From reader Josh Burdick come these graphic images from this morning’s speedy takedown of the Buffalo Grille — the last remaining portion of the shopping center that stood at the corner of Bissonnet and Buffalo Speedway before the H-E-B Buffalo Market took it over. Can H-E-B chew up this breakfast spot and spit out a few more parking spots for grocery shoppers fast enough? A bit more of Burdick’s bite-by-bite coverage:
BLIND ITEM: “POPULAR PUB INSIDE LOOP” FOR SALE — GUESS WHICH Your clues: “This very popular pub boasts great reviews, has been in business for 16 years and is a big hit with the neighborhood crowd as a place for local residents to gather and enjoy adult beverages in a relaxing atmosphere. It is one of the very few places in Houston that has a bocce court (lawn bowling). . . . The median age of their clientele is probably 30-35 and they enjoy playing bocce in their spacious beer garden, watching the world go by from their sidewalk [cafe], relaxing indoors in air conditioned comfort, watching their favorite sports on any of their indoor / outdoor televisions, playing a game of darts, enjoying their favorite music from the internet jukebox or taking advantage of the free Wi/Fi. They are well known for their great beer/wine selection and friendly service.” [BizBuySell, via Twitter user ucalledthewolf]
Ding! That’ll be all for the Buffalo Grille — or its 26-year location at Bissonnet and Buffalo Speedway, at least. The restaurant closed at 2 o’clock today, minutes after serving its last meal (an order of chicken enchiladas, if you have to ask). Next assignment for the building: to go away, and leave behind a few more concrete parking spaces for the H-E-B Buffalo Market.
Sometime next week, a slightly larger Buffalo Grille will reopen a mile to the west at 4080 Bissonnet, on the Academy St. end of the Randall’s shopping center, Weslayan Plaza. Inside will be an even-more-enclosed version of the restaurant’s enclosed patio, plus space for an eventual actual outdoor patio next door:
Listed just last week for just under $1.8 million: the maxxed-out home in Southampton that NBA star Shane Battier and his wife, Heidi Ufer, bought just a couple of months after he joined the Houston Rockets in 2006. Battier was traded back to the Memphis Grizzlies this past February. A few pro basketball players who’ve spent time in Houston have held onto their homes here, but Battier is putting this one up: a quaint little 1905 farmhouse-looking thing expanded and tricked out by previous owners to just under 6,000 sq. ft. Sure, there’s the media room, the game room, the commercial-grade appliances, the big barrel-armed furniture, and the earthy tones straight out of NBA interior design school you’d expect to find here, but there are a few surprises too:
Opened over the weekend: a 1,500-sq.-ft. space at 6115 Kirby in the Rice Village that its owners are claiming is the country’s first non-toxic retail paint store. The Green Painter, a project of green-building supply house and organic-mattress showroom New Living, takes over a former tile store next door to its parent company. Partner Jeff Kaplan says most of the paint and coatings sold at the Green Painter — including its own NOVOC brand and a lower-priced line of contractor-grade paints — won’t have any volatile organic compounds at all, but the store does carry one line of paints for cabinets, trim, and exteriors that qualifies as a low-VOC product.
Photo: Adam Brackman
In an email to the West University city council, public works director Chris Peifer sounds the alarm about the steel-frame home with metal siding currently under construction at 2723 Centenary St., a couple blocks west of Kirby: “As the street view of this structure will deviate greatly from the typical street view/appearance of the neighborhood I wanted to give you notification,†Peifer writes, after noting that the city doesn’t prohibit the use of the materials on the home or regulate “personal taste or esthetics.” And then he adds this: “FYI…Heads up. There are high value properties directly adjacent to this property that may take exception.”
The Museum of Fine Arts’ Caroline Weiss Law Building, with extensions designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, sits on the southeast corner of Montrose and Bissonnet. On the northeast corner of the same intersection, there’s the Cullen Sculpture Garden, designed by Isamu Noguchi; the Contemporary Arts Museum by Gunnar Birkerts looks in from the northwest. And on the southwest corner . . . there’s this pomo villa-model home from 1991, designed by Will Cannady, a longtime architecture professor at Rice. Cannady, better known in B-ball circles as the architect of Hakeem Olajuwon’s home in Sugar Land, built this place for himself and his family on a half-acre Shadyside lot in 1991 but only lived there for a few years. The home’s second owners kept those cute little longhorn and lone-star frieze plaques on the outside of the 5,720-sq.-ft. stucco mansion, but did add an extra column or two. That should justify putting it all on the market with a $5.25 million asking price, no?
