A Texas TV personality with an affinity for bling and big houses has helped build and design a $3.5 million mansion in an effort to raise money for charity.
[Editor's note on Dec. 13, 2017: The home has sold for an undisclosed price.]
Donna Moss is a Dallas-Fort Worth interior designer who starred in the HGTV series Donna Decorates Dallas. She's teaming up with Traditional Home, a magazine that caters to those interested in interior design, to raise awareness and big chunks of change for the Alzheimer's Association. Her husband's mother Clara recently died after battling Alzheimer's.
Moss said before her passing, "we have watched in horror as this takes her beautiful spirit and crushes everything in its path."
A show house in Southlake that Moss and her husband designed is 7,938 square feet sprawling across 1.5 acres. It boasts a master suite, guest suite and three other bedrooms. There's also two separate two-car garages (for his-and-her parking), a pool and three courtyards.
Look inside the Southlake mansion:
The home has been under construction since July 2016, was completed in August.
"Only one year to build a custom home with this much detail is really pushing it," Moss says. She should know.
Moss led the creative vision alongside a team of 24 designers, including some of her HGTV buddies like Meg Caswell. Moss' husband, Paul Moss, who works in the residential and commercial building industry as owner of Marina Bay Development Corp., is in charge of construction.
Moss has built show homes before, but this is the first home she's designed that's this massive.
The house will be home to one wealthy buyer for an asking price of $3.5 million. From Sept. 24 to Oct. 22, anyone can traipse through the house for $40 a ticket. Tours in September and October will run Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m.; it'll be closed Mondays.
Moss says half of the ticket sales will be donated to the Alzheimer's Association Houston Chapter to help displaced Alzheimer's victims of Hurricane Harvey. At least 3 percent of the sale of the home will be donated to the the Alzheimer's Association-North Central Texas. To raise additional funds, Moss' retail store That's Haute will have a pop-up shop inside the home from Sept. 23 through Oct. 22, and a percentage of those proceeds will benefit the Alzheimer's Association as well.
"It's an unexpected and extraordinary gift," says Theresa Hocker, executive director of North Central Texas Alzheimer's Association chapter. "These funds will help pay for research and advocacy efforts on the state and national level."
For more information on the Texas-sized home and the events surrounding it, visit dallasshowhouse.com. The show house is located at 1235 Westwyck Court in Southlake.
Correction at 11:25 a.m. June 14, 2017: An earlier version of this story misspelled Meg Caswell's last name.
