Tag: 77024

Home Design, Malls, Memorial, Memorial Forest

House on Pine Rock, Houston

House on Beauregard, Houston

Having finished with the Memorial Villages, Robert Boyd’s latest bikeride documentary takes us through the neighborhoods lining Gessner, south of I-10:

The houses here were built mostly between 1959 and 1965. The lots tend to be small compared to those in the Villages (just east of these subdivisions). In fact, if you go immediately south or west, the lots and the houses tend to be larger. This is where Memorial starts to become the more familiar kind of Houston suburb–similar houses on same-sized lots, with developers reusing floor-plans and exterior designs.

As usual, Boyd is on the lookout for anything unusual:

I had a Steve Reich album on my IPod as I rode (Sextet, Piano Phase, and Eight Lines played by the London Steve Reich Ensemble–I recommend it highly), and it occurred to me that a neighborhood like this is like a Steve Reich piece, where there is a comfortable, rhythmic sameness with tiny changes as you go along. The tiny changes wouldn’t have even caught my eye while riding through the much more heterogeneous Memorial Villages, but here they stand out.

After the jump: A few more pix of Boyd’s West Memorial picks!

77024, Frostwood, Home Design, Memorial City Mall, Memorial Forest, Tours

Home Decor

03/28/08 12:00pm

Bring Life to Your Bathroom with This Advanced Staging Technique

Homes for Sale, Interiors, Memorial

1 Comment

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn75tA2g-kI 400 330]

About one minute and 28 seconds into this video advertising a home that’s been on the market since late September of last year, we get a little . . . surprise.

77024, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Mannequins, Memorial, Park at Saddlebrook, Price Reductions, Staging, Videos

Bayou Woods

03/24/08 11:25pm

Sanctioned by the Congregation: The Office Building Next to First Baptist

Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, Houston Architects, Memorial, Office Buildings, Parking, Proposed Developments

1 Comment

Rendering of Proposed Hines Office Building Adjacent to First Baptist Church, Houston

A reader directs our attention to this proposed 16-story office building facing the south side of the Katy Freeway, just outside the Loop — on the current site of a Houston’s First Baptist Church parking lot.

Hines plans to build the office building and an 11-level, 1,500-car parking garage on the lot, which the developer would lease from the church. The congregation has already voted to authorize church representatives to finalize and sign a 99-year ground lease for the property.

The garage would help solve the church’s chronic parking problems: According to the HFBC website, 300 cars currently park off-site on weekends. With the Hines development, the church would lose the 480 spaces in the lot now available during the week, but gain 1,500 spaces for church use on weekends and after office hours.

Below the fold, lots more images of the proposed office building and garage on HFBC property.

77024, Bayou Woods, Churches, Commercial Real Estate, Ground Leases, Houston Architects, Katy Freeway, Memorial, Office Buildings, Parking, Parking-Garages, Proposed Developments

Buying and Selling

03/20/08 9:32am

Piney Point Party Pad Postscript: Sold for $1.47 Million

Piney Point Village

230 Blalock Rd., Piney Point Village, Houston

We have a winner! The house at 230 Blalock, which the City of Piney Point Village bought last year — with the intention of using as its first-ever inside-city-limits city hall — has at last been sold . . . at a $60,000 loss, excluding commissions. The buyer, according to the Memorial Examiner, is U.K. resident Edward L. Solari.

The home had been on the market since last summer, when city council gave into pressure from Piney Point residents opposed to housing their city hall in a $1.53 million party pad . . . in a residential neighborhood.

After the jump, one last longing look inside the City Hall That Might Have Been!

77024, Buying and Selling, City Hall, Homes for Sale, Piney-Point-Village

Commercial Real Estate

03/17/08 9:54am

New Memorial Hermann Tower: Great Location for a Head Office

Highrises, Medical Buildings, Memorial City, New Construction, Real Estate Marketing

6 Comments

Memorial Hermann Tower at I-10 and Gessner Under Construction Newspaper and radio technology answer guy Jay Lee snaps this photo of the new 30-story Memorial Hermann tower going up along I-10 next to the Memorial City Mall . . . then posts it to the “Look Like a Robot” photo pool on Flickr.

Does he realize offices in that robot-head are available for rent? From a January report in the Houston Business Journal:

Marshall Heins, Memorial Hermann’s real estate guru, says he gets asked about the cone at least four or five times a day by inquiring citizens.

The top three floors of the cylinder will house mechanical systems, but the bottom three floors will house small offices. . . .

The cone’s footprint is 2,500 to 3,000 square feet, while the office floors below in the main building have a 25,000-square-foot floor plate.

Building developer MetroNational Corp. will lease the three small floors to tenants, but Memorial Hermann will not be one of them. No word yet from MetroNational on who might occupy the special space.

After the jump: what the whole thing’s supposed to look like when it’s finished!

