Look familiar? Two weeks after its smaller look-alike housing unit appeared on the market, this bigger-by-a-bedroom version finishing up right next door listed for a bit more. And speaking of doors, this mini-mod’s entry is cool blue instead of the cheery yellow one marking its neighbor. Other differences include the roofline’s wider wingspan — to accommodate a broader, shorter driveway that bumps against that extra room downstairs.
Maybe the looks of this spa are too brutal a reminder of how the season went down the toilet? Houston Texans middle linebacker Brian Cushing injured his knee in October and was forced to watch from the sidelines as his team bowed out to the New England Patriots in the NFL playoffs. Now, his 7,007-sq.-ft. Missouri City home is for sale, starting at $1,299,900.
Animal bones, mirror shards, scrap lumber destined for a landfill: Dan Phillips builds houses up in Walker County out of almost anything he can get his hands on. The former Sam Houston State dance instructor finished this one, known as the Charleston House, in 2004. It’s got a hallway floor composed of corks (at right) and a fence (above) detailed with the wine bottles from which those corks very well might have been popped. Phillips’s organization Phoenix Commotion tells Swamplot that he likes to sell to low-income families and hungry, if not starving, artists, who often help build the houses themselves. But the Charleston House is one that’s changed hands a few times. Now it’s ended up on the “regular market.” The 935-sq.-ft. 3-bedroom at 912 University was originally listed last fall at $899,900. Then it came down a bit to a rather more sober $89,900.
Photos: HAR
A sun-baked mini-villa in White Oak Terrace that spent most of 2012 on the market is back from its winter break as a re-listing with a new agent. Same price, though: $250,000. Symmetrical on its street-side, the 2010-built home likes columns, arches, and contrasting color so much it used them outside and in, where dappled tile floors further styl-i-fy the somewhat open floor plan. The garage-free property is located off T.C. Jester a little south of W. Little York. Elsewhere on the street, which has a dead-end in the next block, mostly single-story homes in the little northwest neighborhood are either a decade old or well past 40.
The smaller of a wee pair of snaggle-topped properties built since April 2012 on a Scott St. corner of the new East End Southeast rail line popped on the market last week. Initial asking price: $175,000. No listing yet for its equally efficient slightly bigger sister right next door, which employs the same corner windows, criss-cross rooftop, and slew of eco-friendly components.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: PALE IN COMPARISON “Stephen Fox does a real disservice to drag queens, whose mummery and satire are rooted in fascinating questions about gender identity and the plights of powerless human beings. They have nothing to do with shoddily built, ostentatious and vulgar houses. Drag queens are necessary and even essential to a healthy civilization, they parody and mock for the forces of goodness, but shitty architecture benefits nobody.” [Scott Bodenheimer, commenting on Waving the Fronds on Palm Royale Blvd.]
WAVING THE FRONDS ON PALM ROYALE BLVD. 
As they cruise through Sugar Land, columnist Lisa Gray monitors Houston Architectural Guide author Stephen Fox’s vital signs: “We drove south. He drooped as we drove past red-brick privacy walls, red-brick houses, red-brick office buildings, red-brick churches. For me, everything began to blend together — until we turned on Palm Royale Boulevard, lined with humongous red-brick houses from the last couple of decades, most with turrets, all slight variations on the same nouveau-riche theme. I drove slowly, ogling the spectacle, one whacked-out showstopper after the next, interspersed with undeveloped lots. The red-brick reassurance of niceness clearly wasn’t an assurance of good taste. ‘These 10,000-plus-square-foot Mediterranean extravaganzas bear the same relation to architecture that drag show queens bear to women,’ Stephen had written tartly in The Guide. ‘Not the real thing, perhaps, but entertaining nonetheless in their bold and hilarious voluptuousness.’ Abruptly, the street dead-ended into a T-intersection facing a utility easement. Stephen laughed. ‘Such an ignominious end,’ he said wryly, ‘for such grand ambition.'” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: HAR
