Upset that you missed that 1956 Lars Bang home in Braesvalley Swamplot featured last month? An option was taken out on it the same day we featured it.
But . . . the buyers of that house have put their own Tanglewilde Modern on the market. It was built the same year. Realtor Robert Searcy says it’ll have an open house, as Houston Mod’s “mod of the month,” next week.
After the jump: That turquoise tile, and that giant whisk!
Read more about: 77063, Homes for Sale, Modern Design, Open Houses, Tanglewilde
More imports for West Ave! A tidbit from the Chronicle:
Rome, a resort-style day spa and salon, plans to open at West Ave. in the summer of 2009. Conceived by Las Vegas-based spa operators, Resources & Development, the spa will encompass more than 10,000 square feet in the mixed-use development at Kirby and Westheimer.
West Ave rendering: Urban Partners
Read more about: 77098, New Construction, Retail, River Oaks, Theming, Upper Kirby
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
It’s one of those days that fills a Houstonian with pride, knowing what this city can accomplish: 11 homes and 6 businesses get their falling papers in today’s report! Addresses and dust aplenty, after the jump:
Read more about: Daily Demolition Report, Demolitions
Champions has a golf course, Cy-Fair schools, and FM 1960. What’s not to like . . . unless you’re a loser? Plus: tall trees, and neighborhood names like Champions Park, Champions Place, Champions Colony. This weekend’s tour of open houses includes a home in nearby Barrington Woods. It’s a winner too!
Location: 5907 Lookout Mountain Dr.
Details: 3-4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths; 2,335 sq. ft.
Price: $169,000
The Scoop: Late-seventies 2-story home on large cul-de-sac lot next to Champions Golf Course, in Champions Colony. Mostly tile floors; partial brick exterior. Beamed-ceiling Living Room has adjacent Bar. On market for 2 weeks.
Open House: Saturday, 1-4pm
More Champions . . . after the jump!
Read more about: 77069, Champions, Homes for Sale, Open Houses, Tours
“Café Artiste’s closing is fraught with mystery,” declares the River Oaks Examiner. A sign posted on the front door of the cafe at 1601 W. Main St. near the Menil reads “Café Artiste will be closed today — sorry for any inconvenience.” The sign has been posted for about a month.
People are pining for their favorite hangout and its owners’ whereabouts, but no one seems to have an answer. Messages scrawled onto the “closed” sign reveal the sudden nature of the cafe’s closing as well as people’s curiosity and, in some cases, their disappointment.
“Dude, what gives?” read one handwritten message, while the question “Forever?” had been scribbled right under the words “closed today” along with a sad face drawn next to it. . . .
A separate sign in the window, put there by Keller Williams Realty, said the property is up for lease, but calls to the company were not immediately returned.
After the jump: those signs!
Read more about: 77006, Lancaster Place, Leasing, Montrose, Openings and Closings, Restaurants, Retail
Score two houses each for the Heights and Settegast! See where the demos are . . . after the jump!
Read more about: Daily Demolition Report, Demolitions
Is there a limit to the kinds of neighborhoods that work in this game? Again, we had great guesses — and a winner — but some readers expressed frustration that the home we pictured might have been . . . anywhere.
That kinda comes with our territory, doesn’t it?
Here’s where y’all guessed the house was: Katy (2 votes), Pearland, Sugar Land, Missouri City, Spring, The Woodlands, Hyde Park, Camp Logan, Galleria “west of Chimney Rock”(!), the West End, Rice Military, First Colony, and Bellaire.
This week’s winner is HoustonAreaGuy, whose scattershot list of possible locations managed to include . . . Pearland! He also got a few details right (well . . . close enough):
I’m guessing it’s $400k or more (MAYBE $300k+, but I doubt it), easily over 3,000 s.f. and built in the last 4 years.
It’s his second win!
The actual subdivision of the home is The Lakes of Highland Glen. And the house is next to one of those lakes! Could anyone have guessed that subdivision? What do you say, Pearland readers?
The honorable mention this week goes to the eagle-eyed ERM — not for this comment:
I don’t know who to trust anymore. Are HAG and Joni trying to throw me off the scent? Can any of my fellow game players even trust me for that matter? I haven’t a clue as to where it is although Katy would be my guess.
. . . but for some sharp observations that helped pin down an evasive Master Bedroom:
I do believe this home is more of your basic burbs house but it does have some interesting appointments, slate tiles, granite counters, a butler’s pantry, your basic Evita balcony, Grecian type columns, etc. The small LR and DR say 90s although I can’t say I can give up on this century just yet. I do think, though, the master is on the first floor because if you look at the great room pic you see a door and two small pictures on a wall. The same two pictures show up in the master shot. So, that would suggest to me a single family home and not a townhouse since you don’t find too many first floor masters in those.
After the jump: Escape . . . to the Lakes!
Read more about: 77581, Home Decor, Interiors, Neighborhood Guessing Game, Pearland, The Lakes of Highland Glen
A reader sends photos of the new Memorial Hills Apartments under construction just north of Memorial Drive and west of Jackson Hill at 3200 Scotland St., on the site of the old . . . Memorial Hills Apartments! The new apartments are being developed by Gables Residential, and were designed by Ziegler Cooper Architects.
The apartments will be 8 stories tall and face Cleveland Park directly to the south. The parking garage will be on the north side of the site.
Below: more reader photos of the construction site, plus pretty words and pictures from Ziegler Cooper!
