Here’s a 15,000-sq.-ft. plot of West U. land at the corner of Kirby and Plumb across the street from Rice Village, offered in 2 separate parcels for a total of $750,000.
We know what you’re wondering: Is there a closeup of the property?
And you’re in luck! The HAR listing provides one:
Swamplot mentioned the cancellation of Randall Davis’s Titan condo project in passing yesterday, announcing at the same time that the project had scored the first-place spot in the hotly contested Most Grandiose Development category of the Swamplot Awards for Houston Real Estate. But really, if any 2008 event in Houston real estate deserves its own separate post on Swamplot, this is it.
Davis told the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff that slow sales convinced him to shut down the 25-story highrise project. There’ll be no rearranging of the deck chairs, no putting the project “on hold,” no “My Heart Will Go On.” It’s all over.
But the Titan will be sorely missed.
What will happen to the Kirby Court Apartments just west of Whole Foods? The 1949 garden apartments on oak-lined Steel St. make up the major portion of a 5.744-acre parcel at the northwest corner of Kirby and Alabama being offered for sale or ground lease, the River Oaks Examiner reports. Also included in the parcel being sold by the Dickey Estate: retail properties facing Alabama, Kirby, and Kipling.
Cushman & Wakefield’s flyer for the property brags that there’s “potential to abandon Steel Street for an additional 33,750 sq. ft.” How much abandonment could those oaks survive?
From HAIF, a brief but classic conversation from earlier this week about the house for sale at 423 Electra in Memorial Bend:
Has anyone been inside this house lately? The realtor seems to be a little confused in the HAR listing. It reads that it is 2 bed from 3, has 6 bathrooms, a garage and a manned gate?? well I guess the fence and gate was put in by a man. And its a “absolutely gorgeous must see” and also sold for “lot value”. huh? My biggest question is what’s with that front yard nursery plantings?
Is the house re-muddled too far?
The response, after the jump — from someone who’s been there. Plus: all the remaining photos from the listing!
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE BAYOU Lisa Gray gets a glimpse of the “chai-colored” waters of Berry Bayou behind her 1966-model Meadowcreek home: “Most of the new houses sprouting in the neighborhood did their level best to ignore the bayou. Most of them still do; it’s rarely a selling point. A year ago, I was delighted to find that not only was it possible to buy a non-flooding bayou house for $150K, but that it might not cost any more than a similar three-bedroom house on a neighboring suburban lot. On har.com’s real estate listings, bayou frontage either went unmentioned or hid under the faint praise ‘no backyard neighbors’ — the same thing sellers say when a house backs up to train tracks. When first looking at the house I now live in, I had to stand on an overturned bucket to see over the privacy fence and down to the water.” [Houston Chronicle]
From the Swamplot mailbin, questions about the tower Randall Davis got up:
I would like an update on the Cosmopolitan. I drove by and it looks like barely anyone is living in the building. Roughly 20% of the units are either for sale or lease in the building. Given the problems the Titan is having in sales, can anyone provide insight into the viability of the Cosmopolitan. Does anyone live there? How is it?
The last time Swamplot posted a reader’s questions about the Cosmopolitan, the response was . . . underwhelming. Anybody home?
Photo of Cosmopolitan Tower: HAR
HOLIDAY HEAT “Fireplaces in Houston are kind of like spleens or tonsils; probably used to be necessary, but really just for decoration now, until they flare up and cause a problem, or allow racoons, birds and rats unfettered access to your living room. Along with all the other picturesque images of family life I gleaned from Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney, I always envisioned my home with a fireplace. The only trouble is, Drew makes so much of his own heat that he can barely stand to be near himself without sweating. I’m always moments from losing a limb to frostbite, so it’s difficult for us to agree on a mutually comfortable temperature. But, as you can tell, the fireplace is lit in this photo, so we must be learning to compromise. Indeed. All I have to do to make Drew thrilled to sit in front of a lit fire in December is turn on the fan. And the air conditioner.” [A Peine for Your Thoughts]
The best thing about real estate’s Christmas season? The Easter Bunny gets to take a break.
A few more animal mascots are hiding in the listing photos for this 4 bedroom, 2 1/2-bath home in Sageglen. How many can you find?
Note: Story updated below.
The mystery buyer of the house at 834 W. 24th St. has revealed herself! Quilter, artist, and Art Car builder Kim Ritter, who says she was “raised mid-century modern,” expects to close on the Museum of the Weird on December 15th. Museum curator Dolan Smith is planning his own art sale on the property two days earlier; Ritter says that the sale will run from 2 to 8 pm, and that the prices will be far less than what you’d expect to pay for, say, a sculpture made of hair:
Come by and get a bargain, stuff starting at 5 and 10 dollars!
Ritter tells Swamplot she’s purchased some of Smith’s work herself, including a piece entitled “Man of Ten Thousand Nails,” which she intends to keep on the property.
Does this mean the museum will be preserved?
