Tag: 77024

Memorial City
09/02/11 1:47pm

The Cranes Come to Bunker Hill

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New Construction, Office Buildings, Shopping Centers
19 Comments

What’s that looks-kinda-huge project going up on the southwest corner of I-10 and Bunker Hill Rd., just east of the Memorial City Mall? A reader writes in with some info, but wants to know more: “Anslow Bryant, the company responsible for the lotus-blossom-topped Memorial Hermann Tower, is handling the project. There’s a couple of cranes doing crane things and a temporary fence lining the spot already. In addition to spicing up that desolate parking lot, the project means the demise of the nearby Spec’s and the other four or so forgettable places that line that dilapidated strip center, too. Do y’all know anything? Tell me it’s something cool and not just an office building or a La Quinta.”

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Disaster Aftermath
09/01/11 1:29pm

Houston Tree Massacre Body Count

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Landscape, Memorial Park, Quicklink, Trees
14 Comments

HOUSTON TREE MASSACRE BODY COUNT For full effect, Trees for Houston executive director Barry Ward counts the number of local trees expected to die and be removed over the next 2 years because of the recent drought: 66 million. (Okay, but how many of them will we get to carve up for mermaid and doggie sculptures?) That’s 10 percent of the greater Houston area’s branch-bearing population right there. At Memorial Park, 400 of approximately 1,000 close-to-dead trees have already been removed. More fun urban deforesting facts: Already, more trees have been destroyed by the drought than by Hurricane Ike. [Culturemap; watering hints] Photo: Houston Tomorrow

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Homes for Sale
06/22/11 6:08pm

Now Visible from Google Maps: The Jet Set Life in Memorial Forest

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Memorial Forest
15 Comments

It’s certainly not the first aircraft to show up in a Google Maps satellite view, but this Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 found lounging on Broken Bough St. just east of Gessner may be the first to be found through a real estate listing. A reader came across a portion of the airplane image in the HAR map view of this 1961 Memorial Forest Ranch listed for sale one street over. The home features 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, a den with fireplace and backyard view, and is conveniently located on the flight path to Hobby Airport.

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Buying and Selling
04/18/11 9:33am

On Second Thought, Nevermind: The $5 Million Gut-and-Flip of Jerry J. Moore’s Little French Castle in Houston

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Demolitions, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Sherwood Forest
33 Comments

If, when the place was up for sale last year, you only liked what you saw of the legendary ornate sorta-replica French palace in Sherwood Forest that Houston strip-mall king and car collector Jerry J. Moore pieced together for himself from actual French parts, you’ll absolutely love the home in its latest incarnation: The 12,734-sq.-ft. interior has now been gutted completely. And, the home’s current owners hope, you’ll be willing to pay about $5.15 million more for it in its current condition than they were when they bought it about this time last year for just $3.75 million — you know, when the interior had things in it like floors and walls and ceilings, not to mention functioning electricity and plumbing. Also swept away by demolition crews for today’s more sophisticated, imaginative, and demanding buyer — Moore’s famous 26-car garage at the back of the property, with the “treehouse” quarters above it, as well as the poolhouse. Listing agent Diane Kingshill of Martha Turner Properties tells Swamplot both of those structures were in poor condition and had mold.

But if any mold was also hiding in the marble flooring, chandeliers, or extensive wood paneling of the main house, it’s clearly gone now. All that sweat equity put in by the current owners has many more benefits — certainly enough to justify the $8.9 million asking price with which the home has returned to this year’s much stronger market. Just see what interior vistas have been opened up, in a home once full of visual obstacles:

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Demolitions
03/25/11 4:27pm

How They’re Making More Land in Piney Point Village

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Land Sales, Piney Point Village, Trees
6 Comments

The reader who sent in these photos of what appears to him to be the impending demolition of the house at 252 Piney Point Rd. tells Swamplot he can’t tell from the markings which trees are scheduled to come down with it — the ones with the red ribbons or the ones with the green: “There are too many to count and are almost all over 50′ tall.” The 5,022-sq.-ft. house on the almost-an-acre lot dates from 1955. The new owner bought the property last December for north of $1 million, but less than the $1,240,000 asking price. The listing included several photos of the “park like setting” just a couple of blocks north of Memorial Dr. but none of the home.

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Brookwoods Estates
03/09/11 1:58pm

The Sound of the 290 Expansion

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Freeways and Toll Roads, Holly Park, Neighborhood Disputes, Sound, Timbergrove
13 Comments

A small group of homeowners that includes residents of Timbergrove, Brookwoods Estates, and Holly Park have filed a lawsuit against the Federal Highway Administration claiming that the agency approved the expansion of Hwy. 290 along the 38-mile stretch from 610 to FM 2920 last August without properly analyzing how noise from the project would affect their properties. In the filing, the plaintiffs say they are not opposed to the project, but are concerned that TxDOT’s environmental studies of its planned elevated roadways at the 610 and I-10 interchanges — some of which will reach as high as 100 ft. in the air — didn’t account for noise impacts on Memorial Park and the Houston Arboretum as well.

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Bunker Hill Village
03/09/11 11:24am

Bunker Hill Mod in the Rough: Taking in a Strey Lane House

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Home Design, Homes for Sale
15 Comments

For sale by owner: One flat-roofed Memorial Mod, decaying in leafy solitude — it’s been uninhabited for the last several years. The home was commissioned in 1954 by Bernhardt O. Lemmel, who came to Houston to head the art department at the University of Houston, and his wife, who served as the general contractor. Designed by M. Bliss Alexander, the 2-bedroom home features all those midcentury greatest hits: clerestory windows, a multi-sided fireplace, terrazzo, and sliding doors facing its wooded lot.

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Homes for Sale
12/27/10 2:04pm

Holding Court in Hunterwood

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Hunterwood, Interiors
11 Comments

This early Nixon-era single-story at 418 Thamer Circle, which hit the market a few days before Christmas, offers plenty of domestic secrecy: no windows onto its Hunterwood surroundings, a walled-in central courtyard with a pool, a long and curving front driveway, and a three-quarter-acre lot on a cul-de-sac. And you’ll find plenty of era design in this home just north of the fairways of Houston Country Club, too: skylights, crimson laminated countertops, an old-school intercom system, and a showroom’s worth of sliding glass doors. Plus some old wallpaper styles that you didn’t think you’d have to kick around anymore:

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Demolitions
12/10/10 1:44pm

Jerry J. Moore’s French Chateau Is Still With Us — At Least Most of It

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Home Design, Renovations, Sherwood Forest
1 Comment

Back in August, Swamplot noted that a demolition permit had been purchased for the home at 306 E. Friar Tuck, the notable former estate of strip-mall king Jerry J. Moore. Moore’s chateau was a true Houston-style original. In other words, it wasn’t your usual pretentious imitation of some old building style from some faraway country; instead, it was an imitation at least reputed to have included actual original old French building parts transported from across centuries and an ocean or 2 to Houston, and reassembled here with great care and some semblance of appropriateness. All of which has over the years allowed the entire assemblage to gain a certain authenticity — you know, in that uniquely Houston way.

Moore died in 2008. In May of this year the home was sold at a much-discounted price of $3.75 million to — appropriately enough — the CEO of a firm that helps other companies outsource their business processes. But three months later, after the property popped up in the Daily Demolition Report, Swamplot was unable to confirm the extent of the planned demo. Sure, work was already taking place on-site, but the permit was broad, and different sources were providing incomplete and contradictory information about whether the new owner planned to demolish all, some, or simply minor portions of the structures on the lot. Now, the dust has cleared enough to give us a partial answer.

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