Today in Calgary’s Slow Home design school, we ridicule a 2400-sq.-ft., 4-bedroom tract house plan found in Houston, Texas. Sadly, Slow Home’s plan doctors offer no info on the specific neighborhood where the home is hiding.
House designer Jack Preston Wood has apparently had second thoughts about his plan to build two 4-story townhomes where this bungalow now sits in the Freeland Historic District. The city historic commission turned down both his new-construction and demolition plans last month, and neighbors have been writing him letters and protesting every weekend since.
Freeland Historic District is a collection of 35 bungalows, marked down from the original 37, on two blocks south of White Oak Blvd. at the damp end of the Heights. There’s been no new construction in the district — which was designated just last fall — and residents have been working hard to keep it that way.
Wood tells Chronicle reporter Robin Foster that neither the Realtor nor the owner of the house told him that the house at 536 Granberry was in an historic district before he signed a contract to buy it:
Sell! Sell! Sell! screams the grand central Living Room of this 6,495-sq.-ft. wonder (seen here from the entry) in pond-spotted but down-to-earth Royal Lakes Manor. And really, it does look like the builder was able to get a rather comprehensive new-home design-cliché package to fire on all cylinders.
Sadly, all the entry melodrama hasn’t been drawing the buyers. The 2-story house — which looks to be about halfway between Sugar Land and Richmond, south of 59 — was completed in 2007, and originally listed for $1.2 million. The following May the price was cut to $1.1 million, then later listed with another broker for $1,025,000. By July, it was down to $949,000. It’s been listed with the current broker — at $899K — since last December.
Denver’s JG Johnson Architects describes its entry in the $99K House Competition using 4 terms:
MODULAR: three modules, numerous configurations, structural insulated panels allow flexible opening installation, mass production
ADAPTABLE: responsive to different site orientations, ratios, topographies
INDIVIDUAL: different users, multifunctional spaces, architectural style variations, pride in ownership supports demographically diverse neighborhoods
ECOLOGICAL (AND ECONOMICAL): ductless climate control system, inclusion of surplus materials, highly insulated, well sealed envelope, minimal built space through inclusion of exterior spaces, glazing orientation, solar shading
WHERE’S A STINKIN’ FEMA TRAILER WHEN YOU NEED ONE? Trailer sculptor Paul Villinski, on the difficulty of procuring the raw material for his Emergency Response Studio, now on display at the Rice Art Gallery: “I thought, OK I’m going to go get a FEMA trailer, because they’re selling them online through the government – you know, the GAO Web site – at that very moment, it seemed, FEMA basically stopped releasing the trailers into the marketplace. And not only did they do that, they bought back all the ones that they had already sold. . . . And the back story with that is basically that the plaintiffs in this class-action suit need a couple of FEMA trailers so they can really study the indoor air quality and FEMA and the manufacturers do not want them to have them. So they’ve been ordered by the judge in the case to release the trailers, and they haven’t done it yet. So that made it impossible for me to actually get a FEMA trailer, which is why I wound up finding a 30-foot Gulfstream Cavalier, but it was built a couple of years before the FEMA trailers were.” [Arts in Houston; previously in Swamplot]
Next featured entry to the $99K House Competition: This design from Houston’s Glassman Shoemake Maldonado Architects. The firm calls its design the Core House:
Like many of the existing homes in the Houston neighborhood, the CORE house is a compact, single story structure that uses pier and beam construction. The CORE house is powered by a “core†module, defined as an unchanging, narrow mechanical/plumbing spine. The body can be built to suit a family’s needs, while the CORE remains the same.
It sure is hard to keep straight all those white-stucco Modern homes a few Houston architects keep churning out. Which probably explains the big “oops” in the latest issue of Houston Lifestyles & Homes magazine, a free publication distributed to “45,000 upscale homes in the Houston area.”
February’s cover story, “An Inside Outside House,” centers around the somewhat spectacular home local architect-builders MC² built for Barry and Sherry Johnson, along the edge of a fault line on a small lot adjacent to Memorial Park. The tall and narrow home, which features a three-story living space, slanted columns holding up a V-shaped roof, and third-floor balconies looking out over a pool, was featured in a Houston AIA home tour last year.
Attorney and possible mayoral candidate Ben Hall may have cost himself a few votes from the style police for his very public flirtation with purchasing State Rep. Hubert Vo’s languishing Rivercrest Megamansion last month. (Hall’s wife apparently vetoed it because it was “too big.”) But Hall’s working on a comeback, scoring glowing words from Fox26 reporter Isiah Carey after a visit yesterday to Hall’s law office — in a 1922 mansion at 530 Lovett Blvd. in Montrose:
It is by far one of the coolest legal offices I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s an old mansion that seems to be the centerpiece for the entire street. It is huge. Inside of the building is also super cool. You can tell the legal eagle took pride in decorating his offices. If worst comes to worst Hall could say this is his home and still run for Mayor of Houston.
