Touring a local home for an upcoming TV news story on green building in Houston, abc13 reporter Miya Shay comes across some recycled leftovers from the last election:
The home isn’t finished yet. So, while the family waits for the stairs to be stained, carpeted, or whatever, they have cut up old campaign signs to use as temporary flooring on the stairs! As the homeowner told me, “They are very durable, and comfortable to walk on.”
This landscape plan from the Boymelgreen website is our first glimpse of the two condo towers the company is planning for 5.5 acres on the southwest corner of the intersection of San Felipe and a short segment of Woodway — just west of Voss, on the Right Bank of Buffalo Bayou. And this morning the Houston Business Journal has more to report:
New York City-based Boymelgreen Developers is developing the project for landowner Azorim, a publicly traded company in Israel of which Boymelgreen owns 64 percent. . . . The unnamed project will consist of two buildings with 28 residential floors each and an 18,000-square-foot fitness center and spa. The project will have a total of 237 condos starting at $1 million each. Units will be an average size of 2,500 square feet.
The architect is Ziegler Cooper. Boymelgreen’s website refers to the project as the San Felipe Condominiums. (And it reports a building that’s 14 condos smaller.)
Jennifer Dawson’s report in the HBJ says that sales won’t start until the fall, after a sales center — which will later “be converted into a spa, restaurant or office building” — is built on the site of the formerDolce & Freddo next door.
Below the fold: That 1960s office-and-shopping center on the site won’t go quietly!
It’s a little old bungalow on a small lot . . . but it’s clean and green inside! The sellers of this 2-bedroom, 1 1/2-bath, 960-sq.-ft. home say they’re trying to get this Sixth Ward home LEED certified:
The 1920 facade has been preserved, but when you open the door, its all about 21st century. The hm has been renovated using non toxic materials, low VOC paint & sustainable design materials.
A neighbor who watched the work reports the house was sold to the current owners as a teardown:
It was a nasty, dirty, filthy, funky house with a garage in the front yard. They tore the garage off the front, moved the house around on the lot a tad, and have done an outstanding renovation.
Plus: the neighbors are very very quiet, says our correspondent. The house is next to Glenwood Cemetery.
Blogger and head Michael Pollack cheerleader Lou Minatti posts this street-level video report on the state of the real-estate market in Katy and West Houston, and includes the following odd claim:
That house built out of shipping containers on Cordell St. in Brookesmith looks like it’ll be ready for delivery soon. Yes, this was a spec house — and yes, there already is a buyer.
Last year, Numen Development owners Katie Nichols and John Walker used shipping containers to construct the Apama Mackey Gallery on 11th St. in the Heights — because the gallery owner wanted a structure she can move when the property owner kicks her off the land. But the house Numen is building on Cordell looks like it’s going to be around for a while. It comes with its own, uh . . . doublewide lot, and it’s right across the street from a meat-processing plant.
After the jump: drawings, models, and an earlier construction photo of this neat little three-bedroom, three-bath,1,851-square-foot package!
Will something like this be coming soon to a home near you? Up now: a green roof atop a renovated building that will serve as a fabrication shop for architecture and industrial design students at the University of Houston. Unlike most of Houston’s (few) commercial and institutional buildings with a plantedroof, this one has a slope to it.
This, reports Houston Architecture Info Forum member Porchman, is a drawing of the $30 million, 195-unit, five-story apartment complex about to go up on the former site of the Kaplan’s Ben Hur department store on Yale, which was demolished back in June. Except it’ll be different: That giant yellow steel Y bracket you see won’t be there. And the retail indicated on the building’s ground floor is apparently just for show.
The Retreat at the Heights, the newest “Retreat” development from Allied Realty Services, will reportedly feature an equal mix of one- and two-bedroom units, a pool and fitness room, residents willing to shell out an average of $1500 a month, and a two-level parking garage. One of those levels will be below grade (detention-pond parking, anyone?) and each will be accessed from a separate street.
Notable: Top floors are shown with metal siding, a nod to the many simple metal warehouses that littered the Heights before they were replaced with historic homes.
Porchman adds:
Another developer is going to put 4 townhomes on the lot west of Long John Silvers, which is currently being currently being used as the construction lot. They’re targeting the fried fish lovers market . . .
From the design mags to demolition . . . in less than ten years! Remember the modern house with the curious metal proboscis off Bissonnet, near the Museum of Fine Arts? It won a couple of design awards a few years back from the American Institute of Architects, but if the judges had realized it was temporary housing it probably would have swept that category.
A week ago 1 Waverly Ct. appeared quietly in our demolition report, but it became a smashing success just a few days later. It was built in 1999.
After the jump, what lurked behind the proboscis: photos of this record-shattering short-timer from the architects’ website.
Here’s a building method that seems well-suited for Houston: It’s fast, it’s temporary, and it involves both shipping containers and fine art. Remember the demolition permit for the site on 11th Street in the Heights we mentioned a few days back? By Friday, it’ll have a completed building on it, according to ’stina, who wrote in her LiveJournal Wednesday:
Today, the shipping containers will be delivered and installed to the new site of the 1400 square foot gallery, and you can see for yourself what this form of construction looks like. They started this morning with merely a few spread footings and grade beams and they’ll finish this evening with all the containers set and a good portion (if not all) of the roof in place.
It’s the new Apama Mackey Gallery, pieced together out of three shipping containers by Numen Development. The gallery will occupy the site for a few years, until the landowner is ready for a more permanent development in that location. Then Mackey will be able to move the gallery to a new lot she hopes to find in the meantime.
Some of the project’s green features, according to ’stina’s report:
From conception of the idea in March, it has been three short months to a nearly final product!
The Mackey Gallery is built to be moved and reassembled with less than 5% waste.
Custom panelized roof and floor system utilizing Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs are extremely energy efficient and virtually eliminate the need for traditional framing while dramatically reducing waste and build time.)
Clerestory panels and office windows made from Polygal. (An insulated polycarbonate that is more energy efficient than glass, yet less expensive and more secure.)
The job site for the Gallery will need NO dumpsters because the building process has so little waste.
Even the parking lot will be made of Permeable Paving squares which are green, and reusable.
One of the more frustrating obstacles to paving more of this city is Houston’s little flooding problem. If we didn’t have so much damn water to get rid of, there’d be a whole lot more room here for basketball, high heels, rollerblades, and parking.
Tests now being conducted in a Rice University parking lot may change that soon. A segment of sidewalk is being built with pervious concrete, a not-so-new building material with the texture of Rice Krispies:
the product allows water to drain through rather than run off the surface. Environmental benefits include allowing water to percolate back into the soil or be detained rather than being channeled directly into storm drains; a surface that isn’t slippery when wet; and a brighter surface that helps reflect heat.
But there’s more environmental benefit here than just allowing parking lots to drain faster. Using more pervious concrete may allow us to get rid of those annoying green spaces developers are now putting in within larger developments:
The biggest cost benefit to using pervious concrete, said Max Amery, senior facilities engineer and project manager, is that it reduces or eliminates the need for water retention areas to contain run-off, which can be quite expensive in space-limited areas like a city or campus.
Next step: Revising city building codes so everyone can use it!
Swamplot covers real estate, home design and renovation, architecture, and the landscape of Houston, Texas. Swamplot did not flood during Allison. Honest! Read more
