Here’s a pair of renderings of 4 new townhomes about to be built in the Fourth Ward. The site is 2 blocks south of W. Gray, near those side-by-side lots where that 5-story apartment complex Dolce Living has been proposed to go in beside a row of vacant shotgun houses.
If you look closely at these renderings, you can see at least one more remnant of the past: The remains of the brick storefront of a dry cleaner’s that opened here on the corner of Genesee and W. Webster in the 1930s; it appears that what was the store’s main entrance has been incorporated into the design and widened into a 1-car garage. Says Tim Cisneros, whose firm worked on the townhomes: “[The storefront is] being left as a part of the neighborhood ‘commercial archeology.’”
- Previously on Swamplot: The New Home of 3 Freedman’s Town Shotgun Shacks, A Few Freedman’s Town Rowhouses To Be Relocated, Rehabbed, Apartments Moving In on Freedman’s Town Rowhouse Lot
Renderings: Cisneros Design Studio
A trio of Rice grads has come up with what seems to be a kind of golden mean between gentrification and decay, when it comes to restoring an old home that no longer works the way it should and yet still preserving the character of the neighborhood: Andrew Daley, Jason Fleming, and Peter Muessig are calling it InHouse OutHouse, reports OffCite, and 
With the June 10th deadline to submit the Astrodome proposals that 
Making the rounds this week are a couple more long shots for the 
Bellaire City Council voted today to spend an extra $8,000 to allow Habitat for Humanity to practice “whole house recycling” and, in lieu of the usual one-fell-swoop, whiz-bang demolition, “deconstruct” over a 14-day span this home at 5119 Jessamine, reports Robin Foster; the ayes argued that deconstruction can reduce the amount of wasted reusable material — but there remained at least one unconvinced nay: “‘
It just takes awhile to remake a 
