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HOUSTON
SHOCK WAVES
TEXT BY USA RUFFIN/PHOTOGRAPHY BY HICKEY-ROBERTSON

[[image - photograph of a room]]

Curator and collector of the unorthodox, Ann Harithas is the Bayou City's mother of madness.

  As far as Ann Harithas is concerned, you don't decorate houses; you grow them, just like you might the unruliest herbs in a backyard garden. Sometimes, no matter how painstaking your labors, it takes years before they root well in a particular kind of soil, and often when they do take off, they develop into crazy organic entities with minds all their own. "I think you really have to live in a house a couple of years before  you can get wild with it," she says. "You need to see what it's really like to live there. We had a lot of fun with our Houston house, but it took 10 years to find what we wanted for it. Our apartment in New York is really more formal than the Houston house, but we also haven't been there long enough to really trash it out like we have in Houston. When it gets the amount of clutter it should have, I want it to be cluttered with the things I really love, not just things I bought to fill space. That takes time."
    Even if left to their own devices, most gardens still reflect their gardeners, and although it seems a bit too pat, it's almost impossible to get around the fact that Ann Harithas' Houston house is the very image of her. The world is very much with this avant-garde impresario of the arts, and the longer she lives somewhere, the more of it she leaves lingering on the walls, in the hallways and simply wafting about in the wacky atmosphere of the places she calls home.
   Extraordinary parlors in Ann Harithas' Houston traditional are a symphony of startling contemporary art and unexpected treatments. Designer Warren Thompson selected Brunschwig & Fils tapestry and silk tiger velvet as an eyecatching match for a vibrant work by Alfonso Ossorio over the mantel; the altar-like commode is by Larry Fuente, the flying papier-mache spirit and canine sculptures by Jesse Lott. Flowers throughout are by The Empty Vase, Houston.