The Dwell blog and a Dubai-based “ezine” named De51gn both feature long-awaited interior photos of Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen‘s Wabi Sabi House on Bartlett St. near Greenbriar. Doesn’t look like the house has been staged too heavily, but . . . isn’t that the point of “imperfect beauty”?
Have a look around:
Having survived the ordeal of a home photo shoot for a local shelter magazine, Houston blogger and interior designer Joni Webb graduates to the big leagues. A “national magazine” liked what they saw of Webb’s West U home in Houston House & Home, and asked her if they could photograph her Family Room and Guest Room for two separate upcoming issues. Webb’s response?
After last year’s physically tiring and mentally exhausting photo shoot, I swore I would never do it again. But, somehow, here I was, less than a year later, again welcoming strange photographers into my house. Of course, nothing is ever easy.
Exactly one week before the big photoshoot, I received news from the local scout. She had a list of things the editor wanted changed for the shoot. Oh? Really? The editor and art director wanted a new window seat cushion (made out of the Bennison fabric, no less!) The zebra rug HAD to go – apparently their readers object to zebra rugs, the suzani on the chair also had to go (suzanis are too bright) and the neon orange pillows must also go to be replaced by other pillows (like what other pillows, I wondered?) Now understand, I had known this shoot was going to happen for about three months – three months that I could have gotten all these changes done with no problem. Instead, the editor gave me one week to get the new cushions and pillows made.
More details of Webb’s quick-change artistry, after the jump!
“Fish tank in face bowl” is the actual caption to this photo in the listing for 3838 Southmore, in University Woods, by Riverside Terrace.
Face bowl?
The house has 3 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths. Clearly, though, this one ought to count for more than just a half. The home is listed at $224,999 — bathroom aquarium included.
After the jump: How to get your own very private fish tank . . . without having to buy the whole house!
CONTINUE READING THIS STORY
Your last chance to see the Kitchen . . . and more of this remarkable home at 26 Laurenhurst Ct. in Shadow Oaks. HAR says a sale is pending, but it’s continuing to show.
After the jump: on with that show!
What can you do with those long, old-growth pine floorboards you’ve managed to rescue from . . . say, an old farmhouse being torn down in Pecan Park? And what if you’ve got an extra shower door laying around?
Answer after the jump:
The Wabi Sabi House is Carol Isaak Barden’s latest High Concept development. Tucked into a normal-sized lot between Greenbriar and Kirby just south of 59, the 3,700-sq.-ft. cedar-faced home is the first Texas residence designed by Seattle architects Olson Sundberg Kundig and Allen. It’s scheduled to be complete this month.
What’s the big idea? Explains Barden,
Generally, wabi means humble, and sabi refers to the imperfection that comes with time. Freely translated, it means something like “lived in.”
Alternate translation: Move over, feng shui. Wabi-sabi is the ancient Japanese idea behind the latest category of home-design looks and books.
After the jump: A view from the Wabi Sabi House’s huge roof deck. Plus: Barden’s checkered and gilded past!
Is there a limit to the kinds of neighborhoods that work in this game? Again, we had great guesses — and a winner — but some readers expressed frustration that the home we pictured might have been . . . anywhere.
That kinda comes with our territory, doesn’t it?
Here’s where y’all guessed the house was: Katy (2 votes), Pearland, Sugar Land, Missouri City, Spring, The Woodlands, Hyde Park, Camp Logan, Galleria “west of Chimney Rock”(!), the West End, Rice Military, First Colony, and Bellaire.
This week’s winner is HoustonAreaGuy, whose scattershot list of possible locations managed to include . . . Pearland! He also got a few details right (well . . . close enough):
I’m guessing it’s $400k or more (MAYBE $300k+, but I doubt it), easily over 3,000 s.f. and built in the last 4 years.
It’s his second win!
The actual subdivision of the home is The Lakes of Highland Glen. And the house is next to one of those lakes! Could anyone have guessed that subdivision? What do you say, Pearland readers?
The honorable mention this week goes to the eagle-eyed ERM — not for this comment:
I don’t know who to trust anymore. Are HAG and Joni trying to throw me off the scent? Can any of my fellow game players even trust me for that matter? I haven’t a clue as to where it is although Katy would be my guess.
. . . but for some sharp observations that helped pin down an evasive Master Bedroom:
I do believe this home is more of your basic burbs house but it does have some interesting appointments, slate tiles, granite counters, a butler’s pantry, your basic Evita balcony, Grecian type columns, etc. The small LR and DR say 90s although I can’t say I can give up on this century just yet. I do think, though, the master is on the first floor because if you look at the great room pic you see a door and two small pictures on a wall. The same two pictures show up in the master shot. So, that would suggest to me a single family home and not a townhouse since you don’t find too many first floor masters in those.
After the jump: Escape . . . to the Lakes!
Round about the end of April, artist Gloria Becker lopped $53,000 off the asking price of her art-and-animal-filled home at 7309 Greenbriar (near Main) featured here a month ago. It’s now listed for $795K.
Have any of you seen this place?
A reader reports that artist Gloria Becker is selling her home at 7309 Greenbriar, just south of the Med Center. That’s the big brick house with the the 8-foot-tall topiary bears out front. Plus . . .
She has a wildcat in her dining room, deer on her sofa, fish in her bathroom, squirrels in her entryway, a caribou at the top of her stairwell and a prairie dog in her den.
