Sorry, all the furnishings shown here don’t come with. Which is sad, really, because if this is just the kind of place you’d like to live in, you’ll have to find each of these items on your own. This 5-bedroom, 3,075-sq.-ft. 10-year-old fully tiled house in Crighton Ridge — on the not-The-Woodlands side of I-45 — went on the market last week for $359,500.
Auctioneers and swindlers Jerry and Wynonne Hart will begin serving their 14-year prison sentences “within days,” after an appeals court reversed a decision that would have given the former owners of the Hart Galleries on South Voss a new trial. The Harts pled guilty to “misapplication of fiduciary property” 2 years ago, in return for prosecutors dropping theft and money-laundering charges against them. Prosecutors claim the Harts sold customers’ goods at auction but regularly underpaid or otherwise finagled their way out of distributing the proceeds. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Hart Galleries
“Wanna play?” asks the reader who clued Swamplot in to the nonstop . . . uh, doll party going on at this house in Braeburn Valley.
Why, yes, you’re invited! Won’t you stop by for a visit?
Swamplot’s Candace Garcia sends in these pix of the scene on the north side of Westheimer between Park St. and Dunlavy, the morning after a Halloween inferno destroyed an antique store and the Agora cafe next door. There’s not much left to shop for at Gordon Greenleaf’s Antique Warehaus at 1714 Westheimer, a woodframe residence pressed into used-furniture service more than 50 years ago. That’s where the fire started shortly after midnight Sunday morning. Agora’s brick structure appears to have fared better, and may be rebuilt. Everyone in the 2-story cafe was able to get out safely, but 2 firefighters were later treated for heat exhaustion. “Thanks to the Halloween holiday it was one of the most well-documented fires in recent Houston history,” writes the Houston Press’s Craig Hlavaty, who watched the flames from across the street, dressed in drag, along with a small crowd of participants in the Montrose Costume Crawl — none of them dressed as firefighters.
Longtime Ferndale resident Carol Barden (yes, that Carol Barden) clues us into the recent appearance on MLS — at $549K apiece — of 2 out of the 3 wood-frame residences that now make up Jas Gurney Antiques. “It’s such a great little street,” she writes. “All the neighbors are so afraid that some awful developer will demo the houses and build junk. Jas has maintained gardens, old-growth trees, he plants flowers for every season.” Gurney reportedly would prefer to sell his entire inventory of “museum-quality” antiques along with his houses, but hasn’t been able to find a buyer. Also on that mixed-residential stretch of Ferndale, between Westheimer and Alabama: townhouses, plain ol’ houses, 4 more antique stores, Jill Brown’s lighting store, plus several more businesses.
Included among the 9 new or newish architect-designed homes on this year’s AIA home tour this weekend: 3 properties that made recent cameo appearances on Swamplot. Shown here: the one-room-deep one-bedroom home Kay O’Toole had built behind her “antiques & eccentricities” store at 1921 Westheimer, next to Winlow Place. Did you know it was hiding back there? The design by Murphy Mears Architects — with interiors by the owner — showed up in Veranda magazine and (far more notably) in one of those extensive Cote de Texas posts earlier this year.
What about something a little more Modern-looking? And maybe a little more . . . available?
This string of antique-store buildings on West Alabama just east of Shepherd has been on the market since last fall. Swamplot noted the Brian Stringer Antiques 40-percent-off going-out-of-business sale in December, but the 25-percent-off sale on the buildings began only last month, after a second price reduction. The bungalow, showroom, and 2-story warehouse on the 14,004-sq.-ft. lot are now priced at $1,099,000. The listing notes the store and its inventory are also for sale “for additional consideration.”
“Everyone in Houston knows the shopping ritual here,” explained ritual antique shopper Joni Webb last year. “You go [through] the main showroom first, work your way to the back storeroom, stop at the side showroom, then exit through the metal garage door to go outside where you then enter the little French house through its side door.”
Today, tomorrow, and Thursday are the final days for The Fabulous Flea: After this sale, shop owner Mary Daly and her husband hope to sell the little Bammel Lane antique store — along with their cozy 4,018-sq.-ft. house next door. The compound, designed by Kurt Aichler, also includes a pool, an open-air poolhouse, and a small collection of courtyards on a 15,000-sq.-ft. lot.
The whole 4-6 bedroom, 3-1/2-bath package is priced at $1,995,000. But you might be able to find a few pieces of furniture for a little less than that at the shop’s final sale this week:
Ubiquitous design blogger Joni Webb hyperventilates over the March issue of Veranda magazine, which features actual interior pics of the house Kay O’Toole had built behind her Kay O’Toole Antiques & Eccentricities shop. The shop is in the building with the rounded corners next to the Firkin & Phoenix Pub parking lot at 1921 Westheimer:
I had heard the blogosphere mumbling about this Veranda showing Kay O’Toole’s new house and that was what had my mouth watering like Edward’s whenever Bella is around. Honestly, I’ve been waiting over two years for this issue!
