Houston, Texas real estate development, home buying, landscape, and design

Swamplot loves comments! You make ’em, we rate ’em. Here are a few of the best from the past week:

• Man Living in Billboard: No Film at 9
  From Dirty3rd: “The place might be a bit drafty, but the views!”
• Grace Community Church and the Giant Crosses on I-45
  From Evan.mintz@gmail.com: “I wish a Catholic church were doing this, then we’d also get an awesome giant Jesus attached to the cross.”
• Finding Hidden Value in the Tremont Tower
  From Nancy: “Dismissing consumers who have proof of fraud has put our entire nation in danger of severe deep recession.”
• Spring’s Eternal Hope: Release from Houston ETJ
  From Eric: “. . . why do people here in the south love to have two names for everything! Why not just call it Klein (small in German), or Spring - what the “old town” was named after. Perhaps they can call it Small Spring, Texas. Or even better - Sprung, Texas.”
• Weekend Open House Tour: Glenbrook Valley
  From Robert: “It is not an area for everybody. But if you are going to live close to town in Houston, with our no zoning you better be used to the block by block adventure of good areas next to bad.”
• Parting Shots: Houston Starbucks Farewell Photo Album
  From Jessie M: “. . . are they good for anything else besides another coffee shop? If they couldn’t succeed there, will a mom and pop one?”

Hey, great comments this week, everybody! Here are a few favorites:

• Finding Hidden Value in the Tremont Tower
  From RWB: “Tremont Tower has plenty of value for me. Amusement value. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.”
• The New Regent Square: Details and Drawings
  From Elouise A. Jones: “Ugly brick without the proper pigments is very dull, depressing and flat. Unfortunately CVS has put it all over Texas. So have the corner banks. It’s not too late guys to reconsider your choices. Think Texas vernacular, please. Overhangs and trees, clean lines, and don’t forget the sky and good lighting, park benches, birds and a place to water your dog.”
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: Open Bar
  From Ryan: “They really want to be artsy. The statue of the horse on the breakfast table is an interesting way to go about it though, as you have to look under the horses belly and around its junk to talk to someone on the other side.”
• White Oak Tower: It Was All Just a Bad Drawing
  From Corey: “Leave the single-use, single-family-only building to the dying exurbs. A nice mix of land-use has been and will continue to be the strong suit of the Heights.”

No open-house tour from us this weekend . . . you can go it alone! Let us know if you see anything interesting. In the meantime, enjoy these tasty reader comments from the past week:

• Heaven on Earth Sells Again
  From mt: “8′-0″ ceilings are the best you will ever do on this building. Brave souls have looked at removing floors to increase ceiling height, (or even better, adding double height spaces to the ends of the building) but the cost is ridiculous.”
• Most Unknown: Ashford Point Palace of the Golden Orbs
  From Ben Berwick: “It’s as if each level in the temple serves as a higher order of sought righteousness, whereby a zenith of faith (or brainwashing) culminates on a small platform within the apogee of the dome”
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: House Pool
  From margo: “I’ve been known to hang a few bras from my treadmill but never a dead animal.”
• Tips Only: Downtown-to-Midtown Zero-Emission Shuttle
  From Jim: “I dunno … the resemblance is uncanny. Then again, TV’s William Frawley and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe also looked a lot alike, and I’m at least 65 percent sure they weren’t the same person.”
• Between Gotham and Renoir: Squeezing New Apartments into the Shepherd Curve Theme Park
  From Pat: “We’ve GOT to get some decent sidewalks, more than one-half person wide, that actually go somewhere and keep all of our residents, neighbors and dog-walkers out of the middle of what is already a major “cut-through” street. Where the Sidewalk Ends is not just a children’s book.”

Smart comments make Swamplot so much more fun! Here are some of the best from the past week:

• River Oaks Shopping Center Redo: Not Much of a Curve, but a Decent Wedge
  From marmer: What’s with all the Audi’s in the rendering? I drive an Audi, and I have better taste than that!
• The New Regent Square: Details and Drawings
  From Scott Bodenheimer: Houston is about the same latitude as Cairo and New Dehli, why can’t developers figure out that building types more suited to Toronto or Boston are really stupid for our climate?
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: Parquet
  From margo: I cant sleep .. I keep thinking of the ex-inlaws. They have my china cabinet! Damn you swamplot!
• The Secret Pattern Language of Shadow Oaks
  From Brad: Six visual patterns in one kitchen view… argh, my eyyyyeeessss.
• Tremont Tower: How Bad Could It Be, Really?
  From Heather: I moved out to regain my health, not because I wanted to lose my dream of home ownership. Since, I declared bankruptcy, and have watched my unit foreclose four times over four years. What I purchased for $229,000 went to auction for $49,000.

April up and left us a couple of days ago! But you can relive the excitement with our handy summary of Swamplot’s best posts from the last month. Did you miss any of these?

• Karl Rove at the Hotel Granduca
• State Representative Hubert Vo is a landlord! And his properties need a lot of repairs! He’s trying to sell a very large home he had built in Memorial, too.
• Online-map improvements from Google and Microsoft
  
• Five new dining establishments imported to West Ave
• The complete, exhaustive list of brand names festooning Downtown’s new park, Discovery Green
• Fun with sock monkeys at Gloria Becker’s Braeswood Animal House
• Laundry tips from Michael Pollack’s successors at the former Colonial House
• Finally, the Katy Prairie may get a natural feature: a 500-acre lake!
• Roger Clemens walks off the Grille at the Memorial City Mall
• New places to sweat and drink coffee at Rice
• How well are those Mosaic condos selling?
• Lars Bang’s forgettable house
• More foreclosure fun in Bear Creek Meadows
• Stalker posts photos of West U home on the internet!!!
• If there hadn’t been so many damn customers, the Cherry family would never have had to start demolishing houses

Swamplot’s January was just too much fun! Here’s a list of some favorite posts from the last month:

• Why The Woodlands’s street names sound so much alike
• How to make your lawn look much greener, the Photoshop way
• House flips and selling your townhouse for full price: Amazing real-estate stories from Joel Osteen
• Shopping for foreclosures in Bear Creek Meadows
• A sneak peek at Uptown’s new Ritz-Carlton Hotel
• Shiny watercolors of a big new development on Westheimer
• The Montagu Hotel collapses
• For the man who has everything, except maybe enough places to pee: Turnberry Tower’s 10-bathroom penthouse.
• Hurricane Katrina: The Sitcom
• More Astrodome redevelopment fun

Need to catch up on the Houston real-estate scene? Here are a few favorite Swamplot posts from the past month:

• Astrodome redevelopers: Very good at keeping secrets
• New fitness centers headed for The Woodlands and Midtown
• Green-happy communities spread all the way to Alvin
• You loved the book. Now, for only a few million dollars more, you can live in your very own John Staub country house!
• The Titan, Randall Davis’s latest condo project in the Galleria, is ready to take off
• Behind-the-scenes panic at a shelter-magazine photo shoot
• What it’s like to wait for the very last moment to check out from the Crowne Plaza Hotel at the Med Center
• Google Maps’ new features
• Greater Houston Builders’ Association: Buy now or else!