Houston Architects

According to a report by Jennifer Dawson in the Houston Business Journal,, the first new spec office building built in the Galleria area in more than 25 years will be . . . a 20-story tower that was designed 15 years ago!

In the early 1990s, [Novati Group CEO Ken] Moczulski ran Transworld Properties, a developer of office, industrial and multifamily properties. Transworld owned the land at 1600 West Loop South at that time, and commissioned Ziegler Cooper Architects to design an office for the site.

“We had planned a building,” recalls Moczulski. “It was all designed.”

The economy turned south, he says, so the facility did not get built. . . .

Last year, Novati co-founders Moczulski and Fernando De LeÃ³n start looking in the Galleria area for an office development site. Moczulski approached Landry’s about buying the West Loop land because, as in the 1990s, he still thinks the location and high visibility make it a good site for an office building.

To top it off, Novati is saving months of development time by dusting off the original plans from Ziegler Cooper. The only design changes needed are those to make the 475,000-square-foot structure eligible for certification as a green building.

Hey, maybe it’s one of those towers that kinda looks like a tall glass cylinder is bulging out from the center? That was a hot nineties look, wasn’t it?

Building fills West Loop bill [Houston Business Journal]
New 20 Story Tower on West Loop [HAIF]

77027, Development Strategy, Galleria, Green Design, Highrises, Houston Architects, New Construction, Office Buildings, Office Space, Proposed Developments, Uptown

02/20/08 10:54am

Free! Classic Midcentury Modern Home Included with Purchase of Property!

Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Land Sales, Landscape, Memorial, Real Estate Marketing

Garden of 6040 Glencove St., Memorial, Houston

This 1.35-acre lot at the end of the cul-de-sac on Glencove St. has been on the market for almost 16 months, so you can imagine during that time owner-broker Richard Maier has been trying just about every marketing angle possible. There’s some evidence of it too: The records are a little screwy, but it appears the asking price has been raised three times and lowered four. As of last week, we’re on an upswing! At $2.65 million, it’s back up $51K from its all-time low, but still down from the $3 million of early â€™07.

So what do we got?

ABSOLUTELY ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SETTINGS NEAR DOWNTOWN JUST BEFORE MEMROIAL PARK. GORGEOUS VISTAS OF ROLLING HILLS, RAVINES, GARDEN TRAILS, CREEKS AND TURTLE POND! ALL LANDSCAPED WITH THOUSANDS OF EXOTIC PLANTS AND TREES! IRRIGATED BY PRIVATE WELL AND LIGHTED BY NIGHT! THE GROUNDS ARE CONTIGIOUS WITH ACRES OF NATURE PRESERVE & BIRD SANCTUARY!

Clearly, though, Maier’s latest sales tactic has just got to work — now he’s even gonna throw in a genuine Midcentury Modern home with the property. Absolutely free!!!

ALSO INCLUDED IS A CLASSIC MID CENTURY MODERN HOME BY NOTED ARCHICTECT TALBOT WILSON WITH 14 FT.WALLS OF GLASS!

Yeah, it’s a risky strategy: This is Memorial. So better end the listing on a more direct note:

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!

After the jump, exotic plants!!! Plus an actual interior shot of the 5,000-sq.-ft. 1950 home Maier snuck in.

77007, Buying and Selling, Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Land Sales, Landscape, Memorial, Modern Design, Price Reductions, Real Estate Marketing, Talbott Wilson

Crime

01/30/08 12:35pm

Historic Preservation, Meet Self Preservation

Historic Preservation, Home Design, Houston Architects, Interiors, Renovations, Winlow Place

1704 Kipling St., Houston Not all recipients of the 2008 GHPA Good Brick Awards will be able to attend this Friday’s historic-preservation awards banquet at the River Oaks Country Club, but some will have better excuses than others. Ken Rice, who along with Sarah Goodpastor will receive an award for the renovation of a 1930 brick duplex at the corner of Kipling and Dunlavy, won’t be able to make it because he’s currently serving a 27-month sentence in federal prison for securities fraud.

Yes, that’s former Enron Broadband CEO and architecture patron Kenneth Rice, who already helped lessen his sentence by testifying against other Enron executives in two separate trials after his 2003 guilty plea. Rice agreed to forfeit more than $13.7 million worth of cash investments, real estate, cars, and jewelry as part of his plea agreement. His sentence included a $50,000 fine.

Rice, 48, could end up serving less than half of his prison term, though.

His lawyers say he hopes to enter a drug and alcohol treatment program available to nonviolent federal inmates that, if completed, could shave up to a year from his term. In addition, federal inmates can reduce their prison time by 15 percent with good behavior. With those two combined, Rice could get out of prison in 11 months.

