Swamplot Archives by Tag: The Woodlands

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
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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
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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
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Thursday, August 13, 2009

Satellite Dish: Museum of Natural Science Leaves Mall, Takes Prison

August 13, 2009 – 1:51 pm

Opening October 3rd in Sugar Land: A branch of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, smack dab in the center of the former prison farm now known as Telfair. The museum is a rehab of the old Central State Farm Prison building, but it has a better-sounding new address: 13019 University Blvd., at the corner of New Territory Blvd.

Meanwhile, far to the north, HMNS’s Woodlands Xploration Station in the Woodlands Mall is shutting down on September 7th. The Woodlands Children’s Museum next door to it will close a little less than a month later. Going into those vacated spaces: Forever 21.

Photo of new Houston Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land: HMNS

1:51 pm | 4 Comments | Read more about Adaptive Reuse, Historic Preservation, Institutional Buildings, Malls, Neighborhoods: Sugar Land, Neighborhoods: Telfair, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Comment of the Day: New Urbanist Flight

July 15, 2009 – 2:58 pm
   

“Several posters are spot-on about walkable neighborhoods commanding a premium over traditional suburbs, if all else is equal. Unfortunately you can’t have it all in Houston – neighborhood charm, architecturally interesting houses, walkability, safety, good public schooling, AND affordability. Our growing family is being “forced” out of the Heights for several of the above reasons. If a New Urbanist development existed in the Houston area that was priced similarly to the traditional lollipop surburb, we would go there in an instant. Instead, we’re moving to what we see as the best suburban compromise – the Woodlands. Outside observers will no doubt think we are going to the suburbs because of the cul-de-sacs, but the truth is, we are going despite them.” [CV, commenting on Cul de Sac City: Houston’s Ban on New Street Grids]

2:58 pm | 16 Comments | Read more about Comments, Homebuying, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Quicklink
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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
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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!

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2:03 pm | 4 Comments | Read more about Homes for Sale, Interiors, Neighborhood Guessing Game, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Neighborhoods: Wilding Estates
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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
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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
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Another Reason The Woodlands Is Growing So Fast

January 27, 2009 – 11:33 am

Just another happy family scene in The Woodlands:

Feeding time is usually what most people ask me about so I will try to describe how we feed everyone. We put all five babies in boppies and use bottle proppers to start everyone eating. Then we “play zone!” We get to whoever needs burping or help with the feeding and re-prop.

Photo: The Phillips Family

11:33 am | 2 Comments | Read more about Interiors, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands
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Thursday, July 10, 2008

Grace Community Church and the Giant Crosses on I-45

July 10, 2008 – 4:05 pm

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

The two “Marking Our City” billboards near Grace Community Church’s north and south I-45 locations depict a plain white cross, an American flag, and the words “150 FT CROSS COMING SOON.” But they probably show only the top portion of the structures the church is planning — and the 150-ft. label may be selling the project short. The Chronicle’s Lisa Gray says

. . . the pastor hopes both structures will be 200 feet tall, roughly the height of a 20-story building. The Federal Aviation Administration, he said, may limit the south campus’s cross to 150 feet because it’s near Ellington Field.

Five-and-a-half minutes into the Grace Community Church video above, Grace senior pastor Steve Riggle walks viewers through a drawing of a more elaborate structure. Riggle asks

What if there was one of these at every entrance to the city? And it was there for the prayer movement in the city, not just a church. You talk about marking our city for God.

After the jump: More crosses on the side of the highway!

Continue Reading This Story >

4:05 pm | 24 Comments | Read more about Attractions, Neighborhoods: Ellington Field, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Proposed Developments
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Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Why Those Street Names in The Woodlands All Sound Alike

January 2, 2008 – 8:41 am

Woodlands Street View

Nancy Sarnoff’s short interview with the woman responsible for naming new streets in The Woodlands is just too rich:

We use a lot of words that are just appealing, pretty images, like Peaceful Canyon. That neighborhood sold really well and I think it’s because of the name. We even did radio commercials that played off the name and it really helped market the area. Others are Racing Cloud, Amber Glow and Destiny Cove. We even have ones from Star Wars. That day I was really desperate. Nothing was popping into my head. We have lots of nautical names around Lake Woodlands like Outrigger’s Run.

Woodlands Operating Co. marketing director Susan Vreeland-Wendt confirms every cliché about the origins of subdivision street names, from the historical revisionism (“One of our presidents is Alex Sutton, and we have a street named Sutton Mill”) to the what-I-drank-for-dinner-last-night story (“I’ve been known to pore over wine bottles looking for inspiration”) — except the one about suburban names coming from geographical features that were demolished or removed so the place could be built. Fortunately, The Woodlands does carry on the proud Houston tradition of naming places after imaginary or wished-for amenities:

We’ve got Arrow Canyon, Kayak Ridge, Arbor Camp and Rocky Point.

Surprisingly not on Vreeland-Wendt’s list of inspirations: Harlequin romance novels. But she does consult the internet, because it’s full of useful resources.

Photo: Flickr user kaatiya

8:41 am | Read more about Master-Planned Communities, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Real Estate Marketing, Streets
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Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Fig. Leaves: Miraculous Advanced LipoDissolve Works on Retail Locations Too!

December 11, 2007 – 10:15 am

Collage of Diagrams from fig. Medical Body Shaping Website Showing How Advanced LipoDissolve Is Supposed To Work

Swamplot’s many readers eager to return to Houston-area Fig. Medical Body Shaping clinics for continuing fat-reducing injections will be saddened to learn that the national chain has abruptly shut down and discontinued all operations. A note on the fig.com website indicates the company will likely be seeking bankruptcy protection.

There are three local Fig. clinics: in Sugar Land at 59 and Highway 6, next to Panera Bread; next to Jamba Juice at the Summit Plaza by Lakewood Church; and at the Portofino Shopping Center across I-45 from the Woodlands. (Yes, that’s the same Portofino Shopping Center that was home to the statue-genitalia controversy a few years back — which was ultimately solved with . . . a fig leaf.) All three Houston-area Fig. locations had been open only since April.

Okay, whose inside joke was it to locate all three fat-reduction clinics in shopping centers on feeder roads?

What happened to Fig. that would cause it to shut down so suddenly? (Reader caution: suggestive uh . . . medical detail below.)

Continue Reading This Story >

10:15 am | Read more about Neighborhoods: Galleria, Neighborhoods: Sugar Land, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, Openings and Closings, Retail, Shopping Centers
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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
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Spa-Fitness Category Killer Stalks The Woodlands

November 13, 2007 – 12:34 pm

VillaSport in the Woodlands, Texas

Here it comes: A 87,000-square-foot sports behemoth. On more than 12 acres. A gym, aquatic and athletic center, kiddie playground, and spa, all wrapped into one . . . membership fee. The Wal-Mart of health clubs — without the low prices, of course.

Construction of the VillaSport Athletic Club and Spa will begin early next year and open in early 2009 on Technology Forest Dr., across from the Fox Network Center in The Woodlands. The VillaSport website features an interactive tour of the first facility — in Colorado Springs — which is slated to open later this month.

With indoor and outdoor spaces including an indoor soccer field, indoor and outdoor zero-entry kiddie pools, hot tubs, saunas, a Pilates studio, water slides, and a pro shop, VillaSport appears to merge features of an athletic club, spa retreat, sports lounge, country club, resort, water park, and summer camp. All in a gigantic compound you’ll easily be able to lose your family in.

12:34 pm | Read more about Neighborhoods: The Woodlands, New Construction, Proposed Developments
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