12/24/13 10:00am

15402 Lakeview Dr., Jersey Village, Houston

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Light makes bright by day or night in this Jersey Village contemporary. Its bold colors further ramp up the lumens sneaking in from a plethora of windows. The grounds-hugging, mostly single-story property, which occupies more than half an acre across a low gate from privately owned Jersey Lake, has been on the market since May 2013. Its relisting by a new agency last week set a new asking price of $900,000. That’s down a few tads from previous listings, which began at $1.15 million, tiptoed to $1.099 million in September, and hit $945,000 in November.

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Primary Property
11/26/13 1:15pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: READY TO POUNCE ON ANY LIFE FORMS DETECTED IN THE WOODLANDS Drawing of Life Forms Home“I live in a neighborhood in The Woodlands that was built out 100% by Lifeforms (Mitchell’s son was an architect there at the time). The finishes can be a bit dated, as the area was built in the ’80s, but the design and layout of the homes in the neighborhood are unique and in high demand. The homes are comfortable and ‘livable.’ Lifeforms architecture has a cult following . . . there is a fairly substantial group of people circling like sharks waiting for a house to come on the market in my neighborhood . . . additionally, I think I have more respect for a billionaire who was content in a modest home designed by his son as opposed to a man who needs to build a ‘gorgeous spread’ just to impress . . .” [Jeff, commenting on A Look at George Mitchell’s Decked-Out Home in The Woodlands, All Cleaned Up and Cleared Out for Sale] Illustration: Lulu

11/07/13 12:30pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHEN KIDS TAKE OVER THE BIG ROOMS “. . . And let me say as a parent, having a large room entirely devoted to the kids is great. We didn’t have a dining room table for at least a year when we first moved into our current home, and our kids LOVED that empty space. They cried when we turned it into a proper dining room.” [Vonnegan, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Child Support] Illustration: Lulu

11/05/13 2:00pm

Air conditioning repair guy David Lewis finds what he considers a novel installation of the AC condenser units found on the ground outside most Houston homes. The site (above and at left) is a 6,500-sq.-ft. doctors’ office converted from a house built in 1940, about a mile away from Rice University. Here, the condensers have their own vented add-on room tucked behind an added exterior stair — where they’re protected from the elements, thieves, and offended eyeballs. The expensive setup also means there’s a little more work for repairs: “You must have the area well ventilated hence the brown vents and weird hoods on the units. The greatest downside is that those hoods prevent service to the unit. If the condenser fan motor decides to quit then the hood must first be removed to allow access for replacement.”

Photos: David Lewis

07/19/13 4:00pm

Some of the green that goes with this early player in energy-conscious home building in Bellaire could be the $200,000 price increase over its sale last July, when it went for $1.35 million. The ca. 2002 limestone-and-stucco property with Texas Hill Country stylin’ — designed back then for her own family by architect Kathleen Reardon — popped back up on the market earlier this week with a $1.55 million asking price. Some of the enviro-sensitive elements are visible from the get-go, such as the deep overhangs on the eaves. Others are buried deep in the lot — where a network of caverns 250-ft. deep use underground temperatures to regulate the air conditioning and heating. Solar panels and low-water landscaping also play the green card.

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07/12/13 4:20pm

A glowing (at least at dusk) example of Prairie School–style architecture by self-taught designer Richard S. Condon hugs the horizontal and hovers above the flatlands of Tanglewood. Its second level is almost entirely capped by casement windows. Condon passed away in January 2012. The residence on Doliver Dr. he built for himself in 1999 appeared on the market in March of this year, and has kept its asking price at a flat $3,260,000.

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06/18/13 10:00am

Party like it’s 1699 or so in this North Blvd. mansion in Edgemont, where an updated 1925 estate includes a full-blown concert hall, super-formal formal rooms, and a platoon of figures serving a variety of decorative and occasionally structural purposes. The palatial, seemingly performance-ready venue and its collection of antique architectural embellishments sits on the northwest corner of North and Mandell St.

