The Dwell blog and a Dubai-based “ezine” named De51gn both feature long-awaited interior photos of Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen‘s Wabi Sabi House on Bartlett St. near Greenbriar. Doesn’t look like the house has been staged too heavily, but . . . isn’t that the point of “imperfect beauty”?
Have a look around:
Houston design blogger (and Swamplot Neighborhood Guessing Game veteran) Joni Webb takes her readers on a tour of the many recent hôtels particuliers that line her daily café run. She explains West U’s new pseudo-Euro look:
When the rebuilding started, most people opted for red brick Georgian styled, two storied homes. Now, the trend is to build with stucco instead of red brick and French instead of Georgian.
Today, while driving to Starbucks and snapping photos of my favorite homes along my route, I noticed that I am very partial to the new, trendy kind of home: stucco, French inspired, with a straight facade.
After the jump: more wisteria and arched French doors, from Joni Webb’s West U Starbucks galerie!
There will be a grand total of 652-and-a-half private bathrooms in Houston’s Turnberry Tower. Apparently this is the kind of attention to detail that’s needed to attract buyers who are flush with assets:
When meeting with buyers, Turnberry’s sales staff emphasizes the high life they’ll enjoy, said [Turnberry Ltd. vice president Jim] Cohen, with the 40-year-old condo tower developer.
They’re told, for example, that when they hang out by the pool, a Turnberry staffer will offer a cool towel for their neck and wipe sunscreen from their sunglasses.
Image of Turnberry Tower plaza-level pools: Turnberry Ltd.
Remember when it looked like the entire West End was going to go . . . metal? It was going to be the Tin House District: Hot young architects inserting daring steel-sided homes between ramshackle bungalows . . . with great sensitivity to the sleepy little neighborhood.
Here’s a Rice Military home Natalye Appel designed for Sarah Balinskas in 1992. And it’s for lease! Have a peek inside . . .
From one of Swamplot’s initial correspondents, K, comes word of a redo in Memorial Hollow she says
looks like a Mr. Potatohead gone wrong — parts and bits and pieces on a foundation that don’t really go together. It still looks to me like the bottom half of an older house that someone plopped new construction on top of.
At first, K thought the house
was being torn down like so many other 1960s-era homes in my neighborhood. It was a one-story, typical little cottage on a big lot — the kind they love to demolish and then fill up the entire lot with a three-story monstrosity. But then I realized that they were, in fact, totally remodeling it. They tore the roof off and blew out the back of the house until only three brick walls were standing.
Then they rebuilt the back wall and added a second story to the house. It looks pretty bizarre now, although I can’t tell if that’s because I was used to the little bungalow that was there before or because the house really does look weird. You be the judge.
Below: More before-and-after photos of this hollow sixties memorial in Memorial Hollow, ready for your verdict!
The Wabi Sabi House is Carol Isaak Barden’s latest High Concept development. Tucked into a normal-sized lot between Greenbriar and Kirby just south of 59, the 3,700-sq.-ft. cedar-faced home is the first Texas residence designed by Seattle architects Olson Sundberg Kundig and Allen. It’s scheduled to be complete this month.
What’s the big idea? Explains Barden,
Generally, wabi means humble, and sabi refers to the imperfection that comes with time. Freely translated, it means something like “lived in.”
Alternate translation: Move over, feng shui. Wabi-sabi is the ancient Japanese idea behind the latest category of home-design looks and books.
After the jump: A view from the Wabi Sabi House’s huge roof deck. Plus: Barden’s checkered and gilded past!
A reader reports that the large and well-turreted home at the corner of Rivercrest and Westheimer — not far from State Rep. Hubert Vo’s curious mansion — is almost complete:
The home belongs to Mike James, formerly of the Houston Rockets, who was traded to the Timberwolves, only to be traded back in exchange for Juwan Howard. The irony is that the home is an exact replica of Juwan Howard’s home in Royal Oaks, just a few miles down the road (Mike and his wife were unaware of this as their “Manager” picked out the plan — they were not amused when they found this out after Mike and his manager parted ways). It was designed by Berrios Designs (exceptional building designer), as was the guest house and the full NBA regulation indoor basketball court at the back of the ~3.5 acre property. The property also features two putting greens complete with dual sand bunkers and a water hazard, a “sunken” pool between the guest and main house, and a gym and dance studio attached to the basketball court. Sadly, the project, which had so much potential, is being finished on the cheap because of cost over-runs caused by their former manager (trying to do things cheap generally ends up costing a lot more money). Regardless, it is turning out pretty decently, but could have been done so much better.
