05/04/11 3:56pm

This week we’ve all been fascinated with walled compounds. This 4,119-sq.-ft. one on a 5,000-sq.-ft. lot at the corner of Ferndale and Kipling a couple blocks west of Kirby went on the market just last week. It’s the former home of longtime Houston real-estate agent Robin Elverson, designed in 1976 by Chicago modernist Irving Colburn. From the street, you can’t see much of anything inside. Now’s your chance to get a glance:

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04/29/11 10:55am

There’s lumber sliced every which way on the walls here in gated Indian Trails, west of Chimney Rock. This 4-bedroom, 3 1/2-bath home, which sits in the 500-year floodplain just south of Buffalo Bayou, was custom-built for its original owner in 1974, back when people weren’t so uptight as we are today about laying wood only vertically or horizontally. We haven’t seen a house with so many different interior wood treatments since . . . oh, this one in Braes Terrace, a few years ago . . . and that didn’t last too long.

Walls, how can we cover thee? Let us count the ways:

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04/22/11 1:53pm

Listed just last week for just under $1.8 million: the maxxed-out home in Southampton that NBA star Shane Battier and his wife, Heidi Ufer, bought just a couple of months after he joined the Houston Rockets in 2006. Battier was traded back to the Memphis Grizzlies this past February. A few pro basketball players who’ve spent time in Houston have held onto their homes here, but Battier is putting this one up: a quaint little 1905 farmhouse-looking thing expanded and tricked out by previous owners to just under 6,000 sq. ft. Sure, there’s the media room, the game room, the commercial-grade appliances, the big barrel-armed furniture, and the earthy tones straight out of NBA interior design school you’d expect to find here, but there are a few surprises too:

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04/19/11 6:36pm

Reopened yesterday after almost 2 years of construction and renovation: The Oak Forest Library at 1349 W. 43rd St., sporting 2 new brick-and-glass wings on the buildings west side, around a new outdoor reading room. The original building’s signature green tile mosaic wall still faces the Oak Forest Shopping Center’s continuous W. 43rd St. parking lot, but a new second entrance for the neighborhood now peeks out from behind a much greener space on Oak Forest Dr. — across the street from Oak Forest Elementary:

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