Articles by

John Nova Lomax

Apartments
11/19/14 3:00pm

With Industrial Complex Out Of the Way, More Sueba Apartments Are Posting Up on North Post Oak

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1300-n-post-oak-sueba-signcloseup Here is a close-up view of an upcoming apartment complex that eastbound Hwy. 290 travelers might see to the west as they enjoy that new short-cut to I-10. Sueba Development’s Residences at North Post Oak is going up at 1300 N. Post Oak Rd. a little north of Awty International School and a smidge south of the Hempstead Hwy. and the creaky remnants of Northwest Mall. This project is almost catty-corner to another Sueba development — the North Post Oak Lofts, at 1255 N. Post Oak, tucked away behind Prince’s Diner.

A two-story office building and warehouse complex was demolished in 2012 to make way for the project.

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Spring Branch East Redo
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Featured Posts
11/18/14 3:15pm

Here’s the Richmond Ave Bungalow Where Celebrity Chef Wendell Price Hopes To Reboot His Career

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Wendell Price has been a Food Network star and a partner with Olympic legend Carl Lewis at Houston’s Cafe Noir. He has catered Hollywood sets, cooked for the likes of Larry Flynt and O.J. Simpson, and served as executive chef in a restaurant co-owned by Denzel Washington. More recently, after his 2012 conviction on tax-related crimes, Price was an inmate in a Memphis jail. And now Price is back in his hometown, trying to get his career back on track via Rustic Oak, a restaurant slated to open at 511 Richmond Ave in January. Rustic Oak is taking root in a restored Montrose home near Spur 527; Price tells Culturemap’s Eric Sandler he “prayed for a unique spot instead of a strip center,” — and lo, there appeared this bungalow, right next door to the Brooklyn Athletic Club and directly across Richmond Ave. from the Post 510 apartments.

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Comebacks
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Attractions
11/18/14 11:45am

Decorate Your Eclectic Home Compound with These Leftovers from the Houston International Festival

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Auction Items from Houston International Festival

Auction Items from Houston International FestivalComplete the grounds of your Jamaica Beach canal-side palazzo with an actual-ish Venetian gondola! Bond with the family in the back yard while reconstructing a long-dismantled mockup of one of Ethiopia’s famed rock churches, the Great Wall of China, or the Sydney Opera House! (See photos above.) Restore a toppled statue of a Thanksgiving turkey in pilgrim attire to its former pride, and watch the neighbors turn green with envy when your work crew trundles it out to the front yard every November. Or add serious gravitas to your estate gateway through the addition of a giant clenched fist (the iFist?; pictured at right) or mini-obelisk!

All these items and more from the now-ended 27-year run of the Houston International Festival will hit the auction block at 9 am this Saturday in a warehouse at 3811 Clinton Dr.

Here are more pics of some of the choicest lots. Everything must go!

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Auction
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Bars and Clubs
11/18/14 10:45am

Sunset Heights Wine Bar The Boom Boom Room Will Close Forever This Friday

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The Boom Boom Room, 2518 Yale St., Sunset Heights, Houston

The Boom Boom Room, 2518 Yale St., Sunset Heights, HoustonStaff at the Boom Boom Room, Jackie Harris’s funky wine bar and music venue at 2518 Yale St., will pour their last glasses of Pinot noir and dish out their final paninis Friday night. Harris, an artist and doyenne of Houston’s art car movement, tells Swamplot that a “great new restaurant-bar” — one run by “real good Heights–Montrose restaurant people you all know and love” — will be setting up shop at the location in the not-too-distant future, but adds that she is not at liberty to disclose any further details.

