06/11/14 4:15pm

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Clear Lake laps placidly (at least for now) at the shore of a Mies-inspired home designed in 1974 by Houston architect Edmund Furley and located in Glen Cove (the one in League City, not the one near Houston’s Memorial Park). The waterfront retreat’s undated renovations (top) are attributed to interior designer J. Randall Powers and William Caudell (the still-living designer, not Bill Caudill the late CRS architect). Photos in the property’s listing last week generously tour the interior and grounds, but present just one through-the-gate peek at the home’s front (above). There’s a $4.3 million asking price dangling above the wowza waterside spread, but its $12 annual maintenance fee appears to be a real deal.

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Weather Channel
05/28/14 4:00pm

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Berry Bayou’s banks lie behind an aqua-tipped and aqua-tinted 1962 mod in Meadowcreek Village. The ravine lot property popped up on the market today, with a $99,900 asking price. Many of the home’s original details are intact:

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Hollowed Grounds
05/07/14 2:15pm

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Almost matching wings of a deep set 1960 “rancho deluxe” mod extend across the front of a wedge lot formed by the street curling off Forest Oaks Dr. in Meadowcreek Village. When listed last week, the asking price was $215,000 for the property — believed to have been custom built back in the day for the owner of Moore Paper Co. It’s still a swank spread offering many period details — and a few curiosities . . .

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Roofing Hangover
04/15/14 11:15am

Park Place Baptist Church, 4105 Broadway St., Park Place, Houston

Park Place Baptist Church, 4105 Broadway St., Park Place, HoustonThe owners of the Park Place Baptist Church building and campus just south of the Gulf Fwy. at 4101 Broadway St. have put the 8.694-acre property up for sale, with a list price of $3.9 million. The building, which also serves as a sixties-mod landmark at the freeway exit for mod-home bastion Glenbrook Valley (not to mention Hobby Airport), has been home to the church since the building was completed. But the congregation no longer owns the facility. In 2002, the property was deeded to the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which is based in Dallas. The campus currently serves as the Seminary’s J. Dalton Havard School for Theological Studies.

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Park Place Baptist
04/01/14 5:15pm

1202 Milford St., Museum District, Houston

1202 Milford St., Museum District, Houston

The few interior photos included in the listing of William F. Stern’s house at the corner of Milford and Mt. Vernon show the 1990 structure stripped of most of its furnishings — but with much of its famed artwork still on the walls. Are those paintings museum-quality, though? Certifiably, it turns out: Stern, who passed away a year ago from pancreatic cancer, willed the house and its artwork to the Menil Collection. The Menil is accepting all the art into its collection, but put the house on the market last month — with an asking price of $1.475 million.

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Paintings Without a Home
03/27/14 5:15pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: YOUR ‘UPDATES’ ARE DATING YOU Updated Kitchen“The ‘needs updating’ knee-jerk reaction that a lot of people have to mid-century moderns is one of the reasons there are so few good ones left. Unfortunately this one had some ‘updates’ at some point, and now those previous updates are, well, dated. If it had been left alone & original, it would still have its classic features and would have more people fighting over it. Of course that wouldn’t appeal to folks who think that anything that deviates from whatever is sitting on the shelves of your local home improvement store or being slapped up by every production builder in the suburbs is somehow bad. ‘Needs updating’ usually just means ‘let’s suck out the character, charm and personality out of it and dull it down architecturally, so it fits the more mundane taste of more mundane people.’ If you find yourself house-shopping and inside a good original MCM and think, ‘needs updating’ just go find the nearest Perry home instead and sign yourself up.” [MCMlover, commenting on Trekking O’er the Terrazzo in a Sharpstown Country Club Estates Home] Photo: HAR

03/04/14 12:15pm

Schirra Family in Front of Home on Pine Shadows Dr., Timber Cove, HoustonThe homes depicted in the teevee version of The Astronaut Wives Club may turn out to be a bit more landlocked than the actual Space Age family spreads they’re modeled after. Location scouts for the upcoming ABC mini-series, which will be based on the book by Lily Koppel, appear to be steering clear of the actual Clear Lake-area neighborhoods the original 7 astronaut families lived in — and pushing west instead. Real estate agent Robert Searcy tells Swamplot the location scouts who contacted him were looking for a neighborhood with original-looking mid-fifties-era houses. So he passed info around to owners he knew about, letting them decide if they wanted to open up their homes to teevee crews: “They also contacted Houston Mod,” Searcy says:

“Apparently [the site scouts] are most interested in what they loosely described as ‘mid-range’ homes of the era, not updated. I got them in a few houses in Glenbrook Valley and a couple in Meadowcreek Village, including the Mackie & Kamrath one over there, but I think some of the mods were a bit too grand for what they are looking for. They seem to be most focused on Willowbend right now. So if you live in Willowbend in a non-updated house, don’t be shocked if you get a note on your door!”

