04/19/11 12:19pm

Maybe that spec retail block at the Highland Village Shopping Center wasn’t good enough for Apple, after all. A couple of readers have written in to report that the never-been-occupied eastern portion of the relatively recent building at 4012-4018 Westheimer — where Houston’s first-ever mall-free Apple Store is supposed to go — has been torn down completely. The foundation and portions of the parking lot have been jack-hammered, writes one reader: “It’s like someone took a big pair of scissors and cut it off, through the beams, etc. The rest of the structure that houses Sprinkles, Paper Source, and what will be Restoration Hardware is still there. But the end where the Apple Store is/was going to be is gone.”

A permit for the “partial” demo of the building at 4012 Westheimer appeared on Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report back on Valentine’s Day. An Apple retail fan site notes that according to its sources the Highland Village store when it opens “will bear some resemblance to the Scottsdale Quarter store.” Which looks like this:

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04/18/11 9:33am

If, when the place was up for sale last year, you only liked what you saw of the legendary ornate sorta-replica French palace in Sherwood Forest that Houston strip-mall king and car collector Jerry J. Moore pieced together for himself from actual French parts, you’ll absolutely love the home in its latest incarnation: The 12,734-sq.-ft. interior has now been gutted completely. And, the home’s current owners hope, you’ll be willing to pay about $5.15 million more for it in its current condition than they were when they bought it about this time last year for just $3.75 million — you know, when the interior had things in it like floors and walls and ceilings, not to mention functioning electricity and plumbing. Also swept away by demolition crews for today’s more sophisticated, imaginative, and demanding buyer — Moore’s famous 26-car garage at the back of the property, with the “treehouse” quarters above it, as well as the poolhouse. Listing agent Diane Kingshill of Martha Turner Properties tells Swamplot both of those structures were in poor condition and had mold.

But if any mold was also hiding in the marble flooring, chandeliers, or extensive wood paneling of the main house, it’s clearly gone now. All that sweat equity put in by the current owners has many more benefits — certainly enough to justify the $8.9 million asking price with which the home has returned to this year’s much stronger market. Just see what interior vistas have been opened up, in a home once full of visual obstacles:

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04/15/11 8:55am

What’s been going on deep in this pine forest north of Houston, behind the fencing and security guards, where all those trucks have been driving in and out for months? A whole lot of logging at least, it looks like. While ExxonMobil continues to tell its employees that no decisions have yet been made about whether to consolidate approximately 17,000 of them from Houston and Virginia into a new 3 million sq. ft. office campus just south of The Woodlands, contractors working for the company have been stripping what looks like thousands of trees from its 359-acre property and preparing the site for construction of as many as 2 dozen office buildings, 4 enormous parking garages, and several other structures. These aerial photos of the site sent to Swamplot are dated March 12th.

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04/14/11 2:44pm

These are probably the last images you’ll see of two large oak trees on the 4200 block of Feagan, says the reader who snapped pix this morning of the clearance event that’s been going on there for the last few days. There’ll be no designing around them, apparently: A worker on the property “said he hated to do it but both remaining oaks were coming down.” Coming in, gathers the reader: maybe 28 new townhomes between Dickson and Feagan St., just west of Jackson Hill. “Numerous smaller oaks, pecans, hackberries that are now crunched on the ground” were hacked away earlier.

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04/12/11 6:05pm

If you’re the ghost of Kenneth Franzheim, scoot! Again. Cameraphone correspondent Pankaj reports that Cherry Demolition is already at work dismantling a second building designed by the Houston architect: the original Downtown YMCA at 1600 Louisiana St. Workers from the demo company have begun removing windows from the 10-story brick building; the property is now partially fenced. In 2008, as it announced plans to construct the new Tellepsen Y a few blocks to the east, the organization said it would tear down the 1941 structure in advance of selling the 85,000-sq.-ft. lot beneath it to Chevron, owners of the Enron hand-me-down tower next door.

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04/08/11 11:13pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE DISPOSABLE HOME “There is a reason we build out of toothpicks and plastic… Unlike in Europe Americans do not live in their parents houses and do not generally inherit them, tastes and needs also change. Hence a home that will last a few decades is perfect because it will be torn down in that time anyway and will provide new construction jobs and loan interest income. It’s the cycle of life of a home. This metal house will be torn down around the same time the stucco ones around it lose their appeal.” [commonsense, commenting on Tin House Panic Grips West U]

04/07/11 3:12pm

Last fall, the planned $500,000 rescue of a curved fresco painted by muralist Peter Hurd from the lobby of its Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. was the focus of a small publicity campaign by UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. From the institution’s perspective it was probably a better story to focus attention on than the circumstances that instigated the move: the planned (and now active) demolition — despite the grumblings of many preservationists — of the 18-story 1952 Prudential Tower by Kenneth Franzheim that housed it. Since late January, when Linbeck (M.D. Anderson’s contractor) took the extraordinary step of firing fresco-conservation expert Nathan Zakheim from the job before the most delicate and proprietary portions of the process had been completed — and concerns were raised about how well the rescue could possibly be completed without him — the PR effort behind the tricky operation has been silent. Until today, that is.

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