Swamplot Archives by Tag: 77380

Monday, September 21, 2009

Comment of the Day: What Lies Beneath

September 21, 2009 – 1:21 pm
   

“. . . roads go over top of petroleum pipelines all the time with an agreement & bond to protect them. Citie$, countie$ and large entitie$ do it all the time. The whole of the Woodlands Town Center, including the regional mall there, is built atop a pipeline, which runs alongside the foundation of the Anadarko Tower. Even Lake Robbins, though it’s not at all deep, is on top!” [movocelot, commenting on Comment of the Day: Where the Townhomes Ain’t]

1:21 pm | 7 Comments | Read more about Comments, Hazards, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands Town Center, Pipelines, Quicklink
Read more about: , , , , ,
Friday, September 4, 2009

Openings and Closings: Restaurant Revamp Edition

September 4, 2009 – 11:24 am

What’s new to eat?

  • Opening Soon: Lola, a diner-ish spot serving “American comfort foods” — in the restored and refashioned former Eckerd Drug across from the Heights Post Office on Yale and 11th. This’ll be the third Heights restaurant venture from Ken Bridge, who also runs Dragon Bowl and Pink’s Pizza.
  • Opened This Week: From famed New York, Las Vegas, and Dallas chef John Tesar, Tesar’s Modern Steak and Seafood, directly across from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands. You’ll certainly want to eat everything on your plate when you visit: “Tesar’s entire menu will be one hundred percent sustainable created with a zero-waste food ethics in mind,” declares the restaurant website. Whole fish will be a specialty. Outside: a burger bar.
  • Closed: The Texadelphia in the fast-food-friendly strip center on Memorial Dr. and Asbury, across from Otto’s — reportedly on account of the parking lot being too darn clogged. No worries: You can still get your cheesesteak fix at 3 other Houston locations, and it’s now a bit easier to find a spot in front of the Kolache Factory.

More food fun:

Continue Reading This Story >

11:24 am | Add a Comment | Read more about Neighborhoods: CityCentre, Neighborhoods: Galleria, Neighborhoods: Houston Heights, Neighborhoods: Memorial, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Neighborhoods: Upper Kirby, Openings and Closings, Restaurants
Read more about: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Monday, August 24, 2009

Swamplot Price Adjuster: Woodlands Waterway Faux

August 24, 2009 – 12:25 pm

The Swamplot Price Adjuster needs your nominations! Found a property you think is poorly priced? Send an email to Swamplot, and be sure to include a link to the listing or photos. Tell us about the property, and explain why you think it deserves a price adjustment. Then tell us what you think a better price would be. Unless requested otherwise, all submissions to the Swamplot Price Adjuster will be kept anonymous.

Location: 1 Waterway Ct., Unit 4-E, The Woodlands Town Center
Details: 3 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths; 4,314 sq. ft. in One Waterway Lofts
Price: $1,990,000
History: Just listed over the weekend.

The nominator of this property writes:

Who says the real-estate bubble is long gone? Right on the Woodlands Waterway, here’s a faux Venetian condo in the Waterway Lofts. Can’t you just feel the theme-home synergy? Anyway, it looks like there are some great views of a lot of new office buildings from the windows, and if you look down you can see the Waterway and pool.

Is all that wine included? That might help explain the price tag. That and the fact that the county tax assessment for the loft just about doubled between 2007 and 2008. Montgomery CAD has it at about $1.56 million, which still seems too high.

To be fair though, there are several other overpriced lofts currently for sale in the same building.

In a just world, this condo would rent for maybe just twice its $2,062 monthly maintenance fee, all those Disneytalian finishes would peel off, and you could return all the fixtures to Expo for a refund.

So . . . what would be a better price?

Continue Reading This Story >

12:25 pm | 21 Comments | Read more about Condos for Sale, Home Prices, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands Town Center, Neighborhoods: Woodlands Waterway, Price Adjuster
Read more about: , , , , , ,
Thursday, June 18, 2009

Neighborhood Guessing Game Over: The Scented Woods

June 18, 2009 – 6:33 pm

Guess it didn’t really matter too much that there’s no prize to give out to the winner of this week’s Neighborhood Guessing Game. None of you would have won it anyway.

Weren’t there enough guesses? There were 2 of you who guessed Meyerland, 2 who guessed Willowbend, 2 for Bellaire, 2 for Clear Lake, and 2 for Oak Forest. Not to mention Wilchester, “somewhere between Wirt and Blalock,” “around Timmons Lane,” River Oaks, Garden Oaks, Southgate, Gulf Freeway Oaks, Pearland, Alief, Braeburn Valley West, “the Pasadena Arts & Crafts fair, booths 1-30,” “off Briar Forest, west of Beltway 8, east of Dairy Ashford,” “between Westheimer, Briar Forest, Dairy Ashford, and Kirkwood,” Glenbrook Valley, Linkwood, “Hunter’s Valley/Hunter’s Wood or Prestonwood or Lakewood or Heatherwood or something with the word wood in it,” “in smelling distance of Bellaire/Beltway 8 Chinatown,” on Fountainview, north of Memorial between Wilcrest and Kirkwood, Greenwood Forest, Hunter’s Creek Village, Timbergrove Manor, Lazybrook, “close to Traders Village or Old Towne Spring,” Spring, Maplewood, Oakbrook subdivision in Clear Lake, Briarmeadow, Copperfield, “the Kempwood/Gessner area,” Flower Mound, Garden Villas, Inwood Forest, “somewhere west of Oak Forest in the Antoine/Pinemont area,” Tanglewood, “that area below the old Rosewood Hospital,” Spring Branch, and “Augusta/Bering Drive area just north of San Felipe.”

