a great place to go hide.” It has a bedroom and bathroom, a large game room and bar, and several cedar closets, including “probably the biggest cedar closet that I have ever seen,” Kessler says. The space could be used as an apartment, Miller says, but it’s a great area for kids to hang out in while their parents enjoy a more formal dinner party downstairs. She says she spent hours up there as a child, playing make-believe.
Though selling her mother’s house is bittersweet, Miller knows whoever gets it will love it as much as she did. “It was always a great place to come home to,” she says.
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