About Danni Sabota

Wherever I am in the world, I am happiest when I am really paying attention. I pick out clever detailing in distinctive buildings, with my favorites being the old, ornate architecture but I notice the modern majesty in construction, too. I eye the streetscapes for people and dogs. I hate to miss a thing.

Transported by a vintage notion of a slower way to get there—but without the discomfort of a bumpy-road ride—By Coach & Carriage features my collection of travel personality stories about historic architecture and interesting characters.

Being in a place with a past, where people before us centuries ago have fashioned old buildings and cobbled towns for their homes and hang outs, charts my travel course. I am curious to decipher they poured their stories into their placemaking. Mosaics and tiles. Columns and fretwork. Stained glass. The shape and repetition of window and door frames. Turrets and spires on the roofline. Architects and the creators modeled these features for their own joys and purposes at the time, but the art reflected in the best and well-thought historic design is adored by generations who follow.

As an engineering and construction executive, my dad often travelled internationally when I was young. Cairo, Egypt, peaked my interest as especially significant in the whole old world out there.  I enjoyed his stories of tunneling through the minute doorway openings within the pyramid brick in the Valley of the Kings and into the cool, dusty chambers with their craved sarcophagi. The photo (below) of him grinning, perched atop a camel and wearing wing tips, suit slacks and a Mexican wedding shirt with a shepherd’s head towel and staff depicts how great a day immersed in the history of another culture can be.

Dad has been my role model for having a sense of travel adventure and the business of the world. My mom taught me about words and reading and everything I know about baseball, which made the Houston Astros 2017 World Series Championship and that of the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980 even more spectacular.

I made my first international excursion when I accompanied my dad on a business trip to London for my 27th birthday. While he spent the first few days working in the office, I learned the Tube system and explored the city. “Please be careful,” he counseled each morning before we went our separate ways. “Not only would I never forgive myself if something happened to you, but just as bad, I would have to break that news to your mother.”

Saving Houston's Only Frank Lloyd Wright Design

Having studied architectural history in college, I learned about visionary architects like Antoni Gaudí, Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson, and enough to want to go on world location and learn more. While working as a reporter at the Houston Business Journal I ferreted out stories about business people restoring historic properties for law offices, event venues and luxury apartments when I wasn’t writing about pure business news like Initial Public Offerings, environmental compliance and the energy industry. I like to take credit for saving the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in Houston, when I discovered it was for sale as a tear down and told its story. Although not a work among Wright’s most known, the William Thaxton House was notable and designed on the parallelogram shape, from the foundation footprint to the long-gone bed furniture and custom-parallelogram sheets to fit it. My story was seen and reported upon by the Houston Chronicle and that process repeated in national dailies, where it was eventually seen by an out-of-town couple who bought, restored and expanded the residence, which still thrives today.

To feed my great-old-building obsession, the Houston Business Journal editor suggested I launch a column featuring some historic structure each week. Each story started with a curious old building, the kind readers would often pass and wonder about its story. I’d cover the key architectural details—the pie-crust that made the filling delicious—but try to focus on the story of the people behind the building, where they came from, how the place came to be. Featuring oil barons, architects and the area’s founding business and civic citizens, each article used the building to create a vignette of a character in history.

After moving from the Houston Business Journal into public relations for the city’s tourism agency, the Greater Houston Convention & Visitors Bureau, I learned about the travel industry. I also began volunteering with the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance where I expanded the preservation group’s historic walking tour program of downtown’s Market Square. I researched and wrote the content and organized new walking tours of almost all of Houston’s National Register Historic Districts, other cool, vintage neighborhoods and old cemeteries. In time, prompted by eye-catching old structures and iconic tombstones I could knit together practically the whole early history of Houston, one character at a time.

My Own Slice of History

My husband, Mark, and I restored the 1912 late Victorian-early Craftsman style home we live in, in the historic district where we met. From the upstairs balcony, we can see the downtown skyline. Lucky and unlucky that the place had experienced 80 years of deferred maintenance when we purchased it, we won in having every square inch of door and window frame trim still in place and the two-landing wood staircase intact…excellent bones. The project challenged us in that restoration called for everything from pier-and-beam foundation work, a new roof, all new plumbing and electrical, a house full of drywall installation, two heating and cooling systems, two and half baths and a new kitchen. That was the short list of the big stuff.

We moved into the house—originally built by an upholsterer for the Houston & Texas Central Railroad —in February 2000. Having written about and been invited into so many historic preservation projects, I’d long envied the historic home lifestyle: wood floors and walls of windows, creaky construction, funky shaped spaces. How the beat of a favorite song played loudly rolls across the hardwood and up through the soles of your feet. How cracking quakes of thunder raddle the wavy glass window panes puttied into their wooden casings. The wash of sunlight that draws stretchy rectangles on the floor that prompts a series of short naps for our dogs as they follow the warm patches across the floor while the sun arches over the house.

I love to come home to this place. Our home and two large rescue dogs, Cardi and Violet. The act of returning to it makes it a little less sad to end a historic architecture travel adventure. To come home to our own great old building.

Good Bones, Solid Foundation

I’ve been fortunate to be able to use the tools I’ve acquired to create a Web magazine about my travel experiences, having worked in the travel industry and writing for publications like the Houston Business Journal, Austin Magazine and Bay City Daily Tribune. I’ve spent decades doing corporate writing and communications in energy, law and health care. I’ve crafted speeches for both former President Bushes, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Gen. Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Nellie Connally and for CEOs, elected officials, engineers, doctors and lawyers. For five years, I organized a week’s travel logistics and shepherded a dozen coworkers across picturesque mountain and nature destinations of France to participate in my global energy company’s annual ironman team building event. 

I’ve absorbed all of this to shape my own curiosity of other places where we find historic architecture and interesting characters. I revel in the fascinating people, moments and experiences that emanate from the soul and integrity still contained within truly special historic architecture and the communities that have grew up around it.

I hope the stories I share on By Coach & Carriage inspire you to appreciate historic spaces in a new way and from your own perspective. Thank you for joining me in my continued quest to keep paying attention. 

—Danni Sabota