ROUND TOP, TX - December 11, 2007 - Round Top Real Estate has sold some impressive property over its almost 20-year history, but few of the company's listings match the iconic importance of Emma Lee Turney's 12,600 square-foot Round Top Arts Center building, home of the Round Top Folk Art Fair and Creative Market.
The air-conditioned, metal, barn-like structure with space for fifty-four huge 12 x 16 foot booths, is only a year old and built to showcase contemporary art and other updated presentations. It is located just outside the Round Top city limits, not far from the famously-quaint Bybee Square, the centerpiece of civic and social activity in the tiny Texas.
"The buyer will also find a good septic tank and water well," says Grover Hillbolt, owner of Round Top Real Estate, the town's oldest realty firm. Turney's Folk Art Fair property is listed at $1,050,000. "This is an established location with established clients and an established reputation. You can't ask for more,” says Hillbolt.
Turney, a 79-year-old business woman who enjoys an almost celebrity status among antique and art collectors around the U.S. and is known by many as "Miss Emma," remembers Round Top when the migration of major collectors and dealers first began. She recorded these and other memories in her autobiography, “Denim and Diamonds”. town, population 77. Before the exhibit hall was built, a huge tent stood in its place. The 10-acre spread on which it is built has been home to her Folk Art Fairs and other newly-added presentations, such as the Wedding Show and the Country Design Show, which were started last year.
In the book, Turney explains how she launched the Round Top antique and folk art shows in the 1960's, when 25 dealers signed up for a small two-day show that didn't end up being small at all. “It was a sell-out to the 2,700 high-profile shoppers who arrived from Houston,” recalls Turney. “Those dealers must have brought everything their families ever owned," she laughs. More than forty years later, Turney says many of the children and grandchildren of those original shoppers make Round Top their destination.
“Many have bought homes and property in the area,” she says.
Chris Travis, editor and publisher of the “Round Top Register” says every year Turney's antique and folk art shows consistently produce the single largest source of tourist and tax dollars for Fayette and surrounding counties.
"There's a lot going on in this part of Texas,” says Travis, " but nothing compares with the exhilarating, over-the-top shopping mania that possesses our region during the Round Top Antiques and Folk Art Fair shows." Travis says the shows, held in the fall and spring, have grown so that no one really knows how immense the attraction is. Most say they measure attendance by the nostalgia-filled bed-and-breakfast establishments that are swelled to capacity and by observing the bumper-to-bumper traffic that moves easily down country roads.
Turney says that she will always admire art and style and those who create and sell it, but now, she declares, is the right time to pass the ownership baton to someone else. When she made the decision to sell the massive exhibition hall, she says it was only natural that she bring in another Round Top icon to assist her – the oldest real estate company in town.
"Grover and Charlotte Hillbolt, and son Frank, have owned Round Top Real Estate for almost twenty years. They’ve owned property here for more than 40 years. 'They are true Round Topians," she says. "They know how to locate the ideal buyer."
For more information about the Round Top Folk Art Fair and Creative Market and the property located on highway 237 at the edge of Round Top, Texas, contact Round Top Real Estate at (877) 249-5732. Visit the Round Top Real Estate website at www.roundtoprealestate.com.
