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Home Design
After a good life with its original owners, this well-draped and well-preserved 1961 Mod in Meyerland hit the market earlier this week, asking $625,000. The exterior’s contrast of light brick and dark trim repeats inside, where warm-toned paneling pairs with glass, and mirrors expand the effect. The home’s curved driveway sweeps across the front yard, but the garage is farther down the side street, served by a driveway stub at the back lot line.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: PALE IN COMPARISON “Stephen Fox does a real disservice to drag queens, whose mummery and satire are rooted in fascinating questions about gender identity and the plights of powerless human beings. They have nothing to do with shoddily built, ostentatious and vulgar houses. Drag queens are necessary and even essential to a healthy civilization, they parody and mock for the forces of goodness, but shitty architecture benefits nobody.” [Scott Bodenheimer, commenting on Waving the Fronds on Palm Royale Blvd.]
Wraparound porches on two levels add a little more living space to this by-the-park, by-the freeway 1920 home in Woodland Heights, outside the Houston Ave. boundary of that vintage neighborhood’s historic district. The garage-free property relisted with a new agency yesterday at $325,000 — after 4-months of toe-testing at $345,000. Its crisply painted exterior trim gives way to the interior’s stained wood, one of a few elements retained or accented in a 2005 remodeling by one of several previous owners this millennium.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT IT TAKES TO BUILD AT THE UPPER END “You are right that you can build a very nice house for $150/sq. ft., but when you are in this stratospheric range, $150 is your starting point and you jump off from there. . . . Your roof will be slate and not composition. Goodness knows how much that costs, and how it impacts your structural engineering. Your floors will be stone and/or wide plank salvaged wood and not 2 1/2″ plain sawn oak. Your facade will be brick, not hardi plank, and bricks will cost $2-$3 each and not 50 cents. And on an 8,000 sq. ft. structure you may get 50,000, 100,000 bricks. Then you pay the mason. Your trim and doors will be custom manufactured and not stock. Your window package will be custom manufactured and not stock. Saw one house where custom fabricated metal windows cost $250,000. For the windows. Your light cans will cost 10x the cost of the cans you get in a builder spec house. You will have paid a lighting designer a fortune to tell you how to position those lights. Your HVAC, security, A/V systems will be state of the art, each of which will run tens and tens of thousands, if not more. You will insulate your house to an extreme level. And so on and so on. It all adds up . . . But yes, you can build a nice house for $150/sq. ft., but if you are building on a 50,000 sq. ft. lot on the corner of Kirby and Inwood, you just won’t.” [KG, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Out of the Closet]
- 9207 Hudson Ct. [HAR]
- 3809 Rice Blvd. [HAR]
- 915 Franklin St. Unit 2M [HAR]
All rooms within this Briargrove custom home by Rudolph Colby “open to atrium and fountain areas.” Earlier this week, the corner lot property lowered its asking price once more, to $1,329,000, for its re-listing by the same agent. Back in February, the home debuted at $1,595,000, with reductions to $1,469,000 in April and $1,380,000 in June for the summer months.
Built in 1994, the 4,929-sq.-ft. home is not the largest of the newer homes infiltrating the tight-knit neighborhood. On its stretch of street, however, the house stands taller, bigger, and distinct. Landscaping between its two gabled wings helps conceal a brick wall that appears to match the height of neighboring fifties ranch homes. An entryway streetside leads into a brick-paved courtyard-with-fountain surrounded by window walls and glass-paneled doors:
Columns accent the front porch — and are left to define rooms in the opened up floor plan of this $323,900 listing that popped up over the weekend in Candlelight Woods, south of Pinemont Dr. The shady northern approach to the 1964 ranch-style home is a contrast to its brighter pool-view side at the back of the home. Meanwhile, just beyond the back fence, there’s a patch of veggie garden — and a path along a ravine off nearby White Oak Bayou. CONTINUE READING THIS STORY
A bit like icing, the stucco smoothed over the exterior of this renovated-to-the-studs 1930Â brick home in Riverside Terrace was a finishing touch. Interior work reconfigured some of the space and added “engineered wood” flooring, fresh paint, and carpet, plus new wiring, plumbing, and HVAC. In mid-April 2012, the property changed hands at $67,000 after 3 months on the market — it was initially priced at $110,500, with $10K-or-so reductions coming every few weeks. The completed project appeared a week and a half ago as a new listing — for $249,900, though for an extra $20K prior to closing, the seller will add a 2-car garage to go with that new driveway:
As Federal-style homes go, this ivy-clad example on North Blvd. in Edgemont has a pedigree that earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places. An understated bronze plaque displayed discreetly beneath a demilune portico says so, but doesn’t elaborate. The 1925 home’s design is reportedly the work of C.B. Schoeppl & Co., whose efforts can also be found in a NRHP pair on Westmoreland Ave., as well as in a few other older Houston neighborhoods. Listed a couple of weeks ago for $1.9 million, this green-roofed home at the eastern end of the Boulevard Oaks Historic District sits back from — and a bit above — the tree-lined esplanade along North Blvd. But its corner-lot address is a tad shy of the double-allees of live oaks found a half-block to the east, in Broadacres.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A HOME TRIBUTE TO ROGER RASBACH “We own a Rasbach house and pinch ourselves everyday about how fortunate we are to benefit from his genius. We got to meet him a few months before his death and learned the story of the designing/building of our house (we are the second owners). A brilliant gentle man. His sense of scale particularly sets his homes apart.” [NOBSKA, commenting on On Track with a Huge Hacienda in Bellaire]
Yep. It’s pink, and a sun-baked shade at that. The adobe abode has Sante Fe styling in an age and area more prone to “Texas Tuscan.” Located in Bellaire’s Westmoreland Farms section, this 2000 home was a late work of designer Roger Rasbach, considered a pioneer of energy-conscious home design. The hacienda itself measures 5,454 sq. ft., but its footprint includes another 850 sq. ft. of covered outdoor space containing courtyards, pavilions, a pergola, a pool, and a spa. On its eastern border, the near-acre lot backs up to a utility easement, with railroad tracks beyond. The almost-an-acre lot was up for sale for a spell last year. Re-listed in April by the same agent after 5-month breather — and a price drop of nearly a quarter-million dollars — the home’s asking price has remained steady since, at $2,199,500.
There’s a stuccoed Dutch-Colonial-Swiss Colony on the not-so-mountainous streets behind Weslayan Plaza’s west side in the College Court section (aka the “chimney”) of West University Place. The lookalike cottage and quarters are steps away from the new Buffalo Grille and a U.S. Post Office. West U’s Judson Park to the south and a proposed rail station for Metro’s supposed University Line are also blocks away. Railroad tracks, meanwhile, are just up the street.
During construction of the 1983 main house, a former 1940s “barn” on the site became a 2-story guest house in lieu of a garage. HCAD cites some remodeling in 1991 to the home. Last Friday, the property re-listed at $462,500 after a previous listing by the same agent initially sought $575,000 in April 2012, with adjustments to $565,000, $550,000, and then a summer of $524,990. The home’s side entry and hipped roof make for an atypical floor plan:
