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
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Museum District
- Houston Night Timelapse [Vimeo]
Video: Helsinki Films
“The key to buying a home in Houston is to figure out the next up-and-coming neighbourhood before it arrives,” declares Sheila McNulty, the Houston and energy-business correspondent for London’s Financial Times. Then you can knock down a home there — or fix it up! And that next hot new neighborhood would be . . . ?
Momentum is building in Westbury, a 20-minute drive from downtown. Here the tree-lined streets sell suburbia: they are quiet, close to good schools (both public and private), the Medical Center – a key employer in Houston – and the Galleria shopping mall that anchors Houston. Yet they are set back from the highways and urban sprawl that characterise any big US city.
Before Westbury hit the radar of local estate agents it was Meyerland, which followed Bellaire, which followed West University, as the circle of sought-after areas around downtown Houston steadily widened.
McNulty tours a few listings in the neighborhood with Keller Williams agent Peggie Kohnert — including this “needs TLC” special at 5842 Dryad Dr., just 6 houses in from Hillcroft:
Meanwhile in Ranch Estates, architect Karen Lantz is deconstructing this 1950 Rancher, piece by piece. Her goal: building a new home on the site — but only after finding new homes for most of the materials that are already there.
This type of disassembly is almost unheard of in Houston, where relatively low local landfill tipping fees make crushing and dumping a much cheaper alternative. After 5 local demo companies turned down the work, Lantz decided to contract it all herself. She says she expects to be able to recover and donate 90 percent of the materials in the Banks St. home. Working with an appraiser, she’s been sending materials to the city’s new Reuse Warehouse, Habitat for Humanity of Northwest Harris County, the Houston Habitat Restore, Century Asphalt Materials, and Lone Star Disposal.
“The house going up will absolutely be going for LEED, hopefully the highest rating,” Lantz tells Swamplot. It’s intended for her and her husband. Lantz, the founding president of Houston Mod, says it’s been difficult to convince clients to commit time, energy, or funds toward this sort of attention to materials. Since she’s now preaching the benefits of building deconstruction, she sees this project as an opportunity to practice it.
How much will it cost to strip the place this way?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE’S OUR TANIGUCHI? “What’s the hold up on this thing? It’s still a vacant lot. In the past few weeks, utility work on water/sewer has been done on the street, but not sure if it’s associated with the Asia Society construction. Groundbreaking was in Nov. 2008??? It’s already Sept. 2009 and no sign of construction.” [David Hollas, commenting on More Images of the Asia Society Headquarters Design]
Too hot for the squirrels, apparently.
This latest edition of Seen on the Street sticks close to the pavement. First up: Artist David Cook snaps this hot photo of . . . no, that’s not an egg frying on Kirby. Just a street button with . . . culinary aspirations?
What’s more to see around town when you keep your head down?
Hey, what happened to Monday? Swamplot spent most of it fighting off a few tech demons. But hey, here’s some news!
- Opened: The new and expanded Children’s Museum had its grand opening this weekend. Now twice its original size, the 90,000 sq. ft. museum features exhibits of children in various states of play. Also inside: an expanded branch of the Houston Public Library.
- Opening: Backe’s Bullpen, a fine drinking establishment in Dickinson, will open with the backing of Astros pitcher Brandon Backe, reports the Galveston Daily News‘s Laura Elder. Last October, Backe was arrested after a run-in with police at a Galveston bar.
- Closed: Mike McGuff notices that the Meyer Park Chili’s, once “the big teen hangout in southwest Houston,” shut down in February.
As the retail churns . . .
- Reopening Soon: The original Three Brothers Bakery next to Brays Bayou in Linkwood, closed since Hurricane Ike, has a permit in hand to rebuild. Cynthia Lescalleet reports in the River Oaks Examiner:
While the exterior of the building, 4036 South Braeswood Blvd., will retain the colors, 60s-vintage architectural elements and windows of its past, the inside has been reconfigured a bit to be “cozy,†with a more efficient layout.
Among the tweaking are the addition of a small room for wedding consultations and staff offices that look out over the interior so they can see and connect with the customers they’ve missed since Hurricane Ike damaged the business, [co-owner Janice] Jucker said.
“We’re almost like therapists over the bakery counter,†she said.
But: no plans to return to the River Oaks Shopping Center or Sugar Land.
Any future expansion would likely be into properties the bakery would own and build itself, she said: “We want control over our destiny.â€
Near the end of the 10- to 12-week building project, the building’s crooked sign will be re-set. If you see a straight sign, that’ll mean the bagels are almost ready.