After the jump, details and photos of a project Rice is likely hoping will count towards that good-behavior credit.

77006, Crime, Duplexes, Enron, Historic Preservation, Home Design, Houston Architects, Interiors, Renovation, Winlow Place

Historic Preservation

01/29/08 11:15am

Just Listed: Fifties Bayou Cool

Home Design, Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Interiors, Memorial, Open Houses, Real Estate Marketing, Renovations

Family Room of 403 Westminster Dr., Houston

A reader reports that the Frame House, a fifties-Modern classic tucked off Memorial Dr., is up for sale for a cool $3 million. Designed by Houston architect Harwood Taylor in 1960, this is about as close to a Case Study House as Houston ever got — and it perches just about as close to Buffalo Bayou as you’d ever want a home to get. Its recent restoration from a mid-eighties whitewashing earned the current owner, his architects, and builder a local preservation award.

If you’re a fan of this kind of Modness, the best news of all is that you don’t have to pay to play: An open house is scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, February 17th. If you’re not a fan, you can visit and imagine how it would all look with crown moulding and a nice, traditional pitched roof.

After the jump, a few more details about the home, plus a demonstration of the real value real estate agents can bring to a fine listing like this.

77024, Buffalo Bayou, Historic Preservation, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Interiors, Memorial, Modern Design, Open Houses, Real Estate Marketing, Renovations, Restorations

12/13/07 11:59am

Staub Ranchsion Sale Not Going By the Book

Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Land Prices, River Oaks

3740 Willowick Rd., River Oaks, Home by John Staub

How’s that River Oaks “you loved the book, now try the home” marketing tie-in going?

Well, Stephen Fox’s volume on The Country Houses of John F. Staub is currently ranked #10,535 on Amazon.com, which probably isn’t so bad for a book about a dead architect. It is heavily discounted, but it’s collected several favorable reviews online.

The reviews aren’t looking quite as good for the Staub ranch-mansion at 3740 Willowick: The asking price was dropped earlier this month from $7,495,000 to $6,950,000. For a 2.3-acre River Oaks lot with Buffalo Bayou frontage, that’s a healthy step closer to . . . yes, land value. And looky at all the excitement just down the street!

3740 Willowick Rd. [HAR]
The Country Houses of John F. Staub [Amazon.com]
Great Moments in Houston Home Marketing: The John Staub Tie-In [Swamplot]
River Oaks Land Rush: $2+ Million Memorial Park and Bayou Frontage with Modern Obstacle [Swamplot]

77019, Books, Buffalo Bayou, Buying and Selling, Homes for Sale, John Staub, Land Prices, Ranch-Houses, Real Estate Marketing, River Oaks

11/07/07 5:31pm

Great Moments in Houston Home Marketing: The John Staub Tie-In

Home Design, Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Real Estate Marketing, River Oaks

3740 Willowick Dr. in River Oaks by Architect John Staub

A 1955 River Oaks “country house” designed by John Staub appears on MLS just days before architectural historian Stephen Fox’s book on the Houston architect appears in bookstores. Mere coincidence? Or brilliant upper-end home-marketing technique?

There’s a slight price difference between the two: The Country Houses of John F. Staub lists for $75, though Amazon.com whacks 37 percent off of that. No telling if the sellers will accept a similar discount off the $7.495 million asking price of 3740 Willowick.

The house overlooks Buffalo Bayou and features four fireplaces, three bedrooms, and six full and one half baths — all in a single story. Yes, it looks like some ranch-house flavor got mixed in here. There’s a garden loggia and lots of trees, plus a three-car attached garage. It’s a 5,532-square-foot home on a quarter-acre lot.

The book is 408 pages long and comes in hardcover. It features photographs by Richard Cheek, and will take up just three-quarters of a square foot on your coffee table.

After the jump: the not-so-ranchy interiors.

Of the house.

77019, Books, Buffalo Bayou, Buying and Selling, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Interiors, John Staub, Ranch-Houses, Real Estate Marketing, River Oaks

Historic Preservation

10/18/07 10:00am

Fifties Cool Revived: A Houston Case Study

Home Design, Houston Architects, Interiors, Memorial, Renovations

Sunken Play Area at the Frame-Harper House, Houston

Texas Architect magazine features a home that shows what the famous postwar Case Study program of modern steel houses might have looked like if it had landed on bayou banks in Houston instead of L.A. hillsides.