Mike James’s house under construction in Rivercrest is pictured at the top of this story; Juwan Howard’s home in Royal Oaks is the one below it.
We hope the house-plan trade works out better than the player trade: James was sent to the New Orleans Hornets in February. But he says he’ll be back!
After the jump, more glimpses of Mike James’s Howardian manor and sports compound, plus a look inside the Royal Oaks home it’s modeled after!
Cote de Texas author Joni Webb comes clean about her obsession with a recently constructed home in West U.
. . . whenever I drove by the house, I would slow my car to a crawl, craning my neck to try to see inside the white stuccoed home that had so captured my imagination. Through their windows, I could make out some of their furnishings – first, there was a screen in the living room, and then I could see an oversized mirror. Next – I noticed the dining room’s antique light fixture which furthered my suspicions that this was a house I would love – inside and out. By the time the sheer, linen curtains were hung – the deal was sealed – I was an official stalker and somehow, I had to finagle my way into the home to see it first hand.
This must have been tough for Houston’s highest profile design blogger, because Webb is usually obsessed with French design, and the design in this particular home was clearly more . . . Belgian.
After the jump: The stalker gets in!!!
As recently as last Friday, the home owned by State Rep. Hubert Vo and his wife in Memorial’s Rivercrest subdivision was listed on HAR as “Option Pending.” Then — by yesterday — it was back on the market. Did something happen to disrupt a potential sale?
The new, 23,000-sq.-ft. “awesome Mediterranean estate” at 31 W. Rivercrest has been listed at the same price for 21 months.
What’s the story? A comment posted to HAIF last November offers some clues:
That house is a disaster. I believe, it was, initially being built for Rep. Vo, but when the budget quickly ran out and then they realized it wasn’t worth what was spent on it, it has been a mess trying to get rid of the thing.
I met with an agent that was showing the house privately about a year and a half ago just before I started a project down the street and she eluded that it was initially being offered, still incomplete, for 7.5mm. So far as I know, it is STILL incomplete and has dropped a lot. Eventually, they will have to liquidate it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a tear down with as hideous as the house is.
The actual $4.7 million asking price has in fact held steady. For $200K less than Vo’s other real-estate offering, you get a 2.66-acre lot, an enormous brick home with 5 stairways, 2 attached garages holding a total of 8 cars, plus a separate guest house. And it’s all almost complete!
But this isn’t just your typical Memorial mansion for column-and-arch-crazed empty-nesters! Everything about this home — from its 8 bedrooms, 9 full baths, and 2 half baths, to its dual Master Bedroom suites — is tailor made for occupancy by large numbers of people!
See what we mean below the fold, in a few choice scenes from inside.
Having finished with the Memorial Villages, Robert Boyd’s latest bikeride documentary takes us through the neighborhoods lining Gessner, south of I-10:
The houses here were built mostly between 1959 and 1965. The lots tend to be small compared to those in the Villages (just east of these subdivisions). In fact, if you go immediately south or west, the lots and the houses tend to be larger. This is where Memorial starts to become the more familiar kind of Houston suburb–similar houses on same-sized lots, with developers reusing floor-plans and exterior designs.
As usual, Boyd is on the lookout for anything unusual:
I had a Steve Reich album on my IPod as I rode (Sextet, Piano Phase, and Eight Lines played by the London Steve Reich Ensemble–I recommend it highly), and it occurred to me that a neighborhood like this is like a Steve Reich piece, where there is a comfortable, rhythmic sameness with tiny changes as you go along. The tiny changes wouldn’t have even caught my eye while riding through the much more heterogeneous Memorial Villages, but here they stand out.
After the jump: A few more pix of Boyd’s West Memorial picks!
This massive 20,000-sq.-ft. home featured on New York Architect Alexander Gorlin‘s website is under construction at 2950 Lazy Lane in River Oaks. The Museum of Fine Arts’ Bayou Bend Collection is next door.
Gorlin’s client is the youngest member of the Forbes 400 list of the Richest Americans (he’s number 