As mods go, this one in Tanglewood is just one of that neighborhood’s thinning pack of mid-century homes. What sets this property apart? Maybe the bomb shelter out back — and the property’s brush with Hollywood as a film set in Breast Men, the 1997 HBO David Schwimmer flick that finally gave Houston its due as the birthplace of the boob job industry. The mid-July listing of this property for $1.1 million calls the 60-year-old property on Sugar Hill Dr. a “wonderful building site” and leaves it at that. But preservation advocates at Houston Mod met with the home’s current, long-term owner and gleaned some tidbits to share about the home’s origins and features:
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77056, Bomb Shelters, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Modern Design, Movies, Tanglewood
From a tall perch nearby, a reader sends Swamplot this shot of the future site of BLVD Place, where — it appears — site work has begun on the land slated to become the second phase of the mixed-use development, including the long-awaited Galleria Whole Foods Market and more than 150,000 sq. ft. of shops. The camera is pointed down San Felipe, looking east toward Post Oak. Here’s another view of the site from the south, from another reader:
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77056, BLVD Place, Galleria, New Construction, Proposed Developments, Retail, Uptown
Has Whole Foods Market finally signed a lease for the store on Post Oak Blvd. near San Felipe that the developers of BLVD Place have been promising since 2007? Yesterday Whole Foods announced it had signed leases for new grocery stores averaging 37,500 sq. ft. in 12 cities, including Houston. Whether that means a new location near the Galleria or somewhere else in the city, it could still be a while before it opens: “These stores,” says the press release, “currently are scheduled to open in fiscal year 2014 and beyond.” [MarketWatch; previously on Swamplot] Rendering: Wulfe & Co. Update, 2:50 pm: The new store will be in Champions.
Read more about: 77056, BLVD Place, Galleria, Grocery Stores, Leasing, Retail, Uptown, Whole Foods
What’s behind the rebranding of the 3 non-Navigation Ninfa’s Mexican Food restaurants — on Kirby at Richmond, Post Oak north of San Felipe, and the Gulf Fwy. feeder Rd. at Winkler — into Maggie Rita’s Grill & Bar locations, and the attendant replacement of the well-known Houston restaurant’s Tex-Mex classics with . . . tapas? Besides freeing himself and co-owner Carlos Mencia from licensing payments for using the Ninfa’s name, Suave Restaurants’ Santiago Moreno explains, switching to the Maggie Rita’s chain means a lighter menu that customers might be able to eat from as often as 3 times a week. But by his calculation the food switch may not make much of a difference anyway: “We’ve found out consumer decisions are made by women,” Moreno tells Eric Sandler. “When we track what makes a woman decide where to eat Mexican food, it has to do with margaritas. It has nothing to do with food.” The changes won’t effect Ninfa’s on Navigation, which has been owned since 2007 by Legacy Restaurants. [Eater Houston] Photo of Ninfa’s at 1650 Post Oak Blvd.: AmREIT
Read more about: 77017, 77056, 77098, Galleria, Restaurants, South-Houston, Upper Kirby, Uptown
Okay, scratch that image displayed here yesterday of the Hanover Company’s new apartment tower in BLVD Place from your memory banks — it was just an early study. Replace it with these 2 images, showing the updated design by Chicago architects Solomon Cordwell Buenz. And plug in this measurement as metadata: 29 stories. The drawing above shows how the 358-unit building would look from Post Oak Ln., just behind the long-promised Galleria Whole Foods Market. The view below is from one of the Four Leaf Towers to the north, at San Felipe and Skylark:
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77056, Apartments, BLVD Place, Galleria, Highrises, Proposed Developments, Uptown
Here’s the rendering Houston’s Hanover Company passed around to drum up the $40 million equity investment its website now indicates is committed to building the structure as part of BLVD Place, just north of the Galleria. The 358-unit apartment tower at the corner of Sky Lark and Post Oak Ln. is listed as a “midrise” in company materials, but it’s all relative: The 20-something stories depicted make the new version a bit shorter than the 57-story design the company had prepared for the site in 2007, as well as the 37-story model announced a year later, before the project got put on hold.
Image: Hanover Co.
Read more about: 77056, Apartments, BLVD Place, Galleria, Proposed Developments, Uptown
Included in the lawsuit filed yesterday by Houston and Harris County attorneys against the owners of Treasures, which labels the Westheimer strip club a public nuisance and attempts to shut it down: allegations that the venue is a site of “human trafficking” — of dancers from Vegas. From Cindy George’s report: “The trafficking allegations stem from police probes revealing that some of the dancers are transported from Nevada to Texas, then from club to club within Houston, and reside in Galleria- area apartments and condos ‘where they are maintained by the pimps,’ [city attorney David] Feldman said at a news conference. . . . ‘They masquerade as legitimate businesses, but these high-end strip clubs like Treasures really are hubs of human trafficking,’ he said, later noting that the establishment averages $20 million in annual alcohol sales. ‘Treasures happens to be the most prominent of these clubs. It’s the largest. It is clearly the most visible and most notable and prominent. . . . We are hopeful that with this action, we serve notice not only on Treasures, but the other clubs out there that Houston-Harris County is not going to put up with this type of criminal activity.’” [Houston Chronicle]
Read more about: 77056, Crime, Galleria, Lawsuits, Nightclubs, Nightlife
Silent sentries accent the brick colonnade and look over the “motor court” of this Lazy River listing in the Tanglewood area. Were the lions not of concrete, they might roam the home’s half-acre corner lot, which has grassy areas, a pool, an outdoor “summer kitchen” with dining pavilion, and an arbor.
Inside, a paneled library of near-collegiate proportions includes a second-floor balcony. Also: a wine cellar.