Plenty of highly entertaining comments this week. But . . . no dice?

How about we roll with this one — since really, it’s the best we got:

i would guess this is actually an 80’s build somewhere in nw houston, maybe in hunter’s valley/hunter’s wood or preston wood or lakewood or heatherwood or something with the word wood in it.

Congratulations, brandy c, you’re this week’s winner!

But really, where is this place?

Continue Reading This Story >

6:33 pm | 8 Comments | Read more about Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Neighborhood Guessing Game, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands
Read more about: , , , , ,
Thursday, June 11, 2009

Neighborhood Guessing Game Over: The Wilding

June 11, 2009 – 2:03 pm

Who won that Rice Design Alliance membership?

Four of you guessed the Champions area in this week’s game. We also had 2 votes each for Quail Valley, Kingwood, and Sweetwater. The rest of your guesses? Atascocita, Huntwick Forest, Champion Forest, Meyerland, one of the Kickerillo neighborhoods off I-10, The Woodlands, Northgate, Sugar Creek, “Conroe-ish,” Sugar Land, Pearland, Green Tee Terrace, Newport in Crosby, Friendswood, near the Hearthstone Country Club, Deerwood Country Club, and Clear Lake Country Club, near Terry Hershey Park, Plano, Hilton Head, and Ashford Forest.

The winner is Beth, for catching . . .

The place has a Woodlandsesque sort of feel to it, spaciousness, pine trees, golf course, large cement pond….

Congratulations, Beth! You’ve won a one-year individual membership in the RDA!

Special shout-outs this week to skillful deceivers Cynthia and Porchman, both of whom wrote in with the actual listing, then helped lead other players astray. Cynthia’s entry:

Totally 70s redo (but kept the wood accents in a lot of rooms for dead give away). Big house and lot with pool in an older suburb near or on golf course…Sugar Land! Let’s say Sweetwater!

and Porchman’s:

Well, if you’re going to do the whole earth tone thang in updating your 70’s home, why not throw in a bit of camouflage, too? To complete, they should string mosquito netting off the beams in the family room. I’m going to say Champions area either near a golf course or maybe adjacent to one of those creeks in that area.

Come home to The Woodlands, everyone!

Continue Reading This Story >

2:03 pm | 4 Comments | Read more about Homes for Sale, Interiors, Neighborhood Guessing Game, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Neighborhoods: Wilding Estates
Read more about: , , , , ,
Friday, June 5, 2009

Getting Houston Right: The Toll Brothers Come to Town

June 5, 2009 – 3:41 pm

Houston, the Toll Brothers have been looking for just the right home for you:

“We have been studying the Houston market for a long time and have been looking for the right opportunity to enter it,” Robert Toll, chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “In 2008, Houston was the second-largest home building market in the nation.”

Actually, the “nation’s leading builder of luxury homes” is headed to The Woodlands. The Pennsylvania-based company, which already operates in Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio, promises its first houses in the Village of Creekside Park will be complete early next year. Sales will begin this August.

Toll Brothers at Creekside Park will offer homes on 80′ wide home sites and will showcase five floorplans with multiple exterior designs.

A Swamplot reader comments on the photo accompanying the announcement that appeared in the Houston Business Journal:

The story includes a photo of one of the exterior choices: A French provincial pastiche. What in the name of pete does anything like this have to do with the climate and traditional architectural style of the Gulf Coast? Do the Toll Brothers even pay attention?

Well, that may not have been the company’s intent. On its own website, Toll Brothers illustrates its press release with this separately tuned sample:

Continue Reading This Story >

3:41 pm | 21 Comments | Read more about Homebuilders, Homes for Sale, Master-Planned Communities, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, New Construction: Residential
Read more about: , , , ,
Friday, March 13, 2009

The Woodlands’ Bigger Tent Revival

March 13, 2009 – 5:00 pm

The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion will have twice as many seats, and a greatly enlarged tension-fabric structure to cover them, when it reopens for its first concert on May 1.

A new section of about 2,000 additional reserved seats is being constructed behind the existing uncovered seating area. The new canopy structure will cover all 6,387 seats. The result will be 2,147 fewer seats on the lawn, cutting the venue’s overall capacity by about 460, to 16,040.

The original Teflon-coated Fiberglas-fabric roofs were torn to shreds — and their support structures seriously damaged — by Hurricane Ike:

Continue Reading This Story >

5:00 pm | Add a Comment | Read more about Attractions, Disaster Aftermath, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands
Read more about: , , , ,
Friday, November 16, 2007

When Trees Fell in The Woodlands, and It Got Too Loud To Hear

November 16, 2007 – 11:20 am

Former Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion director David Gottlieb, speaking at the Town Green Park dedication of the latest bronze likeness honoring The Woodlands founder George Mitchell, presents a better suggestion for what the statue could have looked like:

. . . [We were] observing a crowd at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion during a performance of that incredible classical music group, Poison. Mr. Mitchell was standing next to me, and he studied the many [characters] and said, “For this we cut down trees and added more capacity?

Now here is my vision of that statue: He’s standing, he’s got his fingers in his ears and he’s looking up to the heavens.

Maybe for the next one? Anyway, sure looks like the one they put up is popular enough!

11:20 am | Read more about Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Parks, Public Art
Read more about: , , ,