77024, Commercial Real Estate, Highrises, Medical Buildings, Memorial City, New Construction, Office Buildings, Office Space, Real Estate Marketing

Bunker Hill Village

02/11/08 1:07pm

Holy Name Giant Homes

Buying and Selling, Land Sales

Holy Name Retreat Center at 430 Bunker Hill Rd. in Bunker Hill Village That 10-acre Holy Name Retreat Center parcel in Bunker Hill Village is being snapped up by Black Diamond Development and Abercrombie Builders, who tell the Memorial Examiner they’ll build 19 new homes on the property that “exhibit the degree of quality consistent with the affluent neighborhood.”

They’ll also apparently exhibit the degree of enormity consistent with extracting the highest possible price from the dollars-per-square-foot equation: the houses will range from 5,000 to 7,000 square feet.

Custom builders acquire Holy Name Retreat property [Memorial Examiner]
Twenty-One New Houses in Bunker Hill Village? [Swamplot]

77024, Bunker Hill Village, Buying and Selling, Homesites, Land Sales

Historic Preservation

01/29/08 11:15am

Just Listed: Fifties Bayou Cool

Home Design, Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Interiors, Memorial, Open Houses, Real Estate Marketing, Renovations

Family Room of 403 Westminster Dr., Houston

A reader reports that the Frame House, a fifties-Modern classic tucked off Memorial Dr., is up for sale for a cool $3 million. Designed by Houston architect Harwood Taylor in 1960, this is about as close to a Case Study House as Houston ever got — and it perches just about as close to Buffalo Bayou as you’d ever want a home to get. Its recent restoration from a mid-eighties whitewashing earned the current owner, his architects, and builder a local preservation award.

If you’re a fan of this kind of Modness, the best news of all is that you don’t have to pay to play: An open house is scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, February 17th. If you’re not a fan, you can visit and imagine how it would all look with crown moulding and a nice, traditional pitched roof.

After the jump, a few more details about the home, plus a demonstration of the real value real estate agents can bring to a fine listing like this.

77024, Buffalo Bayou, Historic Preservation, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Houston Architects, Interiors, Memorial, Modern Design, Open Houses, Real Estate Marketing, Renovations, Restorations

Hilshire Village

01/18/08 9:05am

Memorial North: Hilshire Village and Spring Valley Bike Tour

Home Design, Memorial Villages, Spring Valley, Streets

House on Winningham Ln., Spring Valley, Houston

What makes Hilshire Village and Spring Valley different from the rest of the Memorial Villages?

Both these Villages are north of I-10, which for Memorialites is sort of the wrong side of the tracks. Indeed, if you look at the household income of 77055 in the year 2000, the zip code that encompasses Hilshire Village and Spring Valley, it is $36.7 thousand. The average household income in 77024, which consists mainly of the southern Villages, is $82.6 thousand. The two northern Villages, however, are probably far closer to the Southern Villages in terms of wealth. It’s simply that as you go north and east from Spring Valley and Hilshire Village, you enter more working class neighborhoods, with lots of Hispanic and Korean immigrants. They may not be rich, but they are strivers, and the area North of I-10 on the Westside is, I think, getting wealthier and more middle class.

Robert Boyd returns from his latest bicycle tour — through Memorial’s northern outposts — with photos of his finds: wobbly Metro bike racks, shed-roof seventies Modern Memorial classics, ivy art, creekside barbecue, Tae Kwon Do parking-lot attendants, low-calorie McMansions, plus a couple of misplaced Victorians and a faux Adobe.

Houston Streets 11 — Hilshire Village and the eastern end of Spring Valley [Boyd’s Blog]
Previously in Swamplot: Farnham Park Neighborhood Watch: Beware of Bicyclists Bearing Cameras and Sculptures and Vultures: East Hunters Creek Village Bike Tour

Photo of house on Winningham Ln.: Robert W. Boyd

77024, 77055, Hilshire-Village, Home Design, Memorial Villages, Spring Valley, Streets, Tours

Charnwood

01/14/08 8:50am

Farnham Park Neighborhood Watch: Beware of Bicyclists Bearing Cameras

Farnham Park, Streets

House on Farnham Park, Houston

Intrepid bicycle blogger Robert Boyd ventures into two more tony westside residential neighborhoods: Farnham Park and Charnwood — only to be hassled by security guards:

Now apparently some residents were alarmed to see me riding in their neighborhood taking photos. So the guards gave me a lot of shit when I left, and they strongly implied that this was private property and that I was not allowed to take photos. It was a humiliating dress-down, which I would have gladly avoided. I was afraid they’d try to hold me or call the cops, but they took my personal information (which if I had any guts, I would have denied them*) and let me go.

No pics of the security gates guarding a public street in his report, but plenty of languorous estates nestled behind twiggy foliage. A sympathetic commenter offers Boyd these words of encouragement:

I understand that these people are wealthy and value their privacy, but if you don’t want people taking pictures, don’t build such a great house.

A great number of Houstonians in other neighborhoods are already taking this advice.

After the jump: Boyd provides photographic evidence that Briarbend Park has Buffalo Bayou’s best front-row seats.

