Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
No diving in allowed, unless it’s with an excavator.
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- 2225 Devonshire St. [HAR]
A set of unattended display posters spotted during Rice University’s graduation weekend appear to show interior and exterior renderings of the campus’s planned opera house. The drawings (which were reportedly laid out somewhere in would-be-next-door Shepherd School of Music’s building) included a campus site plan showing the rendered structure’s footprint in place between the existing music school and the remaining stadium-side parking lots.
Rice announced back in early 2014 that Diller Scofidio + Renfro would be the architect for the project — but this design doesn’t really look like the kinds of projects DS+R is known for. DS+R hasn’t yet responded to Swamplot’s attempts to confirm whether or not the firm is still involved.
Included with the presentation materials was the foamcore model below, which renders the building’s ornate exterior details in full 2D and demonstrates some additional landscaping options:
Lifting the Curtain
First order of business at all future meetings around Motile: achieve full consensus on table height. The rendering above from Mayfield and Ragni Studio shows the Houston architecture and design firm’s plan for an adjustable conference table, allowing working teams to alternate at will between sitting and standing (so long as they can unanimously agree on exactly when to do so). The table is headed for this summer’s NeoCon design trade show, where it’s in the running for a HiP award; if you like the idea, the trade show’s online voting system appears to still be operational (though the voting period appears to have formally ended yesterday).
Renderings: MaRS
Table the Motion
Today’s sponsor is the 2-story, 3-bedroom, 4-bath Unit 304 at the Memorial Cove Lofts. Swamplot appreciates the support!
No, the 3,262-sq.-ft. third-floor loft space didn’t look like this back in 2002, when the 20-unit building at 6007 Memorial Dr. was completed. It’s been completely redone — with new spaces, finishes, lighting, hardware, and appliances. And there’s very little more to do: It’s being offered for sale as a “turnkey” property — with all the new furniture and furnishings included.
Interiors of the 3-bedroom, 4-bath loft space were designed by the Chairma Design Group; construction was completed by Morning Star Renovations. The Memorial Cove Lofts building faces Memorial Dr. directly across Glen Cove Dr. from the visitor center for the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens; Memorial Park is less than a half mile in the opposite direction.
The 2-story great room (pictured above) is now the heart of the loft, allowing views into a portion of the master bedroom suite above. Two other bedrooms, each with their own bathrooms, are up the steel floating staircase as well. A wine room flanks the unit’s entry; a separate media room is adjacent to it and the great room as well. The property comes with 2 assigned covered parking spaces and a private storage room.
There’s a whole lot more to look at and appreciate on the property website. You can find out more about the offering there, as well as get views of the balcony, bedrooms, and other reimagined spaces. If you like what you see, you’ll want to come to the open house this Sunday, June 5, from 2 to 4 pm.
Got a spectacular interior vision you’d like to share? Why not try featuring it on Swamplot?
Sponsor of the Day
The jutting, Tyvek-wrapped facade of the under-construction Krispy Kreme donut shop at 3055 S. Loop W. has looked like this for a while now, says a reader curious about the store’s progress. Following the North Carolina pastry chain’s complete retreat from the area in 2006 after a lawsuit with its main regional franchisee, the company opened 2 new Houston stores in 2015, though the announced-then-retracted February grand opening date of the Hwy. 6 location turned out to be much more December-ish than originally planned.
Eater attributed the slow-off-the-line opening to permitting delays, though regional franchise manager Guillermo Perales told the HBJ that the delays had to do with fears that the crowds would be too large for the store’s originally-planned infrastructure to handle. As for the South Main store? Posted to the inside of the front window is a highlighted letter from October documenting the donut stand’s theoretical ability to withstand hurricane-strength winds:
Slow Rise in South Main
- Hundreds of Homes Impacted by Historic Flooding in Fort Bend County [Houston Public Media]
- Construction To Start This Month on Model Homes for First Phase of Elyson Community Near Grand Parkway [Realty News Report]
- Transwestern Sells Sugar Land Business Park Tract To Be Developed into a New School [HBJ]
- Houston’s Hostel Scene Slowly Grows with Midtown Hostel Slated To Debut Next Year [Houston Chronicle]
- Boutique Stationary Bike Company Peloton To Open Houston Showroom in the Galleria [HBJ]
- EaDo’s The Cajun Stop To Slowly Turn Spring’s The Tamale Pot into Second Location [Culturemap]
- Houston Falls 18 Spots to No. 24 Among Large Cities on Forbes’s ‘Best Cities For Jobs’ List [HBJ]
- ExxonMobil May Face Many Millions in Fines After Federal Court Reverses Baytown Refinery Decision [Houston Public Media]
Photo of flooding in Richmond: Bill Barfield via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
Without forgetting these houses it is quite impossible to live at all.