Showing at the Contemporary Arts Museum next May: a main-gallery exhibit featuring portions of a Houston home dissected and reconstructed by Houston’s favorite teardown artists. DD Demo, aka Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, has a collection of demolition artworks to its credit, but the pair’s most famous sculpted wreck was the 2005 funnel-shaped bungalow disassembly on Montrose shown here, which became popular enough for the Inversion Coffee Shop now on the site to be named after it.
Havel and Ruck’s CAM work, though, needs a willing victim: another home they can pick apart. The leftovers, Havel says, “could be visited as an off site space during the run of the show.”
Havel asks Swamplot:
Are there any developers/architects you or your members may know that may have a lead on a house? Preferably, it should be an older house, wood bungalow type with ship lap wall construction. We would like to secure a teardown soon that would be scheduled for teardown in June. This project would have high visibility in the press and would give owner/developer/architect press and exposure if they want it.
Couldn’t they just stalk a condemned house and do something like this on the sly?
Conspicuously absent from the MLS listing for 834 W. 24th St. in the Heights: any mention (or photos) of the Scar Room, a small chamber of sculptures and small wood panels on which house owner and artist Dolan Smith and sympathetic visitors graphically documented their physical and psychological afflictions. Sample Scar Room decor: “a submerged doll with a piece of rubber hose wrapped around its neck, representing the umbilical cord that nearly strangled Smith at birth.”
But it isn’t too hard to find exacting descriptions of the home online. The Houston Press, for example, featured this bit of color as it celebrated the home’s come-from-behind win of the paper’s “Best Shrine to the Abnormal” award back in 2002:
Donations of every imaginable variety show up weekly: horns, doll heads, a film canister of Tommy Lee Jones’s spit, balls of Saran Wrap, clumps of hair, an appendix, color photos of fallopian tubes and contemporary art of a disquieting nature. Artist/nutball Dolan Smith has turned his Heights bungalow into a mecca for all things weird. . . .
Smith is supplementing his empire of the bizarre with a two-thirds-complete pet cemetery. Last year, Tropical Storm Allison took its toll on the nascent final resting place for pets. Rising floodwaters filled the jars of 32 dead rats, inadvertently creating biological pipe bombs.
Sure, you’re thinking . . . Who’s gonna buy this place?
No problem. Realtor Weldon Rigby, himself no stranger to homes graced by an occasional mannequin, has already done himself proud. After just a month and a half on the market, the home — listed for $150,000 — went “option pending” on November 14th.
Each bedroom of this home at 19502 Gamble Oak Dr. in the Pines of Atascocita has its own distinctive personality!
So . . . what color is the Breakfast Room?
MAYBE SIENNNA IS AVAILABLE? Marketing new themed apartments has got to be tough these days — all those great Southern European-y names are already taken! “Out-of-state developers thought they had coined a great name for their senior living apartments in Katy. Then they found out a nearby master-planned community had already claimed the same name. A joint venture led by Georgia-based Formation Development Group LLC broke ground in May on The Sienna at Cinco Ranch apartments at 24001 Cinco Village Center Blvd., west of Houston. But the site was a little too close for comfort to the Sienna Plantation master-planned community located south of Cinco Ranch in Fort Bend County. So Formation Development formulated a slight change of plans — The Sienna at Cinco Ranch is now going to be called The Solana at Cinco Ranch. ‘There was a little bit of confusion,’ says Karen Thompson, a spokeswoman for the development firm. ‘They wanted to have something that was going to be unique to their property.'” [Houston Business Journal]
MOBILE HOME OF THE $20 TACO The upscale taco truck makes a perfect sales vehicle for themed luxury townhouse developments: “‘Most people won’t even stop at a taco truck,’ [Armandos restaurant co-owner Armando] Palacios said during an event he catered at the Spanish-inspired Caceres development, where townhomes starting at $600,000 were touted to potential buyers, sellers and scenesters. . . . ‘This is a taco truck which we’ve driven to a $5 million home. You arrive, and the truck becomes part of the party.’ Instead of simply bringing chafing dishes filled with taco fixings to a catering gig, Palacios drives his $100,000 truck and cooks food to a client’s order. . . . But Palacios’ truck is a more ostentatious version of the typical taco truck. Just like MTV program Pimp My Ride upgrades clunkers, Palacios ‘pimped out’ a taco truck, giving it a custom paint job. He promotes the catering truck with the slogan, ‘We burn rubber and chipotles.’ ‘It’s like urban chic,’ said Cinda Ward, Armandos co-owner and Palacios’ wife.” [Houston Chronicle]
Inspired by the not-so-unusual tale of the house at 2524 McLendon St. in Brentwood (which was apparently renovated, sold, and then demolished just last month), commenter Jimbo posted this challenge to Swamplot readers — which has so far gone unanswered:
Is there a suitable adjective for the activity of renovating a house to flip only to have the new owner demo it immediately?
An adjective? We’d settle for a noun.
It’s not Sisyphean because I’m sure they made money but there must be some fancy Greek mythology parallel for it.
Yeah, try Greek — or maybe Aztec . . . or some term from the mortuary business, or . . . Ayn Rand?
Photo of 2524 McClendon St.: HAR