77024, Briarbend Park, Charnwood, Farnham Park, Gated Neighborhoods, Streets

Hunters Creek Village

01/07/08 8:51am

Sculptures and Vultures: East Hunters Creek Village Bike Tour

Memorial Villages

Shasta Dr. Near Buffalo Bayou

Biz-school student, blogger, and former comic-book publisher Robert W. Boyd takes web visitors on a bicyclist’s-eye-view tour through the rolling meadows of east Hunters Creek Village, reporting on real-estate values and encounters with wildlife — and peppering his travelogue with advice to neighborhood homeowners on naked sunbathing and monumental sculpture.

. . . the instant you leave Hunter’s Creek going east, there are apartments. I suspect Hunter’s Creek is zoned to exclude them, but they are bunched right along the boundary of the Village (despite the fact that the area along Memorial between Hunter’s Creek and the Loop is some of the richest real estate in the city–I guess it still makes sense to have apartments there).

Biking the Streets–East Hunter’s Creek Village [Boyd’s Blog]

Photo of home on Shasta Dr. near Buffalo Bayou: Robert W. Boyd

77024, Hunters Creek Village, Memorial Villages, Streets, Tours

Bunker Hill Village

11/13/07 9:51am

Twenty-One New Houses in Bunker Hill Village?

Buying and Selling, Development Restrictions, Land Sales

Holy Name Retreat Center at 430 Bunker Hill Rd. in Bunker Hill Village The lovely and heavily wooded Holy Name Retreat Center in Bunker Hill Village is selling off 10 acres of its 20-acre property at 430 Bunker Hill Rd. The Congregation of the Passion of Christ, which operates the retreat and is based in Chicago, needs the cash “in order to meet certain financial needs, including caring for elderly members of the religious order,” reports Norm Rowland in the Memorial Examiner.

Commercial buildings and apartments aren’t allowed in Bunker Hill Village, and homesites must be at least 20,000 square feet.

Holy Name plans to sell off part of Bunker Hill property [Memorial Examiner]
Holy Name Passionist Retreat Center

77024, Bunker Hill Village, Buying and Selling, Development Restrictions, Homesites, Land Sales

Historic Preservation

10/18/07 10:00am

Fifties Cool Revived: A Houston Case Study

Home Design, Houston Architects, Interiors, Memorial, Renovations

Sunken Play Area at the Frame-Harper House, Houston

Texas Architect magazine features a home that shows what the famous postwar Case Study program of modern steel houses might have looked like if it had landed on bayou banks in Houston instead of L.A. hillsides.

Of course, what was cool in the fifties wasn’t especially appreciated in the eighties. The home’s second owners

removed the terraced landscaping and painted the entire house white, including its darkstained walnut paneling and load-bearing walls of pink Mexican brick. They filled sunken terrazzo soaking bathtubs in children’s and parents’ bathrooms with concrete. They removed the lacy, cast-plaster screens separating the living and dining rooms designed by Gloria Frame’s father, Joseph Klein, and the unusual turquoise St. Charles steel kitchen cabinets with their little shiny stainless steel legs. In the main living areas they covered over a series of recessed light coves in the ceiling depicted in superb photographs by Ezra Stoller, which were published in House & Garden in September 1961. They also replaced the original copper roof flashing with galvanized steel flashing that had rusted to the point of failure by 2004 when the house’s third owner, Dana Harper, persuaded them to sell it.

After the jump, more swank pics from Harper’s expensive restoration of this cool modern home off Memorial Dr.

77024, Buffalo Bayou, Historic Preservation, Home Design, Houston Architects, Interiors, Memorial, Modern Design, Renovations, Restorations

Buying and Selling

10/12/07 12:01pm

Due Today: Bids for Piney Point Party Hall

Homes for Sale, Piney Point Village

The Party House That Might Have Been City Hall for the City of Piney Point Village, Texas

Remember the $1.53 million party house the City of Piney Point Village bought back in April? The one it wanted to use as City Hall, because City Hall was being kicked out of a strip center outside city limits? Remember how Mayor Carol Fox was all excited about it, and didn’t think they’d even need to redecorate? And how local residents were all upset about a City Hall in a Party Pad moving into a quiet residential neighborhood and having visitors park in a church lot across the street? Sure, the place looked cool, but what would it be like holding police court in the pool room?

Well, it didn’t work out. The mayor backed down, City Hall moved to a third-floor suite in an office building on Woodway, and the house was put back out on the market for bids, which are due today. There were 30 showings, but only three bids had come in by Monday. How will Piney Point Village do on its city hall flip? Stay tuned!

Most of the fun throughout this adventure, of course, has been eavesdropping on politicians trying to play the housing market:

Councilmember John Ebling asked the council to allocate about $3,500 for painting and minor repairs to make the house more attractive to potential buyers. Councilmember Susan Jones objected, saying that most buyers want to do their own painting.

Council opening bid Friday for Piney Point house [Memorial Examiner]
Kicked Out of Strip Center, City Hall To Move to Area House, Spook Neighbors [Swamplot]
230 Blalock [HAR]

77024, Buying and Selling, City Hall, Homes for Sale, Piney-Point-Village

Daily Demolition Report

09/17/07 7:36am

Daily Demolition Report: Allen House Parting

Demolitions

Demolition begins at the Allen House Apartments, plus a few other structures around town. See our daily list of Houston destruction sites after the jump.