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77056, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Lazy River, Tanglewood
“To this day, people still refer to 1400 Smith as ‘the old Enron building,’ even though the company collapsed more than a decade ago and Chevron now owns the property. Will 5050 Westheimer face a similar fate? That’s the building that housed Stanford Financial Group, whose founder, R. Allen Stanford, is awaiting a jury verdict on federal charges that he ran a $7 billion investment fraud. . . . Bruce Kink of Keller Williams said the company chose the space for its prime location directly across from the Galleria mall. He doesn’t focus on who used to occupy it. ‘They removed the name out front,’ Kink said. ‘To us it’s 5050 Westheimer.’” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Read more about: 77056, Allen Stanford, Galleria, Houston History, Office Buildings, Real Estate Marketing, Uptown
February 15, 2012 – 12:11 pm
“The place was always odd. There was always more elegance, more shine . . . and yet there weren’t always people to fill the desks. There was more real estate than people. There was just such pomp. It felt like 1955, the way people were dressed and were ushered in and offered coffee in fine china. They had a private dining room — everything was over the top . . . and you’re like, OK, maybe some of these enterprises are making some money. In retrospect, it was like a Hollywood town. It was like the front, but if you peek around the back, it’s just two-by-fours holding it up.” — Houston videographer Dave Henry, who plans to craft a documentary using footage he created for the Stanford Financial Group, describing the company’s former headquarters on Westheimer. [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot] Still: Magpie River Films
Read more about: 77056, Allen Stanford, Galleria, Houston History, Uptown
February 10, 2012 – 3:54 pm
Note: Story corrected below.
Houston’s transit agency is scheduled to close next month on the twice-delayed $550,000 purchase of a 3,589-sq.-ft. strip of land across Post Oak Blvd. from the Waterwall Park — even though the Uptown Line, the light-rail line the land would be used for, isn’t part of its current construction contract, and isn’t even expected to be complete before 2020, according to Metro documents. Negotiated under the real-estate happy regime of Metro’s previous administration, under Metro’s current administration, under an authorization approved by its earlier real-estate-happy board, the contract Metro signed for the property at 3009 Post Oak prohibits the agency from backing out of the purchase — even if its plans or route alignment have changed. But a Metro spokesperson tells Memorial Examiner reporter Michael Reed that the purchase still makes sense, and turns out to be a less expensive option for it than using eminent domain to acquire the parcel later. Going up next door to the site: a 20-story office tower for its owner, the U.S. subsidiary of Swedish development firm Skanska.
Photo: Memorial Examiner
Read more about: 77056, Buying and Selling, Galleria, Light-Rail, Metro, Uptown, Uptown Line
February 2, 2012 – 2:01 pm
Where’s Randall Davis gonna find buyers for the glitzy condos in this new 24-story Uptown highrise he’s planning — you know, the kinds of carefree, fun-loving sophisticates who’d regularly leave all the lights on in their bedrooms at night just to make sure the whole building glows like this? In other countries, probably. But they’ll be moving to Houston soon!
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77056, Condos, Galleria, Highrises, Proposed Developments, Randall Davis, Real Estate Investing, Real Estate Marketing, Uptown
January 17, 2012 – 9:45 am
Workers began taking down the engraved stone Stanford Financial Group sign embedded in the facade of the company’s former headquarters building at 5050 Westheimer last Friday, reader Andrew Tyler reports with this tweeted photo. Federal law enforcement officials raided the building and Stanford Financial offices in Galleria Tower II almost 3 years ago; company founder Allen Stanford was arrested 4 months later. In July of 2010, Woodlands-based Black Forest Ventures bought the 3-story, 71,000-sq.-ft. structure across the street from the Galleria for $12.5 million.
Photo: Andrew Tyler
Read more about: 77056, Allen Stanford, Galleria, Leasing, Office Buildings, Real Estate Marketing, Signage, Uptown
November 14, 2011 – 12:36 pm
A delightful backyard scene at this home in the Galleria-area Del Monte subdivision. But hmmm . . . what’s that lurking behind the wood fence at the rear of the property? Could it be . . . the first of 19 stories of a new luxury apartment tower working its way to the sky? Or something more modest? Strangely, the listing for the just-on-the-market $576K home, at 5237 Chesapeake Way, includes this photo but no further details of the backyard goings-on. And yet there’s a crane and plenty of highrise construction action on the former parking lot on Brownway behind the home, between Sage and Yorktown, just west of the Walgreens on the corner of Sage and Westheimer. A Swamplot reader was kind enough to send in some photos of the project so far — along with a plea that someone who knows something about it provide some details:
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77056, Apartments, Del Monte, Galleria, Highrises, Homes for Sale, New Construction
Comment of the Day: The Drive Home
“I work in the Galleria. When I leave work, all of the main roads near my office and pretty much gridlocked. The first leg of my journey home (from the office to passing under the West Loop is 2 miles, and can take me as much as 30 minutes. (The rest of the trip, once I’m past 610, is a lot better.)
That’s 4 mph, or the speed of a brisk walk.
I’d get home faster walking. But I have no other choices. The bus sits in the same traffic and then would involve transfers and take about 2x as long as driving.
That’s a normal day. Bad weather? Worse. And what happens as Houston grows and more and more people are using those roads? Where do you build more street capacity in the Galleria? We have a non-scalable system in a growing city, and our needs have already surpassed our transportation model in places. It’s only going to get worse.
And what if you don’t have money? What if you have a disability that keeps you from driving – so much for being productive, you can’t get to work. What about when you get old and can’t drive? Sorry, go sit and rot.
That’s freedom?” [John (another one), commenting on Comment of the Day: Parking Lot City]