Round about the end of April, artist Gloria Becker lopped $53,000 off the asking price of her art-and-animal-filled home at 7309 Greenbriar (near Main) featured here a month ago. It’s now listed for $795K.
Have any of you seen this place?
Read more about: 77030, Art, Braeswood, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Price Reductions
We get some strange tips . . .
Look for a giant telephone to be delivered to the corner of Mason and Hyde Park, probably tomorrow.
Photo of David Adickes sculpture by Jonathan Percy
Tonight’s art opening at the new Box 13 ArtSpace will serve as a grand opening for the new East End art venue as well.
The space is a 2-story former furniture store on the corner of Harrisburg and Cesar Chavez (or — as the organization’s website uh, “artfully”(?) calls the street — “Cesar Chivas”). It features 13 studio spaces for artists in residence, three interior galleries, a storefront-window display space, and an “outdoor performance exhibition space,” known more conventionally as a parking lot.
The artist-run nonprofit intends to acquire a second building, at 6701 Capitol (directly behind the 6700 Harrisburg building), within a few months. “The Capitol building lends itself toward sculptors and installation artists,” declares the website.
After the jump: A quick tour of the new facilities!
Read more about: 77011, Art, Art Studios, Galleries, Harrisburg, Institutional Buildings, Openings and Closings, Parking-Lots
A reader reports that artist Gloria Becker is selling her home at 7309 Greenbriar, just south of the Med Center. That’s the big brick house with the the 8-foot-tall topiary bears out front. Plus . . .
She has a wildcat in her dining room, deer on her sofa, fish in her bathroom, squirrels in her entryway, a caribou at the top of her stairwell and a prairie dog in her den.
From the foyer, where a stuffed bear in a sundress and rhinestone-studded sunglasses stands at the foot of the stairs covered in imitation tiger fur, to the farthest corner of the second-floor spare room, which is adorned with a giant cloth cow in a sun hat, a wreath of monkeys and a Virgin Mary hubcap, the house is a cacophony of contented clutter.
“Empty spaces make me nervous,” [Becker] Rasmussen says.
Becker, who makes a living selling her incredibly detailed Santa Claus sculptures and handcrafted sock monkeys, calls herself an “an upscale, sophisticated recycler.”
Her Braeswood home has 3 or 4 bedrooms, 3 full and 2 half baths, and sits on a 12,563-sq.-ft. lot near the corner of S. Main. Asking price: $848,000.
After the jump: Some interior pics from the listing, plus: Where did all the sock monkeys go?
Read more about: 77030, Art, Braeswood, Home Decor, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Staging
Uh-oh. That trailer — behind the pole barn — on a former scrap yard — next to the Houston Biodiesel plant — on Buffalo Bayou — may look innocuous. But it’s the new temporary Houston outpost of Los Angeles’s Center for Land Use Interpretation. The CLUI is taking up a year-long residency at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at UH — but this is where our L.A. visitors will be camping out.
What does the CLUI do? Some sample CLUI projects:
In this exhibit, farm animals show us their point of view through wireless video cameras installed temporarily on their head and necks by virtuoso animal and plant videographer Sam Easterson. Easterson’s technology enables a cow, a pig, a goat, a chicken, a sheep, and a horse to guide us around their world; what they look at, what catches their attention, how they move through space, and how they relate to one another, on the farm.
You get the idea. CLUI’s front man is artist Matthew Coolidge, whose act often incorporates academic-sounding narrations of landscape slide shows.
Here’s video of part of a Coolidge performance at the Aurora Picture Show late last year:
Read more about: Art, Buffalo Bayou, Houston Ship Channel, Landscape, UH
A reader who doesn’t sound too happy about the situation sends word that David Adickes has sold his artist-studio building at 2500 Summer St.:
Artists who lease space there have been told they need to leave in less than 6 months. Deborah Colton Gallery resides on his 3rd floor.
Yes, that’s David Adickes, sculptor of large presidential heads.
Read more about: Art, Artist Studios, Buying and Selling, First Ward, Galleries
What the house sounds like.
Read more about: 77007, Art, Attractions, Historic Preservation, Home Decor, Rice Military
Here’s one advantage if you’re one of the not-so-large number of retail centers in Houston that doesn’t have a parking lot in front: If business ain’t so hot, you can always sell the highly visible adspace on your facade!
A reader sends in this photo of an ad for Red Bull’s Art of Can competition on the streetfront of a retail center on Elgin, across from the Calais apartments in Midtown. The Maple Leaf Pub is two doors down.
Is this the future of retail real estate? Sure, we’ve all seen ads painted onto the sides of old buildings and the giant window stickers on David’s Bridal storefronts, but doesn’t this go a bit . . . beyond that? Think of the possibilities: Stores . . . with ads covering their entire fronts, advertising . . . other stores. Or anything.
Forget billboards, graffiti, and wheatpaste posters. When this new market really kicks in, we’ll see Houston for its revenue-generating possibilities: We’ve got acres and acres of exploitable advertising space.
Tyvek Housewrap was only the beginning.
What comes after Tuscan-themed shopping centers? Billboard-themed shopping centers!
After the jump: a second photo, so you can get your Red Bull straight.
Read more about: 77006, Advertising, Art, Billboards, Commercial Real Estate, Midtown, Retail, Shopping Centers, Signs, Storefronts
A reader sent in a larger version of the above photo to the Brazosport News. It shows the first giant presidential heads in place at Pearland’s new Presidential Park. Eventually, the remaining 37-member contingent of very-white sculpted U.S. presidents will join them, and the surrounding swampland will be transformed into a lovely green space, separated from a new shopping, retail, office, and hotel development by . . . a watergate! For now, though, the scene sure does look like only a few presidential giants have managed to keep their heads out of the mud.
The winners of an online vote to select which five of sculptor David Adickes’s giant busts should be the first to move to the park were Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Kennedy — even though more recent Oval Office residents had far better ballot position. But democracy has its limits: Richard Browne, developer of the adjacent Waterlights District, decided to include the statue of former president George H.W. Bush in the first group anyway. All six made their head-turning trip down 288 from Adickes’s First Ward studio on Presidents’ Day.
Missed your chance to participate in the online presidential headcount? A separate ballot asks you to select which chain restaurants you want to appear in the Waterlights District, though its unclear if polling has already been closed.
Read on for a sketch of the Waterlights District, and another view of ex-presidents keeping their noses clean. Plus: a dated image of President John F. Kennedy, cut out of our version of the photo above . . . because he was too far to the right.
Read more about: 77583, Art, Mixed Use, Parks, Pearland, Proposed Developments, Public Art, Sculpture
Home buyers want a masterpiece! So why should your home listing suffer from bad, poorly lit, unimaginative photographs? Why, with a little bit of camera-phone artistry, you can make your home look like a Van Gogh!
Here’s a great example. Yes, this beautiful, Galleria-area impressionist interior can be yours, for a mere $165,000:
2 Bedroom, 2 1/2 bath Townhome with living room, kitchen and half-bath downstairs and bedrooms up. Master bedroom has cathedral ceiling and there is a large round skylight in the staircase. Light and bright throughout. Great location . . .
No, we didn’t alter the photo above (okay, we did enlarge it). But we do recognize artistic genius. Great photos like this hide carpet stains, too!
How can you make your home look like it’s worth a lot of Monet? Learn from the masters! After the jump, more of ERA broker Al Rafat’s unadulterated images of this notable home.
Read more about: 77057, Art, Buying and Selling, Condos, Galleria, Interiors, Listings, Photography, Townhomes
