Yes, the shots above are front-yard views of the exact same house on Kimberley Lane in Memorial Hollow, before (at top) and after a thoroughly de-Modernizing revamp completed earlier this year. Just about every sixties-era feature of the original home has been scrapped and “corrected” with — well, something else. The ask for this brilliant flip: a $224K premium over the sales price of the home from December of last year. You are so welcome:
Developer Gerald Hines added a lake to a 32-acre slice of woodsy Memorial back in 1978. Around it, he built Ethan’s Glen, a townhome community with 288 units divided into 2-building clusters of quadplexes. One of the enclave’s larger units came on the market earlier this month, asking $275,000. The 2-story townhome, which has east and north exposures, retains some of that seventies style, such as rough-hewn cedar siding outside and a living room with walls of rustic planks installed in a herringbone pattern. But it also has new paint, new bathrooms, and new, as in last month, carpet upstairs.
House or lot? While the listing mentions this home’s architectural pedigree, most of the photos in the description feature the heavily wooded 2.8 acres on an oxbow of Buffalo Bayou in Memorial’s Village of Hunters Creek.
Built in 1967, the home looks very much as originally designed by architect Richard S. Colley a decade earlier. Houston Mod recently spotlighted the distinctive domain, dubbed the Greer House after its original and longtime owners. Beneath its rooftop pyramid, which has a span of about 30 ft., there’s an even larger interior courtyard with ancillary gardens and a 200-year-old fountain from Mexico. The plantings are a bit overgrown these days since the owner moved out 5 years ago. But here’s how things looked when the property was still occupied:
A PEEK INSIDE HOUSTON’S NEW J. CREW NO. 2 
That topless mannequin will likely have a coverup before tomorrow’s grand opening of the J. Crew inside CityCentre. A Swamplot reader snapped this peekaboo photo of the store’s innards yesterday, through a gap in the window paper. The only other J. Crew store in Houston is in the Galleria (there’s also one in the Katy Mills Mall). Photo: Swamplot inbox
IT’LL TAKE A LITTLE WHILE TO ASSEMBLE THAT NEW IKEA ROOFTOP FURNITURE 
All the pieces are there, but now here comes the hard part. A scene familiar to many IKEA customers is now taking place on a large scale on top of the Houston IKEA store’s roof, where workers from contractor REC Solar are assembling flat-packed stacks of 3,962 solar panels into a 116,400-sq.-ft. PV array. The panels arrived on site at the end of last year, but construction won’t be complete until sometime this summer. When it’s done, the company says, the installation will generate enough energy to power 113 homes — or a larger number of in-store room displays. [Swamplot inbox; previously on Swamplot] Photo: IKEA Houston
COMMENT OF THE DAY: IN DEFENSE OF IKEA’S STARTER SOLAR PANELS “1) The electricity amount is irrelevant. What better option is there for using their rooftop real estate? 2) All energy projects are subsidized. The main differences with solar is that homes and businesses can access energy subsidies generally reserved for much larger corporations who work further upstream. 3) Assuming an install cost of $2.50/W, an effective generation rate of $0.08/kwh, the Fed ITC of 30%, and depreciation, the project has 12 year payback on a 25 year warranty. It’s not great investment, but its a secure, has markting benefits, and increases the resale value of their building. Also, I imagine the recession has curtailed IKEA expansion, which implies IKEA is running out of depreciable assets. 4) Most state and local incentives are giant wastes of money, but Houston has none. In fact, it is the largest US city without a net-metering policy, and as such you can’t eliminate your electric bill with 100% on-site power generation in Houston anyway.” [SolarWonk, commenting on Houston IKEA Going Solar]
SELLING THAT MIDCENTURY MODERN TO THE BIG-HAIR CROWD 
A reader notes an agent’s efforts to sell the sleek 1956 mod at 434 Faust Ln. in Memorial Bend — the 2,233-sq.-ft. property was listed at the end of last week for $549,000 — on those little conveniences. Reads the listing caption to the image at left: “Large custom travertine shower niches are big enough to accommodate shampoo bottles purchased from Costco.” [HAR, via Swamplot inbox]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY THEY WOULD HAVE HAD TO GUT JERRY J. MOORE’S MANSION ANYWAY “By the way, I still have the interior room keys to that house. Each was unique and labelled in French. Plain nickel plated keys for the utility areas, bronze keys for the secondary bedrooms and elaborate sculpted gold keys for the formal areas. It was quite a unique place.” [John McReynolds, commenting on On Second Thought, Nevermind: The $5 Million Gut-and-Flip of Jerry J. Moore’s Little French Castle in Houston]