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Going Boom
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Featured Posts
11/17/14 1:00pm

Hollywood Vietnamese Will Be Gone by Black Friday

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Hollywood Vietnamese and Chinese Cuisine will close down by the end of the month. Back in August plans came to light of a coming Farb Montrose full-block apartment complex at 2409 Montrose Blvd., a one-acre site once home to Cafe Noche but occupied since 2007 by Hollywood. A sign posted on the door last week informs the public of Hollywood’s demise by the end of the month; several staff members told Eater Houston’s Jakeisha Wilmore that Thanksgiving Eve will be its final day of service. How will Montrose late-night diners be able to cope without this vital pipeline to much-needed Lotus Delights, tofu spring rolls, and steaming bowls of ginger-laced Mama’s Hangover Chicken Soup? Turns out they won’t have to, at least not for long:

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Phogeddabouddit
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Featured Posts
11/17/14 10:30am

Say Salaam to the Shady Acres Home of Houston’s First Arabic Immersion School

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SAY SALAAM TO THE SHADY ACRES HOME OF HOUSTON’S FIRST ARABIC IMMERSION SCHOOL HISD-Arabic-use-thisHere’s where some of Houston’s future bilingual Arabic-English speakers will learn their two alphabets: HISD’s former Holden Elementary and the current home of more recently the Energy Institute High School at 812 W. 28th. St., just across N. Durham St. from a ramshackle flower shop just inside the North Loop. An energy school giving way to Arabic-language instruction? Synergy? Arabic trails only Spanish (and English) among languages HISD students speak at home, according to statistics from the district. Interested parents of rising pre-kindergartners and kindergartners were able to start applying last Friday for the magnet program slated to begin next Fall. Two each of pre-K and kindergarten classes will comprise the school’s first classes next year. If the district’s first Arabic immersion school is to operate the same way the existing Spanish- and Mandarin-English HISD schools do, students will be taught half in English and half in Modern Standard Arabic. [HISD] Photo: Swamplot Inbox

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Featured Posts
11/14/14 1:00pm

Tilman Fertitta Sees and Smells a Nationwide Real Estate Crash, Starting in Houston

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TILMAN FERTITTA SEES AND SMELLS A NATIONWIDE REAL ESTATE CRASH, STARTING IN HOUSTON fertitta-bloombergLandry’s CEO and purported Shiloh Club irregular Tilman Fertitta ladled out a deep bowl of bear stew from the teevee-front kitchen of his restaurant empire Wednesday, telling Bloomberg TV viewers that he smells a national real estate crash on the order of what happened in 1986, and volunteering that he “can see it in Houston right now.” He prefaced these comments to hosts Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle with a survey of the “crazy numbers” he is seeing in real estate valuations and transactions: “You are seeing it in New York probably more than anywhere else; but you are seeing it in Texas; you are seeing it in California. And . . . history always repeats itself as we always know, but I think it’s going to repeat a little sooner this time. You can just see it coming. There are so many cranes everywhere.” What’s the trigger? “If oil stays in the 70-something dollar range — where it is right now — you’re gonna see it in Houston first,” he said, adding that it might take an oil price of $50 a barrel to bring on a “total crash” like the one in the eighties that knocked Houston off its feet for a good decade. Fertitta continued his jeremiad with a few complaints about inflation, which he sees as “huge,” no matter what Ben Bernanke has to say to the contrary. [Bloomberg TV; previously on Swamplot]

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Apartments
11/13/14 2:45pm

One Man’s Thriving Gayborhood Is Another’s Montrose Value-Add Portfolio

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ONE MAN’S THRIVING GAYBORHOOD IS ANOTHER’S MONTROSE VALUE-ADD PORTFOLIO montrose-value-add-portfolioWhat is the Montrose Value-Add Portfolio? “48 apartment-units, 13 townhomes, 1 quadraplex and 5 rental homes with 8-units that include 2 garage apartments; for a total of 73 units, 67,960 rentable square feet, with a land tract of 2.09 acres.” Writes a reader who came across the listing: “This is where I live. I love the phrase ‘The Montrose Value Add Portfolio,’ it practically screams ‘knock it down!’ So much for my old gayborhood!” The properties are all within walking distance of the MVAP’s listed address: 409 Stratford St., a stone’s throw from the always-hopping cluster of bars and clubs on Pacific St. to the north and but a little farther from Numbers and Indika to the south. No asking price is indicated in the marketing materials. [Loopnet; brochure (PDF)] Photo: Transwestern.

