- 3339 Arbor St. [HAR]
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Interiors
With its breeze-catching front porch, rockers, and kitchen garden, this 1939 cottage evokes old-time country living. Sort of. The home was overhauled in 2006. And it’s located across the street from a cluster of about 30 manufactured homes, some of which date back to the sixties. The home’s woodsy lot, which is more than a acre in Shepherd Park Plaza, is just west of N. Shepherd Dr. south of Pinemont Dr.
A Briargrove listing has dropped its price a third time in as many months. The updated fifties ranch-style home currently seeks $639,000, down from $650,000 in April, $669,000 at the end of March, and $679,000 when it hit the market earlier that month. On the street, near Briargrove Elementary, there’s a mix of original single-story homes and newer ones built with larger proportions. This home is one lot in from the corner of Briargrove Dr. on a nearly quarter-acre lot. (Beyond a drainage ditch across Briargrove is the St. Luke’s Hospital Emergency Center.)
The ranch dressing on the home’s exterior is “traditional.” The interior?
You might well expect a home on street named “Leafy Lane” to sport a woodsy setting. While this new Spring Oaks listing is on a 16,788-sq.-ft. lot more groomed than sylvan, it does back up to a ravine formed by a ribbon of Spring Branch Creek. The 3-2 window pattern beneath the low-slung gable in front is a tip-off that the front room is not one room at all. Rather, the street-facing space contains a family room and a bedroom. Both sides of that great divide at the roof ridge, however, have vaulted ceilings. Elsewhere inside, other unexpected treatments include a dual personality fireplace that features an ornately carved mantle tacked onto a plainer midcentury brick wall; a common room currently re-purposed as a dining room; and in the kitchen, wall paneling that matches the knob-free cabinets.
- 2169 University Blvd. [HAR]
The very first event at the brand-new West Oaks Art House takes place this Friday night, when the Suchu Dance company performs its first work in the eerie fluorescent-lit cavern left behind by JCPenney when it gave up on its freestanding building at the West Oaks Mall in 2003. The performance kicks off the appropriately named Big Range Dance Festival. It’s not just the repositioning dance of the vacant mall department store: 16 Suchu dancers will range around the enormous space in a piece called “Afternono.” To counter claims that this event is a bit too “way-out” for Suchu’s usual East Downtown audiences, the company is commandeering a trolley-style bus to bring audience members from the Spring Street Studios north of Downtown to the West Houston mall at Westheimer and Hwy. 6.
LA artist Sharsten Plenge, who’s been working to transform the abandoned 100,000-sq.-ft. store into some sort of arts center — in part by offering free rent to artist groups willing to venture so far from their usual haunts and set up shop or exhibits there — tells Swamplot she hopes the inaugural Suchu performance (as well as additional ones on subsequent Saturday afternoons) “marks the beginning of what we hope to be many more unique projects” in the building, which now bears the acronym WOAH.
- 7911 Greenbush St. [HAR]
If the natural world off the many balconies of this River Hollow townhome proves too relentlessly bucolic, just descend into its more urbanized underground garage. The residence-over-parking elevation is a 1980 design by architect Kurt Aichler, whose later work veered into the French countryside with neo-Norman tendencies. Meanwhile, this 30-ish-year-old custom contemporary has been “reconfigured.”
Listed earlier this month at $999,000, the 4,194-sq.ft. home incorporates glass — and lots of it. There are, for example, full-height picture windows in most rooms; curved bays of glass brick, one of which contains a bathroom; and a glass cage elevator linking 4 levels of domain. Now, about those balconies:
Arches. Red tile roofing. Arcades. Timbered ceilings. More arches. It’s a seventies-style revival of a Spanish Colonial Revival model on more than an acre of land in Coward Creek subdivision near Friendswood High School. The home’s footprint is a less-than-lot-filling 4,141 sq. ft. on a street with a little breathing room between residences. The asking price: $675,000. Did we mention the arches?
If this West U mansion on Buffalo Speedway brings to mind a game of Clue, chalk it up to its interior layout — and its inadvertent role in a jewelry pilfering attempt by a house-hunting poseur earlier this year.
As with the classic board game, the listing identifies each room by its function. There’s a Music Room. A Loggia. Even a Billiards Room. It was in a Bedroom back in January, however, that an unassuming early guest at an open house allegedly rummaged through a jewelry drawer. He left quickly and empty-handed, but first “body-slammed” the sales agent who had interrupted him. An account of the incident that appeared in the Village News at the time (no longer online, unfortunately) said the perp, believed to have been working high-end open houses in 2 cities, was quickly ID’d, due in part to a fast-and-furious word-of-mouth campaign among Houston-area Realtors to name him and flush-out his whereabouts — and to remind fellow agents to be careful when showing properties.
The upshot? Don’t be surprised one of these days if you’re asked to show an ID and pose for a cell phone photo at a slightly less open open house. No ID required for this tour, though:
- 682 Lester St. [HAR]
Countertops beneath a high overhang of cabinetry leave an open view in 3 directions from this otherwise ringed-in kitchen in Spring Branch’s Campbell Woods area. The streamlined setup accommodates a breakfast bar doubling as space for food prep and cleanup. Beyond the oven tower, meanwhile, there’s a service window into the dining room.
The symmetry of this home’s front elevation extends right down to the his-and-hers garages off the motor court. It’s a stylized chateau in the Enclave at the Waters of Avalon development. But the interior of the 10-year-old property, newly listed last weekend, is all contemporary:
Picture windows street-side align with sliding glass doors across the back of this 1961 home, so there’s a front-to-back fishbowl view through the living room and into the covered patio beyond. Other windows in the 3-bedroom, 2-bath home are smaller and higher.
This 2,064-sq.-ft. home is a new listing, asking $264,990. It’s located on a 7,800-sq.-ft. lot north of Willowbend Blvd. near Mullins Dr. in the Mayerling Meadows neighborhood of Maplewood. Having hit the half-century mark, it appears to have had a little work done:
- 5906 Echo Lake Ln. [HAR]