- 3909 Rusk St. [HAR]
DEPT. OF PUBLIC SAFETY TO UT: PLEASE DITCH THE PHOTOS OF FLOOD-RELATED CHEMICAL SPILLS WE DIDN’T NOTICE Meanwhile, in Austin: Texas Department of Public Safety officials have recently asked the University of Texas to remove an online collection of aerial photos taken by the Texas Civil Air Patrol during major flooding events, Marty Schladen writes in this weekend’s El Paso Times. The request comes after the Times reported earlier this spring on what appeared to be photos in the database showing a number of chemical spills not captured in any other state monitoring records, including spills along the Trinity river north of Galveston Bay; other photo sets previously on the site reportedly included shots of Houston sewage treatment plants being flooded on Tax Day, as well as possible unreported spills along the Colorado, Sabine, Red, and Pecos rivers since 2014. DPS Spokesman Tom Vinger tells the Times that pulling the photos is a matter of protecting privacy — “for example, there could be pictures of deceased individuals prior to family members being appropriately notified first,” says Vinger. Non-emergency-responders can still ask for the photos via Public Information Act request. [El Paso Times]
Just in time for Thursday’s Aldi opening in a former strip center in Robindell, a reader sends photos of the newly de-limbed oaks along the edge of the grocery store’s new parking lot (looking along Bissonnet St. northeast from the intersection with Beechnut). Area residents on NextDoor claim the hacking occurred early Sunday morning, noting also that some fresh baby trees have been planted along the same stretch of road. Here’s another view down the same sidewalk, catching both the saplings and the stumps:
Robindell
The latest addition to the street-fronting retail strip planned for the former Alabama Furniture Store site at 2200 Yale St. appears to be a pair of Texas Children’s urgent and less-urgent care facilities. The medical groups are named as tenants in a pair of Braun Enterprises leasing documents filed with the county (which include the 90-degrees-off siteplan above). That’s the planned 3rd non-mobile location of Bernie’s Burger Bus shown on the far right, at the south end of the strip; the other 2 children-themed businesses are shown taking up the remaining 13,112 sq.ft. of leasable space in the center.
A 68-spot parking lot is depicted behind the Yale-facing center, which runs between W. 22nd and W. 23rd streets; the former sites of Fashion Touch Cleaners and Midtown Floors were permitted for destruction about the same time as the now-departed furniture store.
Assigning Seats on Yale St.
The land between the Grand Parkway and Hwy.-6-FM-1960 contained more than 37 percent of the construction sites in Harris County over the last decade, according to the Houston in Flux report and interactive maps released by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research last week. The maps above highlight regions where demolition and construction permits were issued at above-county-average rates between 2005 and 2015. Red shows areas with high demolition rates, blue shows high construction rates, and purple shows spots where both stats beat the average — areas authors Kelsey Walker and Kyle Shelton refer to as high-turnover (mostly concentrated in the Inner Loop and to the northwest).
Each subsection of the walkthrough embedded above contains a “learn more” link that provides access to (and a quick explanation of) various data types that can be displayed. A section on census-tract-level trends (including building, demo, and turnover, as shown up top) is followed by a section allowing a detailed property-by-property browsing of the data, as shown below:
Drawing It Out
- Brazos River Reached Record Level of More Than 50 Feet on Memorial Day in Richmond [Houston Chronicle]
- Drone Captures Footage of Flooding in The Woodlands After Friday’s Rains [Houston Chronicle]
- Debating the Katy Prairie’s Role in Flood Control [Houston Public Media; previously on Swamplot]
- Flooding Forces Free Press Summer Festival To Relocate to NRG Park for Second Year in a Row [Houston Press]
- Multifamily Development The Grand at LaCenterra Apartment Homes Opens in Cinco Ranch [Realty News Report]
- Miami-Based One Real Estate Investment Buys 446-Unit Village at Uvalde in East Houston for $20.3M [Houston Chronicle]
- Inside Houston’s Newest Whole Foods Market Opening June 1 in Westchase [HBJ; previously on Swamplot]
- $50M, 25-Acre Waterpark Typhoon Texas Debuts in Katy [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Austin-Based Gloria’s Latin Cuisine Opening Second Houston Location in Baybrook Mall [HBJ]
- TxDOT Plans To Widen 7-Mile Stretch of FM 1960 Near Humble Once It Acquires Funding, Property [Houston Public Media]
Photo of Typhoon Texas: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report lists buildings that received City of Houston demolition permits the previous weekday.
The pleasure isn’t back, but these are 99% tar free properties.