VICTORIANA FOPPERY is big for fall, but Hornament, a Tyler-based furniture company, was harking back to the 1870’s before the fad swept runways and retailers. Launched last year by two best friends and neighbors, each with an East Texas heritage, Hornament turns steer horns into functional, one-of-a-kind folk art. Owners Terri Squyres and Jana Jamison work with a South Texas craftsman, who polishes and reinforces horns salvaged from the Fort Worth Stockyards; he uses four to twelve sets to construct chairs, settees, ottomans, and footstools. The partners then reinvent the organic as elegant by finishing the frames with either the white, black, or brindle of cowhides or a hodgepodge of textiles and embellishments: rug and upholstery remnants, silks and bark cloth, rhinestone pins, millinery flowers, velvet ribbons, mother-of-pearl buckles, horn buttons—you name it, brocade to burlap. Peddled online and at their seasonal Round Top–Warrenton booth at Zapp Hall, the stools work equally well in environments modern, traditional, or lodgelike, while the ottomans are stylish at the end of a bed, in front of a vanity, or as an eccentric coffee table. “Hopefully this will be a piece you’ll pass on,” Jamison says. “It’s not a trend,” adds Squyres. “Horned furniture has been around Texas forever and ever.”
Vintage-fabric footstool, $250; crazy-quilt footstool, $295; vintage-fabric ottoman, $495. Hornament, 903-526-1278, hornament.com.