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From Timber Cove to Willowbend
02/24/14 1:30pm

Former Rice Museum, Rice University, HoustonFormer Rice Museum, Rice University, Houston

Online arts publication Glasstire is reporting that Rice University’s public-affairs office has confirmed plans to demolish the University’s most famous metal-sided structure. Known since the mid-1980s as the School of Continuing Studies Speros P. Martel Building, the southern half of the 45-year-old duo was dubbed the “Art Barn,” and was originally home to the Rice Museum, a predecessor to the Menil Collection.

John and Dominique de Menil paid for the construction of both corrugated buildings in 1969, and selected the architects, Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry. The structures were created to house Rice’s art and art history departments, along with the de Menils’ Institute for the Arts, which the couple moved from the University of St. Thomas after a dispute with that institution. The de Menils later left Rice to start their own little Menil Collection in Montrose. The simple, unassuming design of the structures they left behind became the inspiration and model for a series of “Tin Houses” — Galvalume-clad homes designed by Houston architects primarily in the West End and Rice Military area.

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But Andy Warhol’s Tree Will Stay
02/13/14 3:45pm

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Far into the woods of the Memorial Oaks section of Hunters Creek Village, a 1958 contemporary attributed to Houston architecture firm Neuhaus & Taylor seems to defy access. There is, however, a mini-driveway extending from a private road that peels off an equally discrete cul-de-sac street west of Wirt Rd. Originally, the secluded property also had ramps spanning the ravine lot’s “intermittent” stream bed of Briar Branch. Or so reported one of the daughters of the original owners in an online forum about 5 years back.

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Bring Your Squeegee
02/11/14 3:45pm

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Despite an assemblage of botanical print wallpapers reflecting (sometimes literally) another interior design era, a 1975 townhome in gated Indian Trails, west of Chimney Rock Rd., also has a few features ahead of their time: like extra high ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows, and double vanities in the bathrooms. A bit camera shy, the corner property has a $1.17 million price tag and keeps its elevation as under wraps as the perimeter windows in the listing photos. Here’s a possible hint why:

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Garden Variety, or Deeply Closeted?
01/24/14 4:00pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE THE MODS ARE BETTER PRESERVED Wrecking Ball“It is disappointing that we lose so many interesting houses to the wrecking ball. Those of us who live in ‘crimeridden’ (*wink wink*) parts of town can take solace in the fact that at least our neighborhoods’ reputations keep the McMansions at bay. If you can cut through all the stories about crimes that happened ten or fifteen years ago, you can get a great, if dirty, Mod in Sharpstown, just waiting for you to fix it up and bring it back. And you really should look at those houses, because if you don’t, the ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ people will. And they’ll make them worse.” [ZAW, commenting on Your Opportunity To Hack Away at Memorial Bend’s Former Sales Office Has Arrived] Illustration: Lulu

01/21/14 11:00am

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Nubbly textures abound in the interior of this 1960 Mod by Brenham architect Travis Broesche. The low-pitched presence in Meyerland popped up on the market Friday, just in time for an open house over the weekend; it has a $619,000 asking price.

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Yowza
12/10/13 4:00pm

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Once past the Jello-bold color adjustments to the listing’s exterior photo, this 2000 contemporary home by Rice School of Architecture professor Carlos Jiménez unfolds rather quietly on its in-the-trees and oversized lot on South Blvd. in Ormond Place, part of Boulevard Oaks. The property made its market debut in late October. Its asking price then, $3,285,000, remains.

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Ormond Place
11/15/13 10:00am

The uncommon 62 (and a half!)-ft. width of this West University lot near the city’s park on Sunset Blvd. gives a 1992 contemporary home by the late Preston Bolton room to change up the typical front, flow, and footprint found in the plethora of Georgians built around that time in the neighborhood. Bolton’s custom design for the current owner stacks living space back from the street, on a 20-ft.-setback block, and features a well-established lattice espalier as well as distinct geometric gates and grill work a spider would be happy to call its handiwork, despite slightly shaggy landscaping creeping onto the front walkway:

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