Austin Interior Designer Amity Worrel trades secrets with Veranda’s editors, wears seven-inch platforms to a black-tie gala, and goes looking for her mother’s Birmingham.

I recently flew to Birmingham, Alabama, for the Veranda Trade Secrets Summit, which is exactly the kind of thing I will happily board a plane for: designers, editors, photographers, stylists, garden people, and antique dealers, all with strong opinions about things I also have strong opinions about.

The goal of the event for me, besides having fun, was to hear REAL secrets…that would have an impact.

And, as it turns out, Veranda was not messing around.

Trade secrets and spilled tea!

The Summit was genuinely generous. The editors talked about what they look for in stories for the magazine, how the stories come together in-house, and what details make a project right for Veranda in particular. They also discussed how they think about houses and gardens and the connection between the two. 

There was a panel dedicated to photography and styling, including the things designers routinely get wrong at a shoot (not understanding that what might look good to the eye might read differently on camera and perhaps the wrong kind of flowers). The social media advice they shared was actually about social media tactics that are engaging, not a  lecture on why you should be posting 47 times a week.

I preferred the small-group conversations with other designers (there were only 60 of us at the summit) to the over-attended large-scale version of professional development. Add to that a dinner with the editors, plenty of candid conversation, and a useful look at how the magazine really works, and I came home with notes I will actually use.  

My biggest takeaway is how much heart the people who run the magazine have. They were incredibly accessible to us for questions and assured us again and again that they will be communicative. They also kindly told us not to be discouraged if we are not selected because it might just be a mismatch on timing which felt good to hear. They REALLY encouraged us to be in touch and submit projects and ideas… they made us feel connected and like friends. A truly Southern charm and welcome came through.

Antiques, gardens, and the southern gift for extravagance

Then came Antiques at the Gardens, the antiques show that has been happening at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens for twenty years in connection with the garden fundraiser. If you love antiques, beautiful gardens, and the particular Southern ability to make a wildly extravagant gala look easy then Birmingham is a very good place to be.

The antique show was not massive like Round Top, but rather an extremely manageable size, all under one air conditioned roof, and highly curated. My personal favorite find was a vintage 1970’s broken ceramic tile decorative duck figurine. I’d never seen one before and I was instantly charmed!

Seven inch platforms required to live up to the gala expectations

The weekend closed with a black-tie gala benefiting the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. I wore a gown with a hoop skirt underneath it, and seven-inch platform heels. Seven.

There are not many places in America where that outfit makes perfect sense. I have spent enough time in New York and Texas to know the fashion rules there. In New York, if you were to dress that way someone would assume you were about to perform in an opera!. In Texas, someone might expect you were part of a parade and about to position yourself on a slow moving float. In Birmingham, nobody seemed remotely surprised by the extravagant height and Scarlet O’Hara style skirt!

Then my sister joined me from Austin

When the Veranda part of the trip ended, my sister joined me for something entirely different: visiting some of the homes where our mother lived and grew up.

My mother was born in Texas in 1929, but much of her childhood was spent in the Deep South, and Birmingham was a major part of her life. Her extended family was there for decades. I grew up with stories about people I barely knew and houses I had visited once or twice as a very young child. This is the woman who taught me, one garage sale at a time, that every object comes with a person attached, so going looking for her story felt right.

A neighborhood that has luckily been preserved

One stop was Norwood, where my mother’s family had two houses with a shared driveway. I believe the houses were built in the 1930s. I have a vague memory of a visit we made when I was very young but I did not remember much of it.

Norwood is stunningly beautiful. Not in a polished, planned-for-tourism way, but because the neighborhood developer clearly considered how a neighborhood should work. The streets move with the land. Houses sit generously on their lots. Bungalows of around 1,100 square feet share blocks with grand prairie-style houses of around 7,000, and homes from the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s sit beside those from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.

As a designer, it was a gift to see a neighborhood where the houses haven’t all been scraped, flipped, enlarged beyond recognition, or turned into some version of a lifestyle product.

You can’t politely put history in the background

Birmingham is still a segregated city, and you don’t have to look hard to see it. But I also noticed how willing people were to talk about that history rather than pretend it wasn’t there. Acknowledging the mess is a better place to start than pretending there isn’t one.

The punch card I didn’t take

I wasn’t interested in recreating my mother’s childhood. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. She is gone, the people she knew are gone, and the South she grew up in doesn’t exist in quite the same way anymore. What I could do was walk around places that had been part of her life and see them for myself.

At the end of the trip, I stopped at The Little Professor, and bought a few books for the two-airplane journey home. The woman checking me out asked if I wanted a punch card, the kind where you collect points toward a free book. I told her, “I won’t be back.”

She looked at me as though I had announced a terminal diagnosis, or insulted her city and her amazing little bookstore. I had intended neither. There are a lot of places in the world I want to see, and as we get older, even if we’re not old, we have to choose where we spend our time. I’ve already made a pilgrimage to Charleston House and seen Paris through an architect’s lens, and the list only gets longer.

Not a promise to return

Birmingham was a chance to look at a piece of my mother’s history without having to inherit all of it. To see where some of my family lived. To remember the stories. To discover a city I had previously known mostly through family lore and a complicated American history.

So no, I don’t need the punch card.

But if Veranda invites me back, I reserve the right to reconsider.