A perennial contender for the dubious honor of Houston’s gaudiest mansion may be trying to shake its claim to the title. The mansion at 12930 Memorial Dr. is back on the market this month for at least the sixth time in 5 years — and back down to an asking price of $1.5 million, after a 2014 upward jump and subsequent slow decline. Ownership of the house was traded back and forth between Costello family members until an April sale to an entity called Triple Gate Investments; the new sellers seem to be aiming for a more understated presentation. In this round of listing photos, all but a few of the house’s 11,760 sq. ft. have been stripped of furniture, chandeliers, and giant high-heel statuary, allowing distraction-free contemplation of the colorful interior.
Even the apply-your-own-head wildlife has been reset to its original state:
Art-school graduate, grinder, and faux finisher Michael Bise pays the bills: “Last week for instance, I found myself in front of an eight-foot tall, three-panel window (of which there were 18 total) brushing blue milk-paint (a sturdy, old-master-y kind of paint made from lime—not the kind used to flavor Mexican beers, but the kind used to dissolve dead hookers—and cottage cheese, the delicious curdled-milk treat), which requires three or four applications of slightly different blues, each layer requiring sanding before the subsequent application, with a final application which necessitates a vigorous once-over with steel wool, leaving your arms and face covered in a fine layer of blue lime and steel shavings and your nostrils crusty with black boogers.
This process yields the rough equivalent of a tastefully aged barn door, on a barn next to a cottage in the French countryside, if the barn were to have a Bentley parked in it with the sounds of Aryan children splashing around in a nearby lap pool echoing off its rough timbers. The other mainstay of fauxing consists of creating an approximation of Venetian plaster on top of good old Texas drywall. This is about as labor-intensive as hanging and floating the drywall in the first place. The “Venetian plaster†is made out of standard drywall mud from Home Depot mixed with paint tint and a few secret ingredients to make it smoother and shinier. The key of course is in the application. My partner Joe and I have dubbed this well-guarded application secret “punch, punch, drag.†
After the jump: a detailed look inside.