Before she moved on to greater fame in Arkansas — and designed a home featured in Sarah Susanka’s Not So Big House book series — architect Sharon Tyler Hoover built this Rather Big House for herself in West U. She was known as Sharon Tyler then. This Ranch Romanesque entry fronts 4,792 sq.-ft. of space on a 11,250-sq.-ft. hunk of land: 3 or 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms decked with floor-to-ceiling tile, a library with blueprint-friendly storage, and a black-and-white checkerboard living area where she planned out her next career moves.
In 2007, Houston’s city council sold a block of Bolsover St. in the Rice Village to the developers of Randall Davis’s Sonoma project so that it could be used as a private drive and restaurant plaza linking two phases of the development. Davis and Lamesa Properties did manage to demolish the neighboring buildings, but Sonoma was never built. Now, the Hanover Company is saying it’s ready to build portions of a 6-story mixed-use building directly on top of part of that street. Plans for the new project, called Hanover at Rice Village, show a large plaza with restaurant seating on the eastern portion of what used to be Bolsover, facing Morningside. But the west half of the block is slated for retail space, apartments, and a private courtyard for residents:
A multimillion-dollar gift from eclipse chaser and Rice University trustee Suzanne Deal Booth will be used to build a monumental sod-covered pyramid that will serve as the focus of the campus’s long central axis. Construction is scheduled to start early next month on the $6 million mound, which will contain a room inside with bench seating, as well as a second level above. At the top of the flat-topped pyramid, a 72-ft.-square pavilion with a square hole cut into the top will frame views of the sky.
Official opening date for the new 24 Hour Fitness Super-Sport club carved out of the old Bally’s space at 2500 Dunstan St., just east of Kirby: This Saturday. Yes, this is only the company’s 33rd Houston-area location. Indoor lap pool, basketball and racquetball courts, towel service, blah blah blah.
Photos: Candace Garcia
A few days ahead of its scheduled public debut later this week, Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia got the new Brockman Hall for Physics to sit still for a brief photo session at its new Rice University home. (That wasn’t too difficult: The structure features underground labs specially outfitted to dampen vibrations.) For the occasion, the university’s newest model chose several different outfits: a gridded terracotta rainscreen over a slip of colored aluminum composite cladding on its southern face, a patterned glass curtain wall silk-screened with a Penrose pattern on the north, and underneath, some plain concrete leggings:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: NOT ENTIRELY WEANED FROM THE BREASTFEEDING STORE “I also find the news sad. The store was so beautiful inside — I felt special walking in to rent a scale, get a consult, buy some clothes, or just use the couches to take a break and feed my babes (with Sandie’s help, I breastfed twins!). I didn’t really understand the name of the store (silly me, I didn’t even realize that it was a store geared toward breastfeeding!) until I had children myself — birthing and breastfeeding a child is definitely work, the work that only a woman can do! My twins are six now. They love walking past the window displays. We’ll have to go again tomorrow, and sit on the couches one last time. The upside of the move is that it sounds like A Woman’s Work is now going to be in the same building as a large pediatric practice; for those families getting breastfeeding help should be easier than ever.” [Joyce, commenting on A Woman’s Work Is Abandoning the Village]
Breastfeeding and baby care HQ A Woman’s Work will be shutting down its Rice Village storefront at the end of March. Owner Sandie Lemke plans to move the store by then to a second-floor office at 4101 Greenbriar just south of 59, where she’ll continue her breastfeeding consulting and sales operation on a smaller scale — and by appointment only. “I . . . made the decision to downsize a bit so I can focus on my passion and what I have always considered my product – Breastfeeding,” she writes in an email sent to customers and forwarded to Swamplot. Breastfeeding classes and consulting, breast pumps for sale or rent, and baby slings will still be available at the new location, as well as bra fitting and maternity support services.
Meanwhile, there’s the most-stuff-at-25-percent-off moving sale at the A Woman’s Work storefront at 2401 Rice Blvd., on the corner of Morningside. Lemke founded the store 20 years ago; it’s been at the same location for more than a decade. A couple of years ago, Lemke closed down A Woman’s Workshop, a gathering and classroom space for parenting support groups that occupied a separate storefront across Morningside.
Photo: A Woman’s Work