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06/14/13 1:45pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE PRINCIPLED LOGIC BEHIND THE BATHROOM BOOM “Easy explanation. In high-end homes, builders want every [bedroom] to have its own [bathroom] . . . assuming no one wants to share a bathroom, and you don’t want to roam down the hall at night in your jammies. Plus, you need extra baths (or half-baths) in the public areas (living, dining, etc.). It’s always desirable to have at least one bathroom per floor to avoid sending guests too far from the action (and keeping them from “roaming at will” to snoop through the closets or jewelry drawers. With these new rules, you can easily have many more bathrooms than bedrooms, especially as houses are getting taller in the urban areas.” [Beaker, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Flue Shot]

05/31/13 10:00am

When last we visited this home at the western edge of Memorial Bend, built in 1958 from a design by noted Houston architect Lars Bang, the trees were a smidge shorter and the open-plan interior perhaps a bit less tweaked. That was 5 years ago, for a listing that never found a buyer. Last fall, the midcentury-mod-gone-whatever property returned to the market at $565,000 — though within a couple of months the price had fallen to $499,000. (Price histories posted for the property indicate a couple contracts didn’t go through.) Earlier this month, however, the flat-topped specimen overlooking Rummel Creek and the Edith L. Moore Bird Sanctuary popped back up with a big bang of a price increase, to $679,000.

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05/24/13 1:15pm

The ‘bay’ at this multilevel 1990 property in Walden on Lake Conroe is a 2-story space with a modern, multi-pane frame of the water. Photos of the vista-boosting room — and its contemporary decor — dominate the early-in-May listing. The asking price, $925,000, apparently includes the furnishings.

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05/22/13 10:00am

Norman and Contempo leanings are but the start of the stylin’ mashup incorporated into a large waterfront property in the Village of Panther Creek in The Woodlands. On and off the market since the summer of 2010, when its initial asking price was $3.2 million, the 1990 custom estate popped back up last month as a re-relisting seeking $2.5 million. Earlier this month, the ask dropped to $1.95 million. That’s a price point a previous relisting sought for nearly a year, ending in May 2012 at $1.85 million.

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05/21/13 3:15pm

That steel frame on Centenary St. that roused some West U residents to name-calling and concern-raising 2 years ago now has a steel house built around it — and a single father and his two sons inside. Still, says architect Cameron Armstrong, the build wasn’t as smooth as it might have been: “[C]ertain neighbors were actually quite hostile — they heckled the subcontractors (and not always from across the street!), and made numerous frivolous complaints to the police about things like (non-existent) parking violations by workers. . . . They thought they were living on a street with a predictable visual future, which turned out not to be the case.” Adds Armstrong: “[I]t’s hard to identify substantive objections. . . . The good news is that most of the neighbors are just fine with how the design turned out.”

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05/21/13 12:05pm

It’s a bit of a nature walk to this hidden-from-view home’s front entry. But then, isn’t that the point of living in a property arranged like a treehouse? The woodsy spread in Piney Point Village’s Shady Point neighborhood is a 1972 design by an early advocate of “energy aware” homes, Roger Rasbach. (He also designed this home in Bellaire.) It’s built on a gated cul-de-sac located near one of the designer’s other projects, Vargo’s Restaurant (soon to be replaced by apartments) on Fondren. Listed last week — on the same day demo work began on Vargo’s — the home has an asking price of $1,995,000. That includes several levels of outdoor decks and a nifty open-air workout space in a treehouse of its own (above).

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04/19/13 1:18pm

Smile and step carefully. No fewer than 16 security cameras are installed in this battened-down Braeburn Acres property, a 2007 custom design by Cameron Architects. It’s a big, big stucco-over-concrete-block house — more than 10,000 sq. ft. — with 50 stone columns supporting a double-decker carousel of arches and tile-topped rotundas. The cleared 1.2-acre lot includes a pool-in-progress and very little landscaping (other than lawn). Maybe that explains why a cartoony rendering (at top) is employed as the listing’s featured photo.

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