ISABELLA COURT’S ART PALACE MAKEOVER 
As of tonight’s grand opening opening, the ground-floor retail space of the Isabella Court Apartments will now be home to four functioning spaces for contemporary art: Inman Gallery, the new Inman Annex space, CTRL Gallery, and the just-moved-here-from-Austin Art Palace, run by the conveniently named Art Palacios. Art Palace has taken over the long-vacant space at 3913 Main St. last occupied by Finesilver Gallery. [Arts in Houston; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Art Palace
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Midtown
CHIPPING AWAY AT THE MUSEUM DISTRICT 
Those little tree topper signs have been up throughout the larger neighborhood for a while now, but the new Boulevard Oaks Historic District was only approved by City Council this week. The designation means you’ll now have to wait 90 days before you can demolish that rambling South Blvd. mansion you just picked up. At the same meeting, council members approved an 8-acre extension to the Midtown TIRZ that takes a bite out of the Museum District. The area includes the new locations of Asia House, the Buffalo Soldiers Museum, and the Museum of African-American Culture. [Houston Chronicle, via Slampo’s Place] Photo: WhisperToMe
- Noticing a Billboard [Vimeo]
- here are some images from the first week of installation [Inbound:Houston]
- Six billboards in place [Houston Chronicle]
ART PALACE GETS OFF THE POT Austin gallery owner Arturo Palacios, on why he’s moving his gallery, Art Palace, to the Midtown space formerly occupied by the Finesilver Gallery at 3913 S. Main St. this coming January: “I went to a fundraiser at the Menil Collection and a friend asked me how many people I thought I would know there. And I thought maybe five or six. The event was for the Menil ‘Contemporaries,’ a group that’s under the age of forty who support the Menil on an annual basis. There were four hundred people there! And the whole time, people kept coming up and asking when I was moving the gallery to Houston. Over and over and over again. We were taken aback. I was talking to a collector and he said, ‘looks like it’s time for you to shit or get off the pot.’ And that’s when I decided it was time. That was a month and a half ago. I knew the space [in the Isabella Courts building] had been empty for some time.” [Glasstire; photo]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: STAYING SAFE IN MIDTOWN, BACK IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS “Last I lived inside the loop was 17 years ago in Midtown…before it was chic. I lived behind an 8 foot chainlink fence topped with razor wire. My friends called it “the compound†but I never ever had a problem.” [Tex, commenting on The Front Porch Gang]
Ah, the single life! This one-bedroom, 625-sq.-ft. take at 2016 Main appears to have every necessity in place, down to that single toothbrush artfully placed next to stainless-steel counter bowl. Ax the giveaway Downtown and Midtown views, and wouldn’t this have made an excellent candidate for Swamplot’s weekly Neighborhood Guessing Game?
Asking $129,750 — since mid-ish July. Maintenance fee is $510 a month.
Blogging at NeoHouston, Andrew Burleson declares that the connections a building has to the world around it — what he calls its interface — have a big effect on value:
A house may be great, but if it doesn’t have a nice front yard it won’t be worth as much as the house next door that does. Likewise, homes in an area with lots of big trees tend to be valued higher than places without them. The interface is better.
Well, sure. Big trees is nice! But Burleson also claims that the value effects of interface success — and suckage — can travel:
Interfaces are highly radiant, they have a significant impact on the values of surrounding properties, and this value has a tendency to spread. If a street is truly beautiful, every adjacent property is likely to be highly valued. If a street is very ugly, every adjacent property is likely to be somewhat undervalued, even if some individual structures on that street are highly valued.
So why are we jumping over fences in Midtown? It’s all part of Burleson’s photo tour of the “interfaces” of 3 apartment complexes within a few blocks of each other: The Post Midtown Square (the good), the Camden Midtown Apartments (the bad), and 2222 Smith Street (the so-so).
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE MIDTOWN CVS DOMINO EFFECT “. . . CVS didn’t follow Post Midtown’s urban scale approach even though its lot was right across the street and the collective wisdom at the time was that Gray and Bagby would be built out with mid-rise, mixed-use developments right up to Main and the new rail line. It seemed so obvious and for those who longed for true urban living in this town, it was a dream coming true. CVS didn’t play ball simply because they didn’t have to. No code required them to build in any way, shape, or form that might have benefited the collective vision of Midtown. So be it, that’s Houston. However, after CVS bucked the urban trend, so did most every developer after them. So instead of all or most of Midtown being walkable, populated with street life like just the 3 blocks developed by Post ultimately became; Midtown’s blocks are populated with suburban style apartments complexes with no street life whatsoever, just block after block of gates and fences. If Houston had had the guts to enact urban design strategies then, Midtown would be the success that similar areas have become in Dallas, Atlanta and other cities. Houston punked out and we are all the losers for decades to come. Ironically the very same developers who fought urban guidelines in Midtown were building successful urban properties in all those other cities at the same time. . . .” [John, commenting on Cul de Sac City: Houston’s Ban on New Street Grids]
A reader writes:
A new development sign went up recently in Midtown. It’s a variance notice regarding a lot bounded by Chenevert, Anita, and Hamilton streets adjacent to Baldwin Park. The developers name on the variance notice (#53 on the July 9th variance meeting) published at Houston P&D is “Treemont Homes”. Interestingly, no such builder seems to exist either in the business directory or with an online presence. Tremont Homes, however, does exist and, I believe, was involved in the Tremont Tower fiasco a few years back in Montrose. I am currently trying to determine who “Treemont Homes” is and who the principals are and if this could be another mortgage fraud/shoddy building/screw the people type of project.