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHAT IT TAKES TO BUILD AT THE UPPER END “You are right that you can build a very nice house for $150/sq. ft., but when you are in this stratospheric range, $150 is your starting point and you jump off from there. . . . Your roof will be slate and not composition. Goodness knows how much that costs, and how it impacts your structural engineering. Your floors will be stone and/or wide plank salvaged wood and not 2 1/2″ plain sawn oak. Your facade will be brick, not hardi plank, and bricks will cost $2-$3 each and not 50 cents. And on an 8,000 sq. ft. structure you may get 50,000, 100,000 bricks. Then you pay the mason. Your trim and doors will be custom manufactured and not stock. Your window package will be custom manufactured and not stock. Saw one house where custom fabricated metal windows cost $250,000. For the windows. Your light cans will cost 10x the cost of the cans you get in a builder spec house. You will have paid a lighting designer a fortune to tell you how to position those lights. Your HVAC, security, A/V systems will be state of the art, each of which will run tens and tens of thousands, if not more. You will insulate your house to an extreme level. And so on and so on. It all adds up . . . But yes, you can build a nice house for $150/sq. ft., but if you are building on a 50,000 sq. ft. lot on the corner of Kirby and Inwood, you just won’t.” [KG, commenting on Houston Home Listing Photo of the Day: Out of the Closet]
A top-heavy brick tower tacked onto the front and Euro touches inside this designer-owned spread morphs a 1968 Lynn Park home into a something less provincial and more Provençal — or so the listing suggests. The slightly asymmetrical corner-lot property is a block east of the railroad tracks and two blocks north of Richmond Ave. at Drexel Dr. It’s a newly re-listed home seeking $899,900 with a new agent and agency, after a summer fling with a price tag $25K higher.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: MIDCENTURY STYLING WAS THE PSEUDO TUSCAN OF ITS DAY “. . . But let’s be honest with ourselves, if we can step out of our trendy mid-century loving selves for a moment . . . just because something was original doesn’t mean it was good, or desirable. Let’s not fall into that elitist trap. Honestly, I’m not crying over replacing that gawdawful carpet with anythingbutthatgawdafulcarpet. Yes, a lot of the updates are generic “what’s popular/mainstream right now†sort of stuff. But what they’re replacing is the exact same sort of mainstream styling, just with a healthy dose of nostalgia wrapped around it. Let’s not kid ourselves . . . as much as I personally like midcentury style, most of these houses were just as generic as the pseudo Tuscan places going up all over the area. They simply have the benefit of being fewer in number these days. There is nothing inherently better about one era’s overused style elements than another. Novelty is not the same thing as absolute superiority.” [JB, commenting on Fixed That for You: A Memorial Hollowed Modern, Corrected]
All rooms within this Briargrove custom home by Rudolph Colby “open to atrium and fountain areas.” Earlier this week, the corner lot property lowered its asking price once more, to $1,329,000, for its re-listing by the same agent. Back in February, the home debuted at $1,595,000, with reductions to $1,469,000 in April and $1,380,000 in June for the summer months.
Built in 1994, the 4,929-sq.-ft. home is not the largest of the newer homes infiltrating the tight-knit neighborhood. On its stretch of street, however, the house stands taller, bigger, and distinct. Landscaping between its two gabled wings helps conceal a brick wall that appears to match the height of neighboring fifties ranch homes. An entryway streetside leads into a brick-paved courtyard-with-fountain surrounded by window walls and glass-paneled doors:
Columns accent the front porch — and are left to define rooms in the opened up floor plan of this $323,900 listing that popped up over the weekend in Candlelight Woods, south of Pinemont Dr. The shady northern approach to the 1964 ranch-style home is a contrast to its brighter pool-view side at the back of the home. Meanwhile, just beyond the back fence, there’s a patch of veggie garden — and a path along a ravine off nearby White Oak Bayou. CONTINUE READING THIS STORY
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A HOME TRIBUTE TO ROGER RASBACH “We own a Rasbach house and pinch ourselves everyday about how fortunate we are to benefit from his genius. We got to meet him a few months before his death and learned the story of the designing/building of our house (we are the second owners). A brilliant gentle man. His sense of scale particularly sets his homes apart.” [NOBSKA, commenting on On Track with a Huge Hacienda in Bellaire]
