Home Design

Galveston County
08/10/12 3:57pm

Bora Bora Party Pad Perches on a Tiki Island Knuckle

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Home Decor, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Tiki Island
4 Comments

If you squint, this house sort of puts a party face on its facade, what with the eyeball windows, nose-like roof above the landing, and unfurled tongue of stairs. The 2-story-over-garage quay-side property is on tiny Tiki Island, which, at less than 1.5 sq. miles in size, is more canal than actual land. It’s just off Galveston’s West Bay and has 91 ft. of canal frontage plus 2 boat lifts. It listed in July at $564,500. The entertainment-in-mind layout includes 2 living areas, decks at 2 levels, screened porches, and a pool with hot tub off a covered patio. Inside the 1993 home by the bay, you’ll find more than earth tones:

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Home Design
08/08/12 3:31pm

Hiding from the Big One in the Mod Tanglewood Home of the Breast Men

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Homes for Sale, Interiors, Modern Design, Tanglewood
6 Comments

As mods go, this one in Tanglewood is just one of that neighborhood’s thinning pack of mid-century homes. What sets this property apart? Maybe the bomb shelter out back — and the property’s brush with Hollywood as a film set in Breast Men, the 1997 HBO David Schwimmer flick that finally gave Houston its due as the birthplace of the boob job industry. The mid-July listing of this property for $1.1 million calls the 60-year-old property on Sugar Hill Dr. a “wonderful building site” and leaves it at that. But preservation advocates at Houston Mod met with the home’s current, long-term owner and gleaned some tidbits to share about the home’s origins and features:

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Home Design
08/07/12 1:40pm

Compounding a Centennial Cottage in Lancaster Place

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Homes for Sale, Interiors, Lancaster Place, Montrose
5 Comments

Talk about a gated driveway. This Lancaster Place cottage’s half-a-yard carport extends to the front sidewalk, with a double-garage door and entry gate punched into the lot-line iron fence. The combination gives the front yard a shaded pavilion as well as a parking area. It’s also the starting point of a partly-paved, partly-pebbled path to the front porch and an office in the converted, detached garage at the back of the lot. The 1910-built home has been updated several times, including some work in 2004. Since then, there’ve been big changes a couple blocks away at the corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama: A new H-E-B Market has replaced some apartments, and some new apartments are about to replace the just-shuttered Fiesta Mart.

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Home Design
08/03/12 12:05pm

A Hyde Park Resale Repeater

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Homes for Sale, Hyde Park, Interiors, Montrose
3 Comments

The new kid on this otherwise out-of-the-Twenties block of cottages in Hyde Park is on the block again. Built in 2008, the property west of Montrose Blvd. and south of West Gray St. sold in March 2009 at $629,450 and again in September 2011 at $725,000. Last month, the HardiePlanked home on a 4,800-sq.-ft. lot popped up as a new listing one more time, asking $819,000. The house sits behind a fence with an automated gate across a double-wide driveway. Three crisply trimmed dormers rise above the 2-car garage and a recessed, at-grade porch like whitecaps on water. Just a few doors down at Montrose, there’s a convenience store and that 10-year-old, 14-unit, 4-story stucco condoplex known as the Renaissance on Montrose.

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Home Decor
07/26/12 12:29pm

Nassau Bay’s Purple Waterfront Playhouse

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Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Nassau Bay
15 Comments

It all seems so seasidey serene at this Nassau Bay property on the border of Bal Harbour Cove and Swan Lagoon. A mid-July initial listing, the 3-story $2.2 million property has water views from all its rooms. There’s a lakefront pool, a fire pit on a cantilevered deck, a pair of palapas, palm trees bending in the breeze, and a double-slip boathouse perched above the lapping waves. In the front yard, there’s a tiered waterfall. But inside, this rock-encrusted 2-story  waterfall-with-aquarium in the entry is the real tipoff that while the home is on the water, its interior isn’t a driftwood-nautical knot kinda retreat:

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Home Design
07/20/12 2:18pm

A Big Contemporary’s Curvy Build in Meyerland

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Homes for Sale, Interiors, Meyerland
7 Comments

Gated and front-loading, this 1983 contemporary lot-filler throws a curve or two onto an otherwise straight-from-the-fifties street of ranch-style homes in Meyerland. Earlier this month, the stucco, steel, and glass brick specimen returned to the market after a 4-month break, with a new and lower price of $829,000. It’s a re-listing by a new agency. A previous listing for the home initially sought $975,000 back in October, but by January that price had dropped to $899,000.