Any help you could offer is appreciated.
The variance request is for a 5-ft. setback along Hamilton St., the 59 feeder road — which typically requires 25 ft. Hamilton Court would consist of 20 single-family lots on an L-shaped 0.78-acre property. The item was deferred until the July 23rd planning commission meeting, on the request of the planning staff.
- Previously in Swamplot: Tremont Tower coverage, The Lemon Lady Goes to Washington
Photo of sign at Chenevert and Anita: Swamplot inbox
There’s a new $2 million bed and breakfast going up in Midtown? The Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff reports that the project’s developers were “able to persuade a lender” to finance construction of their 3-story “New Orleans-style” B&B, which has already broken ground at 2800 Brazos, at the corner of Drew St.:
“It was a little challenging early on in the process,†[developer Genora] Boykins said. “The thing that made the difference is we really didn’t give up on the vision we have.†. . .
That sort of positive thinking is apparently nothing new for Boykins, an attorney for Reliant Energy who serves on the Downtown Management District board of directors — along with her La Maison partner, Centerpoint Energy community relations VP Sharon Owens.
Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor of 14,000-member Windsor Village United Methodist Church, provides more insight into Boykins’s real-estate techniques in Chapter 3 of his now-decade-old bestseller, The Gospel of Good Success: A Road Map to Spiritual, Emotional and Financial Wholeness:
At last: That year-old, right-up-to-the-street, parking-garage-behind The Mix @ Midtown building at 3201 Louisiana gets a ground-floor tenant! Going into the buildout in the space at the southeast corner of Elgin, below 24 Hour Fitness: a new Japanese restaurant.
Want a peek inside?
Vernon Caldera, proprietor of video-a-day website Keep Houston Rich, writes in to show off his friend Adam Gibson’s pad at Isabella Court in Midtown — and to round up votes for it in a “smallest, coolest home” contest hosted by design blog Apartment Therapy.
Gibson’s apartment, pictured above, has already advanced to the second round of competition in the “little” category (at 710 sq. ft., the apartment apparently doesn’t qualify as tiny, teeny-tiny, “international,” or small — each of which has its own separate contest). Today, it’s pitted against a “compact but . . . spacious and cozy” (and slightly smaller) apartment in Brooklyn.
What’s so special about this little home? Gibson tells the judges:
I love [the] wrought-iron window between the bedroom and the living room. I love the original sink in the kitchen from when the building was built in 1929. I love the beautiful non-working fireplace. But I would have to say my favorite element is the beautiful wrought iron staircase in the living room with the butterflies sculpted to match the lines of the stairs.
Caldera writes:
There is a short registration, if you are not already a member, but other than that voting is fairly easy. I believe Adam’s apartment is the only one selected from Houston. . . . The winner after each 24-hour elimination round moves onto the next round with the division elimination on Wednesday. Night-owls like myself start voting as soon as the contest opens at 2AM our time and continue to vote until the last hour.
You can find more pics of Gibson’s definitively little apartment — and vote for the winner in the current round — on the Apartment Therapy website.
- Small Cool 2009: Adam’s Edited Bare Essentials [Apartment Therapy]
- Isabella Court (photo gallery) [Houston Chronicle]
- Keep Houston Rich
- Life at Isabella Court: Point, Counterpoint [Swamplot]
Photos: dabfoto creative/David A. Brown
HOUSTON VALET Valet parking makes sense in Downtown and Midtown where spaces are scarce, declares Katharine Shilcutt. But for restaurants with plenty of parking nearby, what’s the point? “Crave Sushi is an excellent case in point of a restaurant whose diners simply got fed up with forced valet parking and threatened to stop patronizing them. The owners had originally instituted valet as a means of thwarting Midtown clubgoers who were parking in their lot and then ambling off to Pub Fiction, leaving their Miata in Crave’s lot until 2 a.m. As honorable as their intentions were, however, guests at Crave didn’t appreciate having to pay extra for their meal (especially when Crave was still allowing the clubgoers to park in their lot, but for an additional $15). This week, however, the owners finally rescinded their forced valet following vociferous complaints. Instead, they’ve hired a parking lot manager who ensures that only Crave customers park in the lot. Not ones to eschew extra income, however, they still allow other Midtown patrons to park there for $10.” [Eating Our Words]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: UPPER MIDTOWN “Talking of rimshotting onto the popularity of neighboring areas did anyone else notice that the Alexan Height[s] apartments became the Midtown Heights after changing hands despite the fact that they are at I-10 and Oxford. Exactly how big is Midtown these days?” [Jimbo, commenting on Watch for Cottage Cheese Dropping from Heights]