This morning, we had breakfast (a pretty nice one, but nothing to compare to Ron Ruckman's breakfasts at Ruckman Haus in San Antonio) in the dining room. When that was over, our hostess offered to give us a tour of the house, and so almost everybody got up and left the table to begin the tour.

I think it might be helpful, should you wish to follow us on our tour, to see an approximate diagram of the first floor of the Steel Magnolia House. I have drawn one (to the best of my recollection) and put it at left. It is pretty self-explanatory, and I think that once you look at some of the pictures (and watch some of the movies) you'll have a pretty good feel for how things are arranged. Also, I think it might be fun as we tour the house to show you some short clips from the movie "Steel Magnolias" that will show you those rooms and areas as they looked in the actual film. You will also notice that the proprietors of the house have taken some pains to decorate it to resemble the actual set decoration for the film, since so many of the people who stay with them do so precisely because they liked the movie and want to have the feeling that they are on the movie set itself.

So the tour began. Our hostess first took us outside onto the front porch to begin talking about the house. She just opened the double front doors and we looked out while she talked.

The Front of Steel Magnolia House In this clip from the movie, we see Shirley MacLaine (Ouiser) and Olympia Dukakis (Clairee) leaving the reception after the wedding of Sally Field's daughter. Although it's dark, you can see the double front door and you can barely see the brick columns on the porch.

We first took a look in the parlor as our hostess described some of the history of the house going back to the Civil War, and then brought that story up to the present time and the use of the house in the movie. I didn't want to try to film our hostess from room to room; we weren't actually THAT interested in the history and use of this particular house. But I did want to take at least one movie of her so you could see and hear what it was like.

Our Hostess Describes the Parlor I filmed just a small portion of our hostess' talk while we were looking into the parlor. (As it turned out, my filming made her a bit nervous, and you can see her ask me not to right at the end of the clip. I could have made other movies here in the house itself, but I decided to use movie clips instead. In this movie, we are looking from the front hall into the room.

We next crossed the hall and entered the study. The owners of the house have it set up as kind of an office, but in the movie it seemed to be another living room of sorts, for when you see Sally Field (M'Lynn Eatenton) and Julia Roberts (Shelby Eatenton) pass it on their way to have their hair done at Truvy's, there are a couple of maids setting things up for the reception that is to occur after the wedding.

In fact, this might be a good time to show you another clip from the movie that will tie together some of the elements in the first-floor schematic that I've repeated at right.

In the scene that I'll show you, Sally Field comes out of what was apparently the master bedroom on the first floor through a door that opens out into a hall that is actually under the back part of the main stairway. In the clip, you'll see that this door to the bedroom comes out into the family room as well. Field plays part of the scene in the family room, where you can see the view to the corner of the room where the circular table is and the view out the back door as well.

Then she turns and goes back through the hall under the stairs, emerging around a corner into the front hall of the house, where she meets Julia Roberts coming down the front stairway. Together, they walk through the hall towards the front door, passing the study where we get the view of the maids cleaning/setting up.

M'Lynn and Shelby Leave for Truvy's Here is the clip from Steel Magnolias that shows the arrangement of the family room, back and front halls, main stairs and the office/study.

Next, we followed our hostess as she walked back towards the stairway up to the second floor. We passed the small hall table which turns out to be the same one that was used in the previous clip- the one where Sally Field stops to put away the gun that her husband has been using to try to scare the birds away from the tree in back, since that's where most of the reception is going to be held. We then entered the door to the dining room that you can see ajar behind that hall console in the picture at left.

Back in the dining room, we found that the table had been cleared from breakfast (by someone I don't recall seeing at all), and we listened to our hostess describing more about the house and the movie. I took a picture of our hostess and Fred.

We next walked down the corridor to the kitchen, past the pantry which was on our right. The pantry appeared in one scene in the movie, the scene occurring after the kitchen scene you'll see in a moment, but the scene turned out to be so long that I didn't include that part of it.

In the photo at right, we have come through the swinging door at the end of that short corridor; that door leads to the dining room. In the picture, the pantry is at the left along that corridor. Entering the kitchen and looking towards the back of the house, you can see the island that appeared in the various kitchen scenes throughout the movie, as well as the eating area in the back corner and the beautiful stained glass window; that window faces north.

You can't see them in this view, but beside the archway that leads from the kitchen into the family room there is a large pass-through in the wall; the bed and breakfast uses it for the coffee and tea service that's available, and you see it in a number of the movie clips involving the family room or kitchen.

M'Lynn Learns that Shelby is Pregnant In this scene, actually in the middle of the larger scene in which Shelby tells her mother that, against doctors' advice, she has become pregnant, takes Shelby from the family room side of the pass-through, through the doorway and into the kitchen. She stands against the island, and you can look past her down the corridor to the dining room door.

The tour went through the kitchen doorway to the family room, and this view looks south across the room to the pool beyond the windows. Just as you pass through the kitchen archway to the family room, you find the back stairs that lead up to the second floor. Actually, they come out on the first landing on the main stairway. I wanted to take a couple of pictures before our hostess and the other guests went up that stairway. Fred got a picture of me with kitchen doorway and pass through behind me.

There are two more clips from the movie that show activity in the family room:

The Family Room In this clip, Shelby and M'Lynn are conversing in the family room, and we can look beyond them early in the clip out the south family room door and across the area where the swimming pool is now. (You can see Soldini House a half block away.) As they cross the room towards the kitchen, and Shelby heads up the back stairs, you can see out the back door and into the kitchen as well.

The Back of Steel Magnolia House In this clip from early in the movie, M'Lynn is hollering out the back door (west side of the house) as preparations are going on for the reception. Out that door and across the parking apron and port d'cochere is the garage building where our suite was located.

The tour continued up to the second floor where there are, essentially, four guest suites.

You can get to the second floor by going up the main staircase from the front of the house. You go up one long flight of stairs from the front of the house, turn on a large landing, and then go up another short flight of stairs. Or, if you go up the back stairway, it brings you out onto the same landing where you take the same additional short flight of stairs up. I know the diagram doesn't make this clear, but it was hard to draw it so it would.

I think the picture at left that I took from the top of that second short flight will make it clearer. The view looks down that short flight of stairs and through the doorway that leads to the back stairs that continue on down into the family room. If, when you descended down to the landing in front of you, instead of going through that door you could turn around to your left and you would be at the top of the main stairway coming up from the front hall of the house.

As I step back towards the front of the house to take another picture from the open area off of which all the four rooms in the house are located, you can see that there is another flight of stairs leading upward. There is another room on the third floor of the house that our hostess told us is mostly used for storage. This second stairway was never shown in the movie and isn't used by guests either.

Off this upstairs foyer are the four guest suites- two on either side of the house. On your left, as you look towards the back of the house are the Jackson Room (back corner) and the Shelby Room (front corner). On your right is the M'lynn Room (front corner) and the Clairee Suite, the largest suite in the main house (back corner). We couldn't go into the Shelby Room because it still had guests staying over, but we went into the other three.

The Clairee Suite is the largest of the rooms in the main house. It is done in yellow, which was, apparently, Clairee's stated favorite color in the movie, though I don't remember that. It is a nice room with a huge bathroom. If you want to look at some pictures taken in the suite, just click on the thumbnail images at left.

The M'Lynn Room at the front right of the house is a nice room, much like The English Room at Ruckman Haus in San Antonio, with a big four-poster bed. It had just been vacated, so all we did was stick our heads in.

The other room we got to look into is called The Jackson Room. The web site for Steel Magnolia House says that it is the Shelby Room that has the bathroom with bathtub that Julia Roberts is using when Dylan McDermott comes in through the window to see her. But as the movie clip below will show, it is actually the bathtub in the bathroom that belongs to the Jackson Room that was used in the scene.

In the clip, the window that McDermott uses is the one to the left of the fireplace- the one with the shade pulled down. The chair is not there in the scene, and the piece of furniture he has to walk around to get to the bathroom door (which is out of the picture to the left) is different. The window treatments, however, seem to be identical to those used in the movie.

Jackson Visits Shelby In this clip, Shelby's fiancee Jackson climbs in the window of what is supposedly her bedroom, and opens the door to the bathroom to talk to her. Oddly, the B&B calls this room "the Jackson Room," although they also have a "Shelby Room." Why the discrepancy I have no idea, but you can see in the picture above the window through which Jackson enters the room.

That completed our tour of the main house. Before we checked out, we went over to the carriage house where our own suite was to film and photograph it. To get there, we went out the back door and across the parking area at the back of Steel Magnolia House.

Our Suite at the Steel Magnolia House: Truvy's Carriage House

The suite called "Truvy's Carriage House" apparently got that name because outside the house used as the set for Dolly Parton's beauty salon there was a garage with what appeared to be an apartment above it. The actual build we were in behind the main Steel Magnolia House was not in its current form when the house was used for filming; it was renovated and added onto later. Part of the old ground floor was used as the tool shed where Sally Field's husband and sons rummaged through boxes looking for fireworks to scare the birds away. As you can see here, there is a large building that has a storage area, the entry to the upstairs suite and two garage bays on the ground floor and, of course, the suite above it.

Truvy's Carriage House Suite Before we take a look at pictures of the suite, why not watch this movie, and follow me up the stairs to the suite. Once there, we'll see the kitchen, living room, bedroom and bath.

Now that you know the layout of the suite, you can take a look at some of the pictures that Fred took of it while I was filming. Just click on the thumbnails below to see the full-size images:

The suite was fun to stay in, and the tour of the house very interesting. But it was time for us to pack up, check out, and head back over to Soldini House to find Justin and Gary and give them the surprise I've been working on for a day or two.

Back at Soldini House

We got over to Soldini House to find Justin and Gary doing some rearranging of decorations in the house. Our understanding was that there would be one more tour of the house the following weekend, and they were taking the opportunity to change some things around based on their experiences yesterday. If anything, the house looked even better than it did on Saturday, and Fred took a couple more good pictures of some of the decorations. Click on the thumbnails below to have a look at them:

Then it was time for me to show Justin and Gary what I'd been working on this weekend when I wasn't helping them with the house or with the tour. When I found that Soldini House was on the National Register of Historic Places when we first visited Justin and Gary last year, I had the idea that there ought to be a web site for the house. I had looked on the Internet and found that quite a few such homes and significant buildings had either their own web sites or they were part of some other web site. That idea resurfaced this weekend, and on the first night we were here, I went to my web hosting company and purchased the domain name "soldinihouse.org", just in case Justin and Gary might want a web site at some point.

Then, over a couple of evenings and some this morning, I created a beginning web site for the house, using some of the pictures we'd taken this weekend and the last time we were here, and using some of the information Gary had printed up for the hostesses in the various rooms to use. Then I uploaded all of that material yesterday. To my surprise, when I got up this morning, I just did a Google search for "Soldini House" to see what all would come up. Gratifyingly, the web site I had just created was the first search result in the list. So everything was set.

Over at the house, I unpacked my laptop and set it up on the floor, and then, under the guise of trying to get them interested in doing a real web site for the house, I asked Justin and Gary to just try a search on the words "soldini" and "house" just to see what came up. They sat in front of the laptop and tried the search and, of course, the new site came up. When they went to it, it didn't take them long to figure out that I'd put it together for them. I was very pleased that they liked the work I'd done, although I took pains to point out that it was just a start, and just my own ideas at that. I told them that they were the real experts and that any time they would like to create something all their own, using their own design expertise and knowledge, that I'd be happy to turn their ideas into code and maintain the site for them.

Although they haven't had time to do much yet, Gary has already asked me about what is possible for the site, and I think that they will eventually take all the information they have about the house, its contents and their own families, and build something really neat. They've told me a number of times already that they've been showing the current site to other folks, and that makes me feel as if the work was worthwhile.

NOTE: I am making some code corrections to this page in 2020, and in the years after our visit to Natchitoches, Justin and Gary have indeed had some ideas for their site, and I have implemented them. Much of what they wanted to add was information from yesterday's tour, so now the site has a number of pages and lots of information about the house. If you would like to see what it looks like, you have only to navigate to

Our Trip Home

Our route home was simply the reverse of the route here; we didn't do anything different than when we travel the route back and forth to Florida all the time. It was a beautiful day and the driving was pleasant, and I was enjoying my new car. (See this year's Miscellaneous Pictures section if you don't already know why I got one.)

As we came around the east side of downtown Dallas, Fred got a really good picture of part of the Dallas skyline; it is at left.

A very enjoyable trip came to an end.

You use the links below to continue to the album page for different day.

	December 11, 2010: The Soldini House Tour
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