When Laura Whitney Daly lived in France, she would drive around the countryside, shopping with her mother.
Sometimes, they would stumble on a studio of glassblowers or other artisans whose families had been molding local resources into functional and decorative objects for ages.
She and her husband, Jeff Daly, want to echo that experience in Austin.
First through their Mockingbird Domestics website and now with their eclectic furnishing shop on South Lamar Boulevard, the Dalys make it possible to purchase year-round what in the past was mostly available only during events such as the East and West Austin studio tours — lots of high-quality, locally made furniture and home decor.
“It’s not just the product,” “Jeff Daly say, “It’s the product with a story and a personality behind it.”
The Dalys have nurtured relationships with the city’s wealth of artisans. They encourage studio visits and they train their staff — including daughter Allison, who studied apparel design and merchandizing at Ball State University and interned at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in textile preservation — to share the history of each object in the store.
How would one classify the look the wood, fabric, metal and other materials in Mockingbird Domestics? Urban rustic? Post-industrial?
“We pick the pieces we think are going to last,” Laura Daly says. “We want people to think they are buying things to pass on from generation to generation.”
Both Dalys benefited from wide-ranging education and extended stays in different parts of Europe.
Laura Daly, 52, daughter of a computer executive and housewife with deep Texas roots, was born in Tyler and studied at Texas Tech University, the University of Texas Dallas and Southern Methodist University. She took art history and French at the Sorbonne and the American School in Paris, France.
“I never focused on a period,” she says of her art historical studies. “Renaissance would have been it. I think there’s a rebirth going on now. But the the time periods are moving faster and they are getting muddled.”
Laura Daly has lived long enough, for instance, to see designs from the triumphant postwar period go through the usual cycles of dismissive rejection, kitsch curiosity and then earnest revival. She agrees that the turning point in wider acceptance of this period was the late arrival of the term “midcentury modern.”
“To us, it was the furniture our parents had that we didn’t want,” says Laura Daly, whose guarded eyes light up when she talks about the connections between artists, objects and collectors. “Now the younger crowds embrace it and want it.”
When her father was transferred to Nice, France, she haunted the Roman part of the city made famous by the artists who had hung out there. She also loved the sense of permanence that accrued from having handmade objects all around her.
“People trade them from generation to generation,” she says. “There is so much value in that.”
Jeff Daly, 52, was born in Reno, Nev. Interestingly, his dad was also a computer executive. Both his parents, however, were from the Upper Midwest and met during high school in Des Moines, Iowa. His mother taught English and took gigs as a professional clown.
While he grew up mainly in Dallas, Jeff Daly attended part of high school in Copenhagen, Denmark. Like his wife, Jeff Daly distinctly recalls trips to factories such as the one that makes Royal Copenhagen porcelain.
“I still remember the personalities behind the plates,” he says. “That reflects what we are trying to do here.”
He met his wife at Plano High School in 1978.
“We lived in Plano for 30 years,” Laura Daly says. “Too long.”
The couple married in 1981. They have two daughters.
In the Dallas and Indianapolis areas, Jeff Daly became a technology executive and worked for a series of companies including Tandem, Lotus and IBM. His last full-time high tech job was as regional manager in Austin for Adobe. He built furniture on the side.
The pair moved here five years ago and settled in a brick colonial with an arts and crafts finish in a midcentury pocket of Travis Heights south of Live Oak Street.
As they reached the half-century point in the lives, the Dalys began to consider “the next thing.”
“We wanted to do something together,” Laura Daly says. They explored the possibilities of opening a bed and breakfast or a retreat center, or perhaps flipping houses. “This was a good time to step back and say: ‘If we are going to do it let’s do it now.’”
They set up a sort of war room for the future at their house. When they visited a furniture-makers’ show in Kerrville and admired the work, the couple realized they didn’t know how it was sold the rest of the year. The same issue came up with the hugely popular East Austin Studio Tour, where they discovered enormous talents among the artisans and artists.
So they decided to act as go-betweens. They started by collecting objects and filling up their house with the purchases.
“The family room and the kitchen were sacred,” Laura Daly jokes. “The other rooms were stuffed with stuff. Now it’s all empty again. We are going to have to buy some of this handmade furniture to fill it.”
A year ago, they launched Mockingbird Domestics online. It tapped into both their skill sets.
“With his passion for building and for putting things together and knowledge of running systems,” Laura Daly says. “And me being in design and loving handmade things, it just came together.”
They looked into a former party supply store on red-hot South Lamar, but instead switched to the former propane distributor next door.
They gutted the offices and warehouse, then used whitewashed pine to warm up the plain but lofty space.
They kept the flame from the propane sign, which now doubles as a bird’s feather.
Why a mockingbird?
“We are focusing on Texas and it’s the state bird,” Jeff Daly says. “But the new Texas, not the ranch-style Texas. Also, a mockingbird protects its nest and comes up with its own songs. That’s what we can do with furniture and what we can do with this business.”
Photos: Ralph Barrera