Photo of 530 Lovett Blvd.: Isiah Carey
“SPACIOUS LIVINGROOM WITH SKYLIGHT & FLOWERBED,” shouts the listing for this 1970s-era home on a cul-de-sac near White Oak Bayou in Candlelight Forest. And it’s no exaggeration. The Swamplot reader who alerted us to the property also expressed appreciation for its mauve carpet and mirrored Dining Room wall:
After a longish break, Swamplot returns with featured entries to the $99K House Competition. This design, from Houston’s Royse/Eagleton Architects, is called “A Simple House,” or ash:
ash is designed around three ideas.
1. To be as simple as possible in the building’s layout/function and construction in order to meet a construction budget of $75,000
At just over 1,200 square feet of conditioned space, ash is a small house. High volumes, an open layout, and connections to adjoining, exterior decks make the building feel much larger than its actual footprint. The layout of the house is two volumes under a single shed roof. The smaller of the two volumes that contains the master is located on the front of the house, and frames a path to the building’s entry. The second volume is split into a private space with bedrooms and a public space that opens to an exterior deck that runs along the entire length of the building’s east side.
A question from a Swamplot reader:
My husband and I lost our Heights bungalow (and the hundred-year-old oaks that shaded it) to Hurricane Ike. We have decided donate the remnants of the house to Historic Houston for salvage, sell our lot . . . and use our insurance settlement to pursue our dream of purchasing an older commercial building, like an old two-story brick grocery store, somewhere inside the loop in the $200K – $350 range, 3000 – 4000 sq. ft., for mixed use as a residence upstairs and studio space/small theater downstairs. We are not having much luck.
My question is this: aside from all the usual avenues–Commgate, Loopnet, HAR, reading blogs, driving around, submitting LOI’s, what other resources exist for novice commercial buyers, like us?
Remember that crowd-friendly but vacant and unfinished mansion on Rivercrest that State Rep. Hubert Vo has been trying to unload since mid-2006? It may soon have a buyer! Abc13 reporter Miya Shay says former city attorney Ben Hall — who would need to move inside Houston city limits from his current home in Piney Point Village if he decides to run for mayor — is interested in buying it!
The house is nice, very nice. It’s currently listed for $3.9 million on HAR. There are 8 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms and 2 half baths, and an 8 car garage. So, if Hall buys the house, you can bet that his mayoral ambitions are pretty real. Imagine the fundraisers he can hold there!
The $800K price cut apparently went through last May. And though the revised listing still lists the home as “under construction,” the rooms now look . . . finished!
A few months after Ike, this tricked-out FEMA trailer rolls into Houston as . . . art?? Paul Villinski’s reworked 30-ft. Gulfstream “Cavalier” trailer, which took the artist 7 months to mod, will be parked outside the Rice University Art Gallery starting later this month.
Re-born as the Emergency Response Studio, the trailer’s formaldehyde-ridden original materials are replaced by entirely “green†technology and building materials, including recycled denim insulation, bamboo cabinetry, compact fluorescent lighting, reclaimed wood, and natural linoleum floor tiles made from linseed oil. It is powered by eight mammoth batteries that store energy generated by an array of solar panels and a “micro†wind turbine atop a 40-foot high mast. Not only practical, Emergency Response Studio is a visually engaging structure with an expansive work area featuring a wall section that lowers to become a deck. A ten-foot, elliptical geodesic skylight allows extra headroom and natural lighting in the work area. Though designed as an artist’s studio and residence, Emergency Response Studio is an ingenious prototype for self-sufficient, solar-powered mobile housing.
Party on the back deck!
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE BAYOU Lisa Gray gets a glimpse of the “chai-colored” waters of Berry Bayou behind her 1966-model Meadowcreek home: “Most of the new houses sprouting in the neighborhood did their level best to ignore the bayou. Most of them still do; it’s rarely a selling point. A year ago, I was delighted to find that not only was it possible to buy a non-flooding bayou house for $150K, but that it might not cost any more than a similar three-bedroom house on a neighboring suburban lot. On har.com’s real estate listings, bayou frontage either went unmentioned or hid under the faint praise ‘no backyard neighbors’ — the same thing sellers say when a house backs up to train tracks. When first looking at the house I now live in, I had to stand on an overturned bucket to see over the privacy fence and down to the water.” [Houston Chronicle]