Of course, what was cool in the fifties wasn’t especially appreciated in the eighties. The home’s second owners

removed the terraced landscaping and painted the entire house white, including its darkstained walnut paneling and load-bearing walls of pink Mexican brick. They filled sunken terrazzo soaking bathtubs in children’s and parents’ bathrooms with concrete. They removed the lacy, cast-plaster screens separating the living and dining rooms designed by Gloria Frame’s father, Joseph Klein, and the unusual turquoise St. Charles steel kitchen cabinets with their little shiny stainless steel legs. In the main living areas they covered over a series of recessed light coves in the ceiling depicted in superb photographs by Ezra Stoller, which were published in House & Garden in September 1961. They also replaced the original copper roof flashing with galvanized steel flashing that had rusted to the point of failure by 2004 when the house’s third owner, Dana Harper, persuaded them to sell it.

After the jump, more swank pics from Harper’s expensive restoration of this cool modern home off Memorial Dr.

77024, Buffalo Bayou, Historic Preservation, Home Design, Houston Architects, Interiors, Memorial, Modern Design, Renovations, Restorations

Construction Materials

09/04/07 10:13am

Waverly Goodbye

Demolitions, Home Design, Houston Architects, Museum District

1 Waverly Court, by Glassman Shoemake Maldonado Architects

From the design mags to demolition . . . in less than ten years! Remember the modern house with the curious metal proboscis off Bissonnet, near the Museum of Fine Arts? It won a couple of design awards a few years back from the American Institute of Architects, but if the judges had realized it was temporary housing it probably would have swept that category.

A week ago 1 Waverly Ct. appeared quietly in our demolition report, but it became a smashing success just a few days later. It was built in 1999.

After the jump, what lurked behind the proboscis: photos of this record-shattering short-timer from the architects’ website.

77005, Construction Materials, Demolitions, Home Design, Houston Architects, Museum District

Condos

06/21/07 10:36am

How the Magnolia Lofts Got Their Name

Development Strategy, Historic Districts, Houston Architects, Houston Heights, Lofts, Mixed Use, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Townhomes

Sketch of Magnolia Lofts in Houston Heights by Tim Cisneros

Commenting on an article describing plans for a 40-unit condo building on the site of the former Ashland Tea House in the Heights, with another 40 townhouses and “garden villas” to be sprinkled around it later, Chronicle blogger Martin Hajovsky writes:

I remember when the Ashland Tea House, the McDonald Home, was demolished in 2005, the plan at the time was for a Victorian-themed restaurant to go there. The mere idea that someone would tear down a Victorian-themed restaurant to build a Victorian-themed restaurant struck me as the height of irony.

That memory came back reading the article because there’s a beautiful old magnolia on that site right now. It’s a perfect example of the species. Wonderful, fragrant, old and stately. If that tree survives the building of the “Magnolia Lofts,” it would be a miracle. Once again, irony triumphs.

Construction is expected to begin in August or September. The Magnolia Lofts will feature a tiny ground-floor commercial space—at 750 sf, even smaller than the average condo size of 900 sf—and two stories of parking, one of which the article describes as

“partially submerged” so the building would only appear to be five stories tall.

Maybe the developers should claim that the bottom level of parking is really at a normal level—although it’s underground, it is in the Heights.

Architect Tim Cisneros’s vague storybook sketch of the facade, though, has aroused the ire of Heights resident Mark White:

“While the description provided by the architect sounds like the building’s proposed style is in keeping with the Victorian-era architecture of the Heights, the initial drawings suggest a more ‘updated’ factory-turned-condo facade,” he said. “We would ask that the developer consider making a few changes to the style to make it more consistent with the architecture of the time period represented by the Heights neighborhood.”

By our estimate, that time period would be approximately 1891 to 2007, with the average construction date moving toward the present at a pretty steady clip.

Heights growing more dense? Thoughts thereof… [Home in the Heights]
Plans expand for Ashland Tea House site [Houston Chronicle]
Magnolia Lofts [Cisneros Design Studio]

77008, Condos, Historic Districts, Houston Heights, Mixed Use, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Parking

05/22/07 10:34am

New Listings: Where the Mid-Century Moderns Are

Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Meadowcreek

Back View of 5226 Berry Creek

Stained Glass Window at 5226 Berry Creek Dr. A three-bedroom, two-bath, 2700-square-foot house on a cul-de-sac. A half-acre, wooded, park-like lot. Overlooking the bayou. Designed by Houston’s own Frank-Lloyd-Wrightian architects, MacKie & Kamrath, and built in 1969. Lots of built-ins and stained glass.

At $259,000, is it a bargain?

It’s in Meadow Creek Village. Meadowcreek has some nice mid-century moderns. But yes, it’s on the southeast side of Houston, and it’s not too far from Hobby Airport or Pasadena. That bayou is Berry Creek, a tributary of Sims Bayou.

So some of you are probably imagining how nice this house would be if it were only in a different part of town.

How nice would it be? Read on for an estimate—and more photos.