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Home Design
07/13/12 12:50pm

Selling a Midblock Modern Blockade in the Heights

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Homes for Sale, Houston Heights, Interiors
34 Comments

Like a beret worn jauntily, an angled steel roof provides a little attitude, a stab of color, and some tilt to an otherwise monochromatic and perpendicular property on a lot-and-a-half in the Melford Heights area of the Heights. That’s near 14th St. west of Studewood, 2 blocks from the Fiesta. The much-discussed 2006 home has a block-on-block facade, light-and-shadow fencing, and landing-pad pavers. But for a boldly toned painted wall here and there, the inside repeats the exterior’s shades-of-gray grid:

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Brookesmith
07/12/12 2:11pm

Where Are Houston’s Modern Add-Ons?

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Home Design
23 Comments

One of the reasons Brookesmith resident Vicki Scarpato bought the 1890 cottage on Archer St. pictured above last year was because of the 2009 Modern addition at the back: “I love the mix,” she says. Her home is next door to the modern structure architect Jeromy Murphy designed for his family and not far from the Cordell St. shipping-container house — all in a neighborhood that she calls “an interesting mix of beautiful new modern, Victorian cottages in various states of repair, and only a very few instances of three-to-a-lot townhouses.” Here are some pics of the back:

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Home Design
06/28/12 1:37pm

A Renovated Woodside Ranchburger’s Shy Second Story

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Homes for Sale, Interiors, Renovations, Woodside
5 Comments

Instead of razing this ranch-style home, the new owner raised the roof, adding a heap of space on the second floor and reworking the original floor plan downstairs. Located in Woodside, near Longfellow Elementary School, the 1957 home morphed via a to-the-studs renovation and addition following its purchase in 2009 for $315,000. Now weighing in at 3,621 sq. ft., the new listing’s asking price is a much heftier $675,000.

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Buildings for Sale
06/27/12 2:09pm

Spur-Side Mansion a Mixed-Use Bute

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Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Mixed Use, Montrose, Office Space
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Some might know this Milam at W. Main property as the former home of Milam House, a social services agency that operated within until 2007. Some might recognize it as a building they view peripherally and from above while zipping out of downtown on Spur 527. Behind the automated gate, however, the mansion-turned-commercial space holds a doctor’s practice downstairs and unrelated professional offices upstairs.

The building combines the presence and proportions of a 1950 home with the more modern upgrades of a 2007 renovation, which also subdivided — only temporarily, the listing agent says — several first floor rooms. Described as an historic property in the Bute section of the Montrose area, this new listing fronting an access road is asking $1,350,000 — regardless of whether its future use remains commercial, resumes residential status, or blends a bit of each. Its neighbors include 2-story apartments next door and 3-story offices-over-parking across the street.

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Home Design
06/25/12 2:02pm

Using Every Inch of a West U Original

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Homes for Sale, Interiors, Renovations, West University
9 Comments

This expanded-since-1938 home in West U has a 2-story front facade, but 3 stories of living space. Its last redo was in 2000. Listed in mid-June at $1,091,000, the home is located west of Buffalo Speedway in a section of the small city where lots run 50 ft. by 150 ft. Unlike many newer properties, this 5-bedroom home has no brick or stucco and doesn’t fill the lot. Behind the house there’s a deck with an outdoor kitchen and a bit of a yard — or is that a garden?

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Champions
06/21/12 2:51pm

Pitch and Pattern in a Champions Park Home

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Home Decor, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors
10 Comments

Is that an arrow or an anchor above the dining-room bay window of this well-gabled home a little more than a mile northeast of the Willowbrook Mall? Either way, the decorative timbering acts as a harbinger of the many accents, patterns, and imagery within:   CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Home Design
06/20/12 1:24pm

Revamped Heights Home Ramps Up Price, Too

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Homes for Sale, Houston Heights, Interiors, Renovations
40 Comments

The last time this 1920 Houston Heights home was on the market, it was a tiny bungalow and sold for $235,000. That was way back in 2009, before Arnold Builders remodeled and spiffed it up as the builder’s own home. Earlier this month, the renovated property hit the market — at a much heftier $750,000.

As part of the overhaul, a driveway-covering 1,600-sq.-ft. addition more than doubled the now 2,708-sq.-ft. house. Its revised elevation sports a third gable and a new front room so the porch, formerly off-center, now sits squarely between old and new construction. The redo pumped up many of the home’s Craftsman-y design details, inside and out.

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