Designing For Candy: Dallas Architect Stephen Chambers Recalls Infamous Party Home of Candy Montgomery

Stephen Chambers was just starting out decades ago as a young Dallas architect when he was approached by Candy and Pat Montgomery to design their perfect home. It would become “the best party house” in eastern Collin County — a prominent backdrop in Candy, the Hulu miniseries about a gruesome 1980 Dallas-area murder in the Wylie-Fairview-Lucas area. 

The true-crime limited series tells the story of Candy Montgomery, a popular Fairview wife and mother, who killed her friend Betty Gore with an ax at Gore’s home on Dogwood Drive in Wylie on Friday, June 13, 1980. As renewed attention comes to this sensational North Texas crime, we’re using our unique real estate lens to give context to the home, the neighborhood, and the community that serves as a backdrop for the international Hulu series. We covered the story in 2014 (with a very lively debate in the comments), and again last month, and continue to follow the real estate that has become another intriguing facet of the Candy Montgomery saga. 

Now, nearly 42 years to the date of the crime, CandysDirt.com (no relation) discovered the Dallas architect who worked with the Montgomerys and asked him his recollection of working with Candy on the ultimate party home.

Nice People

Past the winding roads of Lucas and into the community of Fairview, the Montgomerys’ home on Arroyo Blanco Street is a rare architect-designed home full of purposeful architecture and design.

Chambers had just started his architecture firm in 1975 when a few years later, he was approached by the Montgomerys. 

“I think they just heard about our work and called us,” Chambers said. “They were pleasant, nice people, easy to work with. They were respectful.”

The architect tells a story of Candy coming into his office, concerned that the blueprints show a home that’s just too big for them. The square footage needed to be cut down. 

“‘You’ve got to cut it!’” Chambers said she shouted at him, then pulled a hatchet out of her purse.

“Really?” listeners gasp as Chambers tells the story. 

He laughs. 

“No, that didn’t happen,” he says. “She was nice. She was normal.” 

There is a true story, however, of a reporter knocking on Candy’s door for an interview. She opened the door with a knife in her hand. She smiled and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not dangerous.”

Producers of the Hulu show have said they relied heavily on details in Evidence of Love, a true crime thriller about the case written by John Bloom and Jim Atkinson. Bloom is a Pulitzer Prize nominee, and Atkinson is the founding editor of D Magazine.

The authors refer to the architect Chambers in their book as a “chic Dallas architect.”

The area where the Montgomerys decided to build is referenced in the book, too. 

“They called it simply ‘the country’ — this place where the women had come with their men and children to settle,” Bloom and Atkinson write in Evidence of Love. “Specifically, it was eight to 10 amorphous little towns in eastern Collin County, Texas, but it really had no name. The church where the Montgomerys worshiped was located in a tiny farming community called Lucas, but most of the farming had ceased and few of the church members lived there anyway. The church buildings sat on a slight rise surrounded by fallow blackland wheat fields on three sides and a farm-to-market road on the fourth …”

“Most of them had come to escape something: cities, density, routine, fear of crime, overpriced housing, the urban problems their parents never knew. They came in the 1970s, just about the time the Dallas developers started buying out the farmers one by one, and they settled on pasture-size lots in homes designed exclusively for them by architects happy to get rich by satisfying their whims.” 

Chambers no longer has the plans, renderings, drawings, or any record of correspondence with the Montgomerys. He estimates he’s designed about 1,000 homes since then. He does believe, however, that the house he designed was nicer than the one portrayed on Candy, which was filmed in Georgia. 

Chambers recognized the home on the evening news.

“One evening I just happened to sit down in front of the television,” he said, tuning into Candy’s arrest. “There was something that was going on and the camera panned by the neighborhood. I thought, ‘I think I did that house.’”

It was disturbing for the up-and-coming architect, who has now had a 47-year career in Dallas, to see his design as the backdrop in the arrest of an ax murderer. 

“It was bizarre,” he said. “People are people, and if you work with thousands of people over a period of time, you will occasionally run into people who behave in an unusual way. [Candy and Pat Montgomery] didn’t behave badly. They were nice people.” 

The Best Party House

Chambers recalls that the Montgomery home had an open floor plan, maybe about 2,400 square feet. It was a modern home for that wooded Fairview neighborhood and the time period during which it was constructed, Chambers recalled. 

“It was pretty ‘out there’ for a person building a house in Fairview to come to an architect back then,” Chambers said.

Pat Montgomery was an engineer at Texas Instruments. Candy met him, according to Evidence of Love, through her job as a secretary at a wrought-iron furniture manufacturing plant, where Pat’s mother and aunt made cushions for padded headboards and barstools. 

Chambers estimates a home like the Montgomerys’ might have cost about $30 a square foot in the late 1970s and could cost maybe $500 per square foot today. 

“It wasn’t like a North Dallas special,” he said. “It was modern for that area. It had a lot of windows. It was not a really large house, but a pretty good size. In the ’60s and ’70s, all the rooms were separate rooms. It was a different era. The kitchen had a door and rarely was the door open to the rest of the house. That’s a throwback to the period of time when people had help.”

Subdivisions along F.M. 1378 at that time were “full of fantasy architecture,” Bloom and Atkinson write. 

“… Houses shaped like Alpine villas, houses dolled up like medieval castles, houses as forbidding as national park pavilions or as secluded as missile bases, hidden in thickets along the shores of Lake Lavon. Juxtaposed with these personal statements were the more familiar examples of prairie architecture: trailer homes, bait shops, windowless lodge halls, an outdoor revival shelter, barns, ghost-town cemeteries. The only connection between past and present was the ubiquitous white horse fences which proliferated along the highway, and around many of the brand-new houses, in inverse proportion to the number of horses needing corrals.”

