Four years ago April and Craig Mlady bought their building lot on Padre Island. They had decided to leave their busy life in California for a quieter, simpler place to raise their new baby girl Helen. April grew up on Key Allegro in Rockport, and her parents Phil and Frances Colling moved to the Lamar Park area of Corpus Christi in 1977. Padre Island offered the lifestyle the Mladys wanted with the added bonus of family nearby.
April’s parents sent their daughter a subscription to Gulfscapes at their California address. Frances knew they wanted to build and decorate a coastal style home, and Gulfscapes was full of great ideas and photographs. A story about award winning jewelry designer Peter Barr and the gorgeous ads picturing his custom pieces caught April’s eye. While her engagement ring was beautiful, she felt it simply did not go with her wedding band. She began to think of having the ring redesigned, and Peter Barr was the artist she wanted to do the job. As far as April was concerned, a meeting with Peter Barr was going to be her first task once their move to Texas was complete.
A quick sale of their California home brought the Mladys to Texas faster than anticipated. They settled into an apartment on the mainland and began to research builders for their home on the Island. With dozens of ideas from Gulfscapes in mind, they met with the builder and finalized a plan for their home.
April hadn’t forgotten that meeting with Peter Barr. She wanted to redesign the ring to go with her wedding band of diamonds. She took one of the ads she had carried around with her to show Peter what she wanted. According to Peter Barr “About 50 to 60% of our business is redesigning jewelry. Factors in choosing a piece for redesigning include wear ability, fashion, and what stones the customer has to work with. The process in creating a new design starts with seeing the stones and gold… Then we look at the different styles of my work in the showcases and pictures of other pieces I have done while listening to what is being said. From the information gathered, I start sketching, keeping function and beauty in mind along with the meaning of the new piece. When we are locked in on an idea, we review the design. Next, I carve the design out of a block of wax. The client can see from the wax model the shape and placement of stones for the finished piece. If I haven’t captured what they were asking for, I make the adjustments at this time. Next we cast and complete the piece of jewelry.”
“That was it. It was just perfect,” says April. “It was exactly what I wanted.” The ring was crafted and the house was underway.
Frances Colling had shopped at Tropical Home Furnishings in Rockport and on the Island and suggested that Carol Albrecht might be just the right decorator to help them realize their dreams. “Carol was right there to advise on everything from furnishings, window treatments, art work and accessories to the style of faucets.” The master bedroom and dining room furnishings were chosen at Buddy Walker, another of the Gulfscapes advertisers whose beautiful vignettes inspired April and Craig’s dreams of a beachside home.
While Carol Albrecht, whose own store My Coastal Home opened in the fall of 2005, was giving advice on decorating, Craig and April Mlady were giving advice to Carol and fiancé ROC. Carol and Robert O. Curry of Legacy Estate Planning in Rockport and Padre Island were engaged, but she didn’t have an engagement ring. She didn’t really want an engagement ring. Since everyone including the Mladys kept asking her when she would have one, she started to research. She asked jewelers for some ideas and told them her own. They continued to supply stock pictures from catalogs. If she was going to have a ring, she certainly wanted it to be something special and unique and meaningful, not one ordered from a picture in a catalog. She had seen Peter Barr’s award winning work in Gulfscapes, and had seen her friends and clients wearing his creations. She loved his work, but was worried that it would be terribly expensive. As luck would have it, she met Peter at a party and they started to talk about the ring she might want. “The customers give me more input than they think. As they talk about what they like and don’t like, I listen. I hear the words and the emotion. They are giving me the direction in which the piece will go. It is up to me to interpret what they are asking for, evaluate the mechanics of construction, design, comfort and wear ability,” Peter suggests.
Peter asked questions and listened to her answers and Carol knew they were on the right track. He got it! She gave him a copy of a poem ROC had written for her. Using the poem as inspiration and some family gold jewelry to incorporate into the design, Peter creatively combined the two to form an engagement ring and two wedding bands that met Carol’s standards of perfection. “They are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” says Carol. “And the greatest surprise was that they were so affordable. I have jewelry designed just for me by an award winning artist, and it was just so affordable.”
Carol’s latest recommendation to the Mladys was a landscape designer and pool contractor. They are happily settled into their new home and have welcomed another new family member. Son Eddie was born in December. And April is looking ahead to another redesign by Peter Barr. For their tenth wedding anniversary she wants to use the stones in her engagement ring as part of a new wedding band. As Peter’s wife Jo would say, “That is the ultimate in recycling.”
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