From the foyer, where a stuffed bear in a sundress and rhinestone-studded sunglasses stands at the foot of the stairs covered in imitation tiger fur, to the farthest corner of the second-floor spare room, which is adorned with a giant cloth cow in a sun hat, a wreath of monkeys and a Virgin Mary hubcap, the house is a cacophony of contented clutter.
“Empty spaces make me nervous,” [Becker] Rasmussen says.
Becker, who makes a living selling her incredibly detailed Santa Claus sculptures and handcrafted sock monkeys, calls herself an “an upscale, sophisticated recycler.”
Her Braeswood home has 3 or 4 bedrooms, 3 full and 2 half baths, and sits on a 12,563-sq.-ft. lot near the corner of S. Main. Asking price: $848,000.
After the jump: Some interior pics from the listing, plus: Where did all the sock monkeys go?
Design blogger Joni Webb identifies Houston’s latest “hot pocket of stores selling reasonably priced, yet very chic antiques.”
Where is it? At the Fiesta Mart!
Or more accurately, in and around the shopping strip that includes the Fiesta — on the southeast corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama. Webb’s Cote de Texas blog runs through items available at Antiques and Interiors on Dunlavy, the Country Gentleman, plus the latest shop to open: Boxwood Interiors, a second store by the same people who run Foxglove Interiors on Alabama, a few blocks to the east. Boxwood
. . . immediately called to me when, through the window, I glimpsed freshly laid seagrass matting stretching from the front door to the back. It’s amazing what spending a few extra dollars on seagrass will do to an old and ugly mall space.
After the jump: seagrass magic! Plus a few of Webb’s Fiesta-area finds.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn75tA2g-kI 400 330]
About one minute and 28 seconds into this video advertising a home that’s been on the market since late September of last year, we get a little . . . surprise.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdPOOkjNzzw 400 330]
What the house sounds like.
Houston interior designer Joni Webb takes time out from her usual focus on French design to tell the story of a home in Avalon Place that was done up first in an English country style (top photo), and then — some years later — completely redone by the same owners to something more . . . 18th century Swedish (second from top).
The English incarnation, which was captured in a Country Living magazine feature in the 1990s, had taken years to perfect, Webb reports:
. . . the finished project was perfect: a cozy English, country-style home, filled with authentic antiques, Italian oil paintings, wall to wall seagrass, faux painted yellow and red walls, toile wallpapers, Bennison fabrics and Kenneth Turner candles. It was an open, fun house – the site of many parties where people gathered around a roaring fire and lounged in the deep George Smith sofa, all the while remarking on how warm and inviting the home was.
So, it was a great surprise to many, including [Houston interior designer Carol] Glasser herself, when the wife declared she had changed. She no longer loved her home’s decor, she wanted a new look – a Swedish look – and not just a Swedish antique here and there, but a total, complete Swedish home. And so, for the second time, everything in the house was either sold or was stored and they started the process of decorating their home, completely from scratch, again.
Who best to complete this European migration? Carol Glasser, the same designer who had created the house’s first look. (This time, she enlisted help from Swedish Style expert Katrin Cargill.) After the jump, more before-and-after photos, plus nitty-gritty details of international style-travel.
Here’s a great idea: Let’s deck out a 1980s two-bedroom, two-story Tanglewilde condo. It’ll look really sophisticated and sell fast, too! First, add the sleek blond leather furniture. Then build a dramatically lit aquarium into the dining area, so you can see the back of it . . . from the kitchen! That’s gotta help this baby sell for big bucks.
Except sixteen months later, it’s still on the market. The asking price has dropped from $129,900 to $109,900, but it’s been sitting at that last number for more than 10 months. And more reductions seem inevitable: Just a few doors down, an unstaged version popped up for sale 8 days ago, and has already reduced its price to $99,000.
After the jump, more pics of the Tanglewilde leather-and-aquarium bachelor pad!
Here’s another fine item sure to light up the interior of any sophisticated home, but also certain to warm the hearts of patriotic Houstonians as well. It’s the Firevase, a beautiful ceramic container for flowers or flames from Plodes Studio.
The Firevase is another original decorative piece from the mind of John Paul Plauché, a local designer with a remarkable ability to work images of the Houston landscape into his creations.
Plauché calls the Firevase an “indoor or dense-city version of a firepit.” So much nicer than that mock or simply unused fireplace, no? According to Plauché, the firevase runs on a nontoxic clean-burning alcohol gel-fuel can called Sunjel:
The Firevase attempts to bring everything you enjoy about an outdoor firepit to your tabletop or somewhere where you can’t have a firepit. It’s another thing I enjoyed growing up in a small town just east of Houston. It’s about scale [and] my past experiences of living in dense apartment buildings [where you] simply cannot have such amenities . . .
The vase’s tripod shape is inspired by two kinds of plants: the kind that grow in the ground, and the kind that sprout near Pasadena and on Houston’s scenic eastern reaches:
It can be a seasonal affair if you’d like. Fire in the winter and flowers in the summer. Its shape is inspired by root branching systems, and the stark nature of chemical plant structures that can found off hwy 225.
Refineries, chemical plants, flares, and flowers: at last, interior designers discover Houston’s true local style! Below the fold: more photos of this hot item, plus how you can light up your own home with one for the holidays.