O’Toole owns a French antique shop housed in a 1920s brick building that was once home to several different businesses. Through the years, she eventually acquired the entire building and tore down the dividing walls – creating a long and narrow haven for the best of what France, and now Belgium, Sweden, and Italy have to offer.
O’Toole’s single-story, one-bedroom stucco home — designed by Murphy Mears Architects — is another long and narrow haven, modeled after something O’Toole saw in New Orleans’s French Quarter: It’s one room deep, and backs up to the property’s back fence.
Couldn’t Webb have just charmed her way inside, camera in hand? Oh, she’d tried that:
A quick roundup:
be sure to also stop in at Ginger Barber’s Sitting Room which is next door. Further up the street is Tara Shaw and Heather Bowen Antiques. Continue up W. Alabama to Antiques and Interiors on Dunlavy, Boxwood and The Country Gentleman, then hit up Foxglove and Alcon Lighting.
If you haven’t passed out from exhaustion yet, turn around and head back to Brian Stringer’s and go the other way on W. Alabama. Stop at Jane Moore’s, then at Ferndale, go to Brown, Bill Gardner, Made in France, and Objects Lost and Found. Back on W. Alabama, continue on to Thompson and Hansen, The Gray Door, Chateau Domingue, Indulge on Saint Street, and 2620 on Joanel.
More openings and closings:
Antiques fan Spencer Howard takes readers on a tour of a Hyde Park house full of them: the home of his former boss, architect John Zemanek.
The home’s design “falls somewhere between a Texas farm house and Japanese Tea House,” writes Howard:
However, the landscape, structure and furniture are accented with mysterious objects. Some are recognizable and easily comprehended, but most are not – engaging the viewer to imagine the story behind the piece.
What mysterious objects? A few choice rusting relics of Zemanek’s Fort Bend County childhood: a hunk of the engine from the family’s 1923 Buick; parts of old farming implements; the family typewriter, on a pedestal by the front door.
Wanna quick tour of the place?
Vacant home for sale, in need of staging. Antique dealer from out of town, needs showroom space. Idea?
Joni Webb reports on Cote de Texas that New Orleans antique dealer Mignon Favrot Topping has gone into the business of staging for-sale homes. But: She leaves the price tags on.
What better way to show off the brand-new 4-bedroom, 5,822-s.-ft. fantasy home designed by Robert Dame at 3015 Virginia, which has been listed for almost 3 months. The price was cut $100K in April, leaving an asking price of $1.875 million.
If that’s still too much, now you can walk away with a piece of it for maybe a little less.
The listing photos still show an empty house:
Jerry and Wynonne Hart are scheduled to be sentenced today for “misapplication of fiduciary property” in the operation of their auction business at the Hart Galleries. In return for the couple’s guilty plea, prosecutors dropped charges of theft and money laundering.
11 News reporter Dave Fehling spoke to several former Hart Galleries customers:
The auction house thrived for years. The Harts enjoyed a sterling reputation among the rich and not so rich who all trusted the Harts to sell their valuables. But around 2003, something strange began happening . . .
. . . the Harts auctioned furniture and antiques for John Zielinski and his wife.
They were expecting to get $20,000.
“And I said, ‘where’s our money?’ And they said, ‘we’re having difficulty collecting some of the checks,’” said Zielinski.
The next thing Harts’ customers learned was that the couple was bankrupt.
With her just-introduced line of home furnishings called Maison, New Orleans-to-Houston commuter Tara Shaw has apparently found relief from that bane of all highly successful antiques dealers: the little problem of supply.
Tara Shaw Antiques fanatic Joni Webb ended up seeing a cardiologist after a heart-racing episode at Shaw’s first Houston to-the-trade sale a few years ago — after she thought she might lose out on a set of antique chairs. So she’s uniquely qualified to explain:
Recently there’s been some rumblings that Tara was off on a new adventure, manufacturing her own line of furniture, inspired by original pieces she owns in her private collection. . . . The debut was worth the wait. The new MAISON pieces are gorgeous, their authenticity is unrivaled by anything available on the market today. Besides wonderful tables, chairs, and bookcases, there is a great array of smalls – candlesticks and mirrors, crowns and jardineres. One could certainly furnish a house with the MAISON line, that’s how extensive it is. The craftsmanship is superb, each piece was created under Shaw’s knowledgeable and watchful eyes.
A bit more hyperventilating after the jump:
Design blogger Joni Webb identifies Houston’s latest “hot pocket of stores selling reasonably priced, yet very chic antiques.”
Where is it? At the Fiesta Mart!
Or more accurately, in and around the shopping strip that includes the Fiesta — on the southeast corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama. Webb’s Cote de Texas blog runs through items available at Antiques and Interiors on Dunlavy, the Country Gentleman, plus the latest shop to open: Boxwood Interiors, a second store by the same people who run Foxglove Interiors on Alabama, a few blocks to the east. Boxwood
. . . immediately called to me when, through the window, I glimpsed freshly laid seagrass matting stretching from the front door to the back. It’s amazing what spending a few extra dollars on seagrass will do to an old and ugly mall space.
After the jump: seagrass magic! Plus a few of Webb’s Fiesta-area finds.