Candy repeatedly refers to her home as “the best party house” when planning a baby shower for her friend Betty in Episode 3 of the miniseries. 

“Today what makes a good party house is an open plan,” Chambers said. “The kitchen and the family room and the dining are all open to each other. Everybody always wants to end up in the kitchen. Today, people want a more casual kind of entertaining. Even if you’ve got a caterer, people want to be in the kitchen and see what the caterer’s doing. It leads to a more flexible kind of living where the spaces are more open to each other. It’s not chopped up with a bunch of walls. You can move furniture, but you can’t move walls.” 

The Montgomerys’ home was open to the back, so there was a comfortable flow from the inside to the outside. Chambers couldn’t recall if the home had a screened porch, but that’s a common element in his repertoire. 

“People want it,” he said. “It’s romantic, really. Because of our climate, you can’t use much of the outside space most of the year. We have some relatively nice weather that can make it comfortable as long as you don’t have mosquitoes and flies.”

Over the span of his decades-long career, Chambers has specialized in ranches, new-historical, modern, and preservation homes. His homes are “a reflection of the personality of the owners, not a portrait of the architect,” according to his website. 

“If you do something long enough, you might get good at it,” Chambers said. 

It was unusual in the late 1970s for an architect to design homes — and Chambers said he focused on casual living, open spaces, flexibility, and not a lot of precious things, particularly for those who wanted to entertain. 

“People felt like they could be themselves,” he said. “What makes a good party house? I actually think more now about the topography of the land. It also has to do with the function of the house. I like the whole house on one level. It breaks up and limits the use of the space if you have step-downs. It’s actually inconvenient and slightly dangerous. Your guests are interested in talking to other people, maybe having a drink. You almost have to be there and make sure they don’t stumble. Nothing would be more embarrassing than having a guest injured. We used to change levels in houses a lot. 

We think more today about universal design where houses are comfortable and functional for people of all capacities, people who don’t have good eyesight. We’re starting to get away from doing houses that have precious material inside. If it’s all so precious that you can’t have guests with a glass of red wine, you don’t get to enjoy it. A house needs to be sort of fool-proofed.”

Functional Space

Speaking of functional space, Chambers said he gives a lot of thought to what the homeowner wants and how long they plan to stay there. 

“The question is, is this your forever house?” Chambers said. “A lot of people don’t want to talk about it, but if your house isn’t adaptable, at some point you’re going to have to go someplace special to live. We’re applying more universal design. It isn’t rocket science. You have to think about how people will use the space.” 

Chambers’ father was a disabled World War II veteran in a wheelchair who had a home designed by an architect for him in 1952. The halls were a little wider, and the light switches a little lower. 

“It was a really cool 1950s Midcentury Modern with big windows,” Chambers said. “In my father’s older age, I was talking to him and he said, ‘I just want to be carried out of here feet first.’ It’s like a light went on in my mind. Not everybody wants to do that, and the client’s the boss. It makes their house more valuable for the next person. Rarely are you excluding anyone from purchasing the house. It’s just common sense design.”

Some technology has changed since the year Candy Montgomery’s home was built. Larger and more windows are requested these days, Chambers said. 

“Houses built in Dallas in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the garage is always on the west side of the house because the sun was so intense,” he said. “You didn’t use a lot of windows. Now the technology of windows has changed so much. The actual building code is so much better than anything we’ve ever had. We’re doing a lot more homes that have views of the outside. You let light in, and it makes the house seem bigger.” 

People are now less interested in “a whole bunch of chopped up rooms and more footage than they need,” the architect added. 

“We see people more willing to have less space and have the ability to use one room for more than one function,” he said. We also have people now who want to have as little impact on the environment as possible.”

Ordinary People Under Duress

Chambers hasn’t watched Candy on Hulu, but he’s looked at still photographs and has seen some clips online. 

“I can’t really sit still for long periods of time, and my imagination is so vivid that I get worked up and can’t sleep,” he said. “This particular story is pretty gruesome.”

His wife Stephanie has watched the show, researched the court case, and even befriended author Jim Atkinson, who co-wrote Evidence of Love. 

Stephanie Chambers is also a writer, penning “family dysfunction stories” set in Louisiana, where she was raised. She has studied how Candy Montgomery could be acquitted for swinging an ax 41 times — characterized as “overkill” by many experts. Montgomery said in court that Betty Gore confronted her about Candy’s affair with Betty’s husband Allan, and Candy wrestled the ax away from her friend, assaulting her friend in self-defense. 

A jury of nine women and three men delivered the verdict — which Stephanie Chambers thinks might have played out differently today. 

“The psychiatrist that her attorney sent her to took her back to her childhood,” Stephanie Chambers said. “She recalls an incident where her mother was punitive and shushed her. I really do think that young children can be traumatized. The jury got that. They got the story that [Candy’s attorney] told. I’m not sure that would happen today.” 

Candy Montgomery reportedly now works under her maiden name Candace Wheeler as a mental health counselor in Georgia. 

What’s interesting about the Candy Montgomery story, according to Stephanie Chambers, is the psychology of a bored housewife who initiated an affair with her friend’s husband, then killed the friend, Betty Gore. 

“It’s like one little shoe dropped that just broke her,” Stephanie Chambers said. “She was walking on the edge. That, to me, is why the story is so fascinating. They’re not sensational people. They were ordinary people under duress. It’s the murder that makes all of this really sensational.”