Time for a shopping break! Swamplot Shoppers now trawl the ’nets daily looking for fabulous, freaky, or fantastical finds to suit your fancy. Plus: Gawking at these goods is a great way to support Swamplot. See below for the treasures we’ve dredged up today!
In today’s edition: You have arrived!
Photo of River Oaks: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
A good demolition makes a good end.
Flower Child — the health-minded restaurant that announced it was coming to Houston back in October — will take over the space that houses women’s clothing boutique BB1 Classic in the Cafe Express building at Uptown Park. Bidding is already underway for construction that will turn the 2-story, corner-side store into the new restaurant, whose owners already run North Italia and True Food Kitchen, both located in the same shopping center just south of Uptown Park on Post Oak Blvd. at the corner of San Felipe St.
Ads for a moving sale were posted on the high-fashion retailer’s Facebook page last Thursday. BB1 Classic’s current location opened in 2003. Before that, the store had spots in Memorial City, south of Uptown Park on Post Oak, in River Oaks, and in the Galleria.
Photo: BB1 Classic
Quick, what’s the most vaulted bank in all of Houston? Easy: the lofty Bank of America branch on the ground floor of the Bank of America Center at 700 Louisiana St. Downtown (pictured at top) — so grand, so postmodern, so . . . unleasable. Philip Johnson designed the 12-story high banking hall to resemble “a sixteenth-century Dutch guild hall, albeit one scaled to be seen from the freeway at sixty miles per hour,” writes Joel Warren Barna in a history of the project included in The See-Through Years. But now big changes are planned for that empty space:
“We’re just going to kind of slip in these two floor slabs,” Jeff Sydness of Sydness Architects tells the Chronicle’s Katherine Feser. Sydness was hired by M-M Properties to reconfigure the lower levels of the 56-floor tower, which was built in 1983. So: Lower ceilings ahoy! New mezzanines are now being planned to colonize the banking hall’s towering overhead emptiness. The new structures, edged with glass walls, will fill much of that air-conditioned but unused airspace with workstation- and cubicle-ready office platforms:
Time for a shopping break! Swamplot Shoppers now trawl the ’nets daily looking for fabulous, freaky, or fantastical finds to suit your fancy. Plus: Gawking at these goods is a great way to support Swamplot. See below for the treasures we’ve dredged up today!
In today’s edition: Turning over a new leaf . . . for a new year!
Photo of Marriott Marquis: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Picture perfect, open concept, waterfront living.
2017, CHECKING OUT 
What a swampy lot of a year this has been for Houston, eh? Swamplot is taking off early today just to help get the thing over with. Here’s to a better 2018 for all of us, whatever your elevation or watershed. Check back with us on Tuesday, for more tales of what’s notable around town. Photo of Buffalo Bayou Park on a wintry day not too long ago: Marc Longoria, via the Swamplot Flickr pool
What’s happened to this storied Walnut Bend Mod by Robert Pine from the 1960 Houston Chronicle Parade of Homes since it last appeared on Swamplot in 2010? Well, it finally sold — for $120K — the following year. (In 2014, it traded hands again, for approximately $287K, without making an appearance on MLS.) Also, new windows were cut into the living room and master bathroom, adding openings to the once-blank stone-faced walls on the front facade. There’s also this brand new screened-in patio, inserted between the carport and the main house in back, like so:
Photo of Chung Tai Zen Center of Houston, 12129 Bellaire Blvd.: Swamplot inbox
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Buildings demolish over us, but leave their shadows behind.
THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN–THEMED BREWERY COMING TO GARDEN OAKS’ BEER ROW 
Construction began earlier this month, reports Jen Para, on a 1,600-sq.-ft. brewhouse for Walking Stick Brewing Co. in Garden Oaks. Also on tap for the 16,948-sq.-ft. site at 957 Wakefield Dr., pictured above from the back, which faces Judiway: a 3,600-sq.-ft. bar and patio featuring the brewery’s 7 beers, each of which is named after a peak in the Rocky Mountains. Walking Stick will sit directly across the street from the volleyball courts at Wakefield Crowbar and its neighboring Great Heights Brewing Co. microbrewery. Petrol Station is at the end of the block, at Golf Dr. [Houston Business Journal] Photo: Walking Stick Brewery