So what’s new?
- Opening: There’s a big new Gallery Furniture taking over the old Pier One space in the Post Oak Shopping Center, across from the Galleria. Isiah Carey notes that there’s a (much smaller) “coming soon” sign out front. Also coming to the strip from Mattress Mack: a new and more upscale Kreiss Furniture store, where Pier One Kids used to be.
- Closed: Paulie’s restaurant reports receiving an undisclosed “offer we couldn’t refuse” to close its Holcombe at Kirby location, and dutifully complied on Monday. The original Paulie’s, on Westheimer at Driscoll, will remain open.
- Hoping to Spread: And Katharine Shilcutt reports that Otilia’s Mexican restaurant, the longtime Long Point standout, now “a bastion of the upper class yuppies who reside quietly in the nearby Memorial Villages and wash down their rice and beans with bottles of Merlot,” isn’t closing, despite rumors she had heard. But:
it turns out instead that Otilia’s is actively seeking to franchise their restaurant. A bright sign by the register blinked this advertisement every five seconds as we ate, while the waitresses sullenly confirmed this fact.
Then there’s that Main St. mulch . . .
Now available on the Asia Society website, amid pix of dragon dancers and Yao Ming shoveling dirt at the groundbreaking last spring: 2 more renderings of architect Yoshio Taniguchi’s design for the society’s new 38,000-sq.-ft. Texas Center in the Museum District.
The view from Southmore St. at Caroline, in 2010:
You may have seen a few old small, blurry model photos of the Asia Society headquarters Yoshio Taniguchi has been designing. But more detailed plans and views of the building planned for Caroline and Southmore in the Museum District haven’t exactly been in wide circulation. Maybe that’s because the architect is apparently not done tinkering:
Even though the noted Japanese architect has spent the past four years developing his design for the new Asia Society Texas Center headquarters, he recently scoured a table-top model of the building like it was the first time he had ever laid eyes on it.
“Each time I meet with my client, I feel like I’m under pressure,” he said, while examining the model of the $50 million Asia House in a nondescript office near the Galleria. “I have to make it better. I can’t make a mistake.”
On this recent morning, Taniguchi was concerned about the height of a stone fence that will jut out from one corner of the building. He wants it tall enough to define the space but not so imposing that it blocks out the surrounding neighborhood.
Since January, Taniguchi and his team have suggested 85 small changes to the building before construction officially gets under way after today’s groundbreaking ceremony.
After the jump: More building details! Plus . . . an old small, blurry model photo!
If you’ve been waiting for your chance to take the perfect dramatic nighttime photo of the Mecom Fountain, act now! The fountain at the middle of the five-way intersection of Main, Montrose, and Hermann Dr. is currently bubble-bath-free and lights up properly at night, thanks to a more-than-$100,000 renovation effort approved by City Council back in November and completed last week.
Back in the fall of 2006, someone had stolen the 264 bronze canisters and light bulbs that lit up the fountains. After staying in the dark for months, it got some help more recently . . . with floodlights from high atop Hotel ZaZa. Maybe now those floods can be turned into motion detectors!
Security measures to protect the Mecom Fountain lights will include additional surveillance by the Houston Police Department, the Hotel ZaZa and the Houston Parks and Recreation Department.
After the jump, photos of the fountain lit up the way it was and how it’s supposed to be, plus a view of the Hermann Park beauty taking a bath.
A permit was issued late last week. And so sitework begins for the 119-unit, 168,398-square-foot Belle Meade at River Oaks, on Westheimer between Ferndale and Sackett, developed by Grayco Partners:
The project is a 6-story epicore (light steel) construction on top of a 2-story podium garage. The boutique building will resemble the look of turn of the century, old New York hotels in brick with cast stone details, while spacious interiors will include such amenities as hardwood floors, 10-foot ceilings, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and individual wine chillers. Community amenities will include conditioned interior corridors, heated pool, fitness facility, business center and a resident recreation room.
Grayco is also developing Museum Place, at Fannin and Oakdale in Midtown—a “contemporary design” also on a two-story podium. And Braeswood Place, on North Braeswood just east of Stella Link: the more usual four-story stick apartments hugging a parking garage, but it’ll also include 21 townhouses. It’s meant to look like Rice. All three properties will be managed by Camden Property Trust.
- Grayco is digging right in on apartments [Houston Chronicle]
- Belle Meade at River Oaks [Grayco]
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.