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Development Regulations
11/13/14 12:30pm

Upper Kirby’s Latest Streetside Oak Massacre: The Story Behind the Takedown of 26 Trees

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XO Communications Building, 2401 Portsmouth St., Upper Kirby, Houston

XO Communications Building, 2401 Portsmouth St., Upper Kirby, HoustonA grand total of 26 trees (some of them shown in the top photo of the above before-and-after sequence) surrounding 4 sides of the XO Communications building at 2401 Portsmouth St. just west of Kirby Dr. were felled over the weekend. That’s more than 4 times the number of trees turned to mulch in the overnight removal of street trees surrounding the Kirby Dr. Wendy’s just a few weeks earlier. Does the axing of the XO trees along Portsmouth, Park, Revere, and Norfolk streets in Upper Kirby count as another illegal tree massacre?

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Goodbye Oaks, Hello Japanese Blueberries?
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College Station
11/12/14 1:00pm

Here Comes College Station’s Answer to CityCentre, Right Across the Street from Texas A&M

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Amid much local hullabaloo  in Aggieland today, Houston’s Midway Cos. unveiled its plans for a new campus-adjacent mixed-use complex. By fall 2016, Midway hopes that Century Square will feature an outdoor concert space, a midrise office building and conference center, an apartment building, shopping and dining outlets, and, at least judging from the site plan below, ample space for a pad site or six along busy University Dr.  Not one but 2 new boutique hotels are also slated to go up at the corner of College Ave. and University Dr. across the street from Texas A&M’s polo fields and Emerging Technologies Building and the local IHOP.

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neo-urbanizing aggieland
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Featured Posts
11/11/14 2:30pm

Trailside Sign Gone from the Proposed Heights Hike-and-Bike Development

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Over the weekend  Surge Homes removed the sign promising “future development” along the Heights Hike-and-Bike Trail. Workers took the recently-installed bike-scaled billboard Saturday morning. It appears that the sign had been squatting on a public right-of-way.

Around the same time, the newly-created Surge Homes released lots of new information for the trailside colony. Surge is run by the same principals involved with Canada’s Group LSR who closed on the property in 2004. Sporadic attempts to develop the site have so far borne no fruit.

Aerial views show that the project would take quite a bite out of the pocket forest currently on the site; access would come via a lengthened E. 5th St., not a trail-crossing extension of Frasier St., as in an earlier proposal.

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Surge Homes Pullback
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Demolitions
11/11/14 11:30am

100 David Weekley Homes To Spring Up in the Branch Atop Former Flea Market Site

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Here lie the remains of the New Flea Market, the most recent occupant of a strip mall site at 8315 Long Point Rd. that once was home to the  Spring Branch K-Mart. Workers are scraping an 8-acre parcel of the larger site at the corner of Hillendahl Blvd. to make way for the Village at Spring Branch, a 100-home David Weekley development offering three-story townhouses and garden and patio homes ringing a pool and cabana. Blue-light specials will be offered around $400k; premium buys will go on sale at $700k. Retail — and the tiny, historic Hillendahl Cemetery (captured below in an old photo) — will remain along the Long Point frontage.

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What’s New Is Old
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Featured Posts
11/07/14 10:00am

A New Sign of Future Development Appears on Heights Hike-and-Bike Trail Site

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Here’s the sign that a reader says went up earlier this week along the south side of the Heights hike-and-bike trail just south of the Freeland Historic District, at the ends of Frasier St. and E. 5th 1/2 St. Does the promise of “future development” mean that another developer is taking a turn trying to develop the 1.4-acre parcel of land where a proposed 80-plus-unit condo project known variously as Emes Place or Viewpoint at the Heights stirred up a fair amount of neighborhood opposition when it was last in the news a couple of years ago?

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Surge!
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