Read more about: 77007, Apartments, Houston Architects, New Construction: Residential, Real Estate Marketing
The L-shaped glass building at the center of this drawing is apparently a new 742,000-square-foot office tower planned by Hines for the northeast corner of Main and Capitol Downtown. But Hines hasn’t officially announced it yet. Houston Architecture Info Forum user ChannelTwoNews found the drawing earlier this week — only a few days after it had been posted on the website of an engineering firm working on the project. Fellow forum user lockmat later spotted it again . . . in a Hines presentation from February posted on the Texas A&M Real Estate Center website. By the end of the day yesterday, the engineering firm’s site had been scrubbed of all information about the building.
The tower is planned for a corner most recently occupied by a languishing sales trailer for the appropriately named Shamrock Tower, and a full-size McDonald’s before that. At the far end of the block is the vacant Texas Tower, which the new Hines building appears to wrap around.
The drawing shows a view looking northwest. The tower looks like 28 or so office stories perched atop a parking garage of . . . maybe 10 levels? After the jump, a closeup . . . and an even closer-up, so you can count the floors for yourself.
Read more about: 77002, Commercial Real Estate, Downtown, Highrises, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments
Round about the end of April, artist Gloria Becker lopped $53,000 off the asking price of her art-and-animal-filled home at 7309 Greenbriar (near Main) featured here a month ago. It’s now listed for $795K.
Have any of you seen this place?
Read more about: 77030, Art, Braeswood, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Price Reductions
Seven houses and a store fade into history, starting today! Map it all with our handy address list, hiding below the jump.
Read more about: Daily Demolition Report, Demolitions
Finding it hard to stay healthy in Houston? Do you find yourself wheezing and coughing . . . maybe because you’re uh, so out of shape? Blogger and chemical-plant worker Baytown Bert has come up with a solution: Industrial Trekking.
Industrial Trekking (IndyTrek) is a planned path consisting of climbing/walking obstacles or evolutions inside a refinery, chemical plant, factory, water treatment plant or even a large office building whereby a person can use stairs and ladders to promote fitness. An IndyTrek typically consists of 8-10 evolutions, usually requiring an hour to complete.
What a great way to get out, lose some weight, and get some fresh air, too! But how can anyone find the time?
I do it on the clock, as I can do it while strolling through the Chemical Plant I work in, but it can be done anywhere stairs are and in time-frame sections, throughout the day until all the evolutions are completed. It can be incorporated into your daily schedule (while on the clock or on break).
After the jump: A Baytown Bert photo shows an IndyTrekker in action!
Read more about: Air Pollution, Air Quality, Baytown, Fitness, Hazards, Pedestrians, Public Health
Christof Spieler returns from a Metro meeting with some new detail on the proposed Downtown routes for the Southeast and East End light-rail lines.
Spieler politely calls the latest plan a compromise. (”I doubt anyone is really happy with it,” he writes.) It has Metro siting the two lines — which will run on the same tracks for most of the crosstown trek — along the south side of Capitol (heading west) and the south side of Rusk (heading east). But unlike the trains that run down Main St. today, the new vehicles won’t have any right-of-way advantages over cars:
Like buses do now, the trains will share the curb lanes with cars, both turns and through traffic. . . . And the signals will be operated as they are on Capitol and Rusk today: trains will find the lights are sometimes green and sometimes red, and they will stop or go accordingly. There is no doubt that this will slow trains down and throw off schedules: for example, a line of stopped cars in the left lane on one block would force the train to hold in the previous block until the cars moved. It might also be a safety issue, but that’s not as clear.
The new lines will intersect with the Main St. line at a new Downtown Crossing station, which will likely require passengers to do plenty of street-crossing themselves:
there are 4 platforms — north- and southbound Main Street and east- and westbound East End/ Southeast — that can share one station name, making the system easy to understand. But the east-west platforms are a block away from Main Street, so some transfers will still involve a three block walk, with 3 pedestrian lights, from the center of one platform to the center of another.
After the jump: The end of the line!
Read more about: 77002, 77003, Downtown, East Downtown, Light-Rail, Metro, Proposed Developments, Streets, Transportation
A reader reports that the large and well-turreted home at the corner of Rivercrest and Westheimer — not far from State Rep. Hubert Vo’s curious mansion — is almost complete:
The home belongs to Mike James, formerly of the Houston Rockets, who was traded to the Timberwolves, only to be traded back in exchange for Juwan Howard. The irony is that the home is an exact replica of Juwan Howard’s home in Royal Oaks, just a few miles down the road (Mike and his wife were unaware of this as their “Manager” picked out the plan — they were not amused when they found this out after Mike and his manager parted ways). It was designed by Berrios Designs (exceptional building designer), as was the guest house and the full NBA regulation indoor basketball court at the back of the ~3.5 acre property. The property also features two putting greens complete with dual sand bunkers and a water hazard, a “sunken” pool between the guest and main house, and a gym and dance studio attached to the basketball court. Sadly, the project, which had so much potential, is being finished on the cheap because of cost over-runs caused by their former manager (trying to do things cheap generally ends up costing a lot more money). Regardless, it is turning out pretty decently, but could have been done so much better.
Mike James’s house under construction in Rivercrest is pictured at the top of this story; Juwan Howard’s home in Royal Oaks is the one below it.
We hope the house-plan trade works out better than the player trade: James was sent to the New Orleans Hornets in February. But he says he’ll be back!
After the jump, more glimpses of Mike James’s Howardian manor and sports compound, plus a look inside the Royal Oaks home it’s modeled after!
Read more about: 77042, Home Design, Houston Rockets, Interiors, Memorial, New Construction: Residential, Rivercrest, Royal-Oaks
We get some strange tips . . .
Look for a giant telephone to be delivered to the corner of Mason and Hyde Park, probably tomorrow.
Photo of David Adickes sculpture by Jonathan Percy
ExxonMobil marks an X on 17 buildings; no more auto sales for Fabela; another clearance on Washington. Addresses are listed after the jump!
Read more about: Daily Demolition Report, Demolitions