LAWSUIT CLAIMS PINEY POINT VILLAGE IS USING HUNTERS CREEK VILLAGE AS DETENTION POND 
A waterflow restrictor the city of Piney Point Village secretly installed in a new stormwater system it shares with Hunters Creek Village is now the focus of 2 separate lawsuits. The latest, filed last week, includes claims that the bricked-up storm drain — narrowing a culvert under Hedwig Rd. connecting the 2 Memorial villages from 36 to about 8 inches — effectively turns Hunters Creek Village into a stormwater storage facility for its downstream neighbor. Piney Point Village officials claim the restrictor prevents Hunters Creek from draining more water from Kemwood Dr. through the new culvert than the 2 municipalities had originally agreed upon. Rainstorms on January 9th and 25th flooded Kemwood with 4 ft. of water, which backed up into residents’ yards. Hunters Creek’s second lawsuit calls the narrowing of the culvert “deliberate sabotage” put in place to force the city to sign off on a drainage study. [Memorial Examiner] Photo of Kemwood at Hedwig Rd.: Rusty Graham
PRINCE’S HEADS FOR NORTH POST OAK 
Reader Marcy Basile notes the former location of the French Press Cafe at 1201 N. Post Oak Rd between I-10 and Hempstead Hwy. is now sporting “coming soon” window signs for Prince’s Diner. Same logo as Prince’s Hamburgers, but these ones have a diner label. [Swamplot inbox] Photo: Marcy Basile
HOUSTON IKEA GOING SOLAR 
Houston’s 300,000-sq.-ft. IKEA store on the Katy Fwy. near Antoine — along with 8 other southern-state locations and a distribution center — will soon be covered with rooftop solar panels. The furniture company’s U.S. solar program began late last year. Contractor REC Solar will install 3,962 PV panels measuring a total of approximately 116,400 sq. ft., which IKEA will own and operate, on top of the Houston store by next summer. A company press release estimates the Houston panels will produce 931 kW, for a projected annual electricity output of 1,317,500 kWH per year. [BusinessWire] Photo of panels installed earlier this year in West Sacramento: IKEA
COMMENT OF THE DAY: INSIDE THE KNOWLES FAMILY’S WALMART HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS “That sitting area by the fireplace looks familiar — is that where they filmed the commercial with the band members/family opening up all their gifts from Wal-Mart?” [Hellsing, commenting on Is This the House Behind the House of Deréon? Beyonce’s Mom Tina Knowles Selling Farnham Park Mansion]
Fashion designer Tina Knowles put her Houston estate on the market this week — just days after the London Fashion Week launch of her and daughter Beyonce’s House of Deréon International Collection at Selfridges. Coincidence? Yeah, more than likely. The fashion line of women’s clothing and bedding is named after Knowles’s mother and Beyonce’s grandmother, Galveston seamstress Agnèz Deréon (later Agnèz Beyincé). Knowles founded the House of Dereon line with her daughter in 2004 — the same year she bought this property in the gated Memorial-area neighborhood of Farnham Park off San Felipe, west of Voss.
Boasting 5 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half baths, and the sort of charming, quasi-institutional exterior that could only have sprung from the 1970s, the home is listed at a dollar under $3.5 million. Inside, it’s been done up this way:
Note: Update below.
The hip roof on this 1958 modern home in Knippwood is only 7 years old, but whether it had a different shape originally isn’t clear from the outside photos — they stand back from the building on its 17,120-sq.-ft. lot. There’s no seller disclosure available, and the place is being sold “as is.” What will you find inside?
A reader sends in a drawing showing MetroNational’s long term plans to develop the “Lifestyle Tract” at Memorial City — on I-10 west of Bunker Hill Rd. That new office building going up at 945 Gaylord is the 14-story tower the company is developing for Nexen Petroleum, which is moving its headquarters here from Plano. The Houston Business Journal reported the company would be leasing 250,000 sq. ft. from MetroNational — and that the building would be a mirror image of the Cemex tower to the west.
