May we make your order? How about a battered West Oaks-side Exxon station and a tossed Spring Branch ISD elementary for starters? Plus these tasty condiments:
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COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOUSE POOR OR FURNITURE POOR “Roche Bobois designs are a still a little too blobby (i.e., French) for my taste, but it makes [more] sense to me to buy a $400k mid century mod and fill it with nice Bobois furniture than to buy a $800k faux Tuscan Villa and fill it with Pottery Barn.” [Patrick, commenting on Internum Takes Over Where Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams Took Off]
. . . To Swamplot’s direct advertisers:
- New Leaf Real Estate
- The Texas Art Asylum, featuring “cool stuff for creative reuseâ€
- New Living in the Rice Village, featuring no-VOC paints and coatings and organic mattresses.
- Boulevard Realty
If you enjoy Swamplot, please let these folks know you appreciate what they’re doing here. And drop us a line if you’d like to add your local business to this list and connect with this site’s large and growing audience of Houston real estate fans.
It’s just about summertime, and all you fans of fresh West University produce know what that means: Yes, it’s well past time to set up those security cameras to monitor your vulnerable front-yard fruits. “The camera and fruit-thief deterrent signs have returned,” notes the reader who sent in these photos of this ripe “either peach or nectarine” tree on Tangley, west of Buffalo Speedway. But the security effort actually appears to be a bit more subdued than last year. The bilingual warning signage featured on the tree and a few of its neighbors last season has been replaced with a smaller and simpler handwritten “Camera” warning.
Swamplot’s West U fruit scout says there’s another sign on the other side of the tree “that says something like ‘Don’t even think about it.’” No photo of that? Explains the source: “I was in a hurry and, of course, wanting to stay out of the camera’s wily view.”
- Previously on Swamplot: West U Fruit Tree Warning Update: Bilingual Protection, The High-Security Fruits of West University
Photos: Swamplot inbox
The white house at the corner of Hawthorne and Garrott in the Westmoreland Historic District where Lyndon Johnson lived for a couple of years in the early 1930s got a $50,000 price cut at the beginning of this month: It’s now for sale for $375,000. Johnson came to town to teach public speaking and business arithmetic at the old Sam Houston High School downtown; he shared a room in the house with his Uncle George. By the end of 1931, the future president had moved to Washington to become a secretary to newly elected congressman (and King Ranch heir) Richard Kleberg.
Several readers have written in to report on the apparent demise of the Octane Coffee and Wine Lounge at the corner of 34th St. and North Shepherd. “As of Sunday,” says one correspondent, “the place was shut with a computer-generated ‘Sorry We’re Closed’ sign taped to the door, and a Pink’s employee next door said the owners had been carrying stuff out all day.” The morning and night spot opened almost exactly a year ago, one of the first tenants in the renovated but still-modern Garden Oaks strip center.
- Previously on Swamplot: Shock of the Redo: The Garden Oaks Strip Center Miracle on 34th St.
Photo: Candace Garcia
- 2410 Cleburne St. [HAR]
A little restaurant reconfigurating in the Village, plus some Walmart pre-clearance in Idylwood. And so much more:
This photo, sent straight from the street by a Kirby-cruising reader, shows the brief sign-free interregnum between the rule of Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams and its replacement, Internum, at 3303 Kirby. There’s been no change of ownership at the home furnishings store, and Internum will continue to sell MG+BW lines — at least for a little while. But luxury-goods company European Designs, operator of MG+BW stores in Houston, Miami, and Mexico City, is renaming and revamping its locations, adding in additional furniture brands like Poltrona Frau, Kenzo Maison, Baxter, Cappelini, and Flexform. European Designs also operates the Roche-Bobois stores in Houston and several other U.S. and Mexican cities.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Storied Heights hangout 11th Street Cafe, at the corner of 11th St. and Studewood, is now closed, a tipster reports. It’s scheduled to reopen Saturday with a new menu and a slightly different name: Ruggles’ 11th Street Cafe. The Heights location will be the third in Bruce Molzan’s growing Ruggles Green empire — the counter-service restaurant’s second location opened in CityCentre last year.
Photo: Candace Garcia
Houston wins again! If the world’s current population — all 6.9 billion of us — were packed into a city as dense as Paris, or Singapore, or New York, or San Francisco, just look how piddly it would be. This handy chart from Tim De Chant’s Per Square Mile blog shows how sad, too: The Gateway Arch in St. Louis would probably get lonely, and the Minnesota Twins would lose their all their fans. But what if we all spread ourselves into a city with Houston’s density? Much better, this:
Back in the swing of swinging and crushing and piling and hauling. With these fresh summer recruits:
A web app put together by a 23-year-old German programmer lets you figure out how far you can travel on public transportation within a specific time period from any point in Houston — and 60 other cities worldwide. Give Mapnificent an address and a time limit (say 15 minutes) and it’ll mark on a Google map what areas of town are within your reach. Tell the app if you’re lugging around a bike or the maximum distance you’d be willing to walk to a stop or station and the resulting shapes will change accordingly. As Stefan Wehrmeyer’s video above demonstrates, you can also use Mapnificent to figure out areas where you and your car-shunning friends could meet up within 20 minutes — as well as all the coffee-shop, bar, nail-salon, or Apple Store hangouts available to you. More generally useful: Mapnificent can generate a heatmap for any location, showing what neighborhoods around any particular address are quicker or slower to reach by bus or train. (Note: If you don’t have Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, or a car, you’re out of luck. The app doesn’t work on Internet Explorer.)
Video: Stefan Wehrmeyer
The steel frame of the new Montrose H-E-B is going up along West Alabama St. at Dunlavy, Candace Garcia’s latest photos show. The new supermarket on the site of the former Wilshire Village apartments is scheduled to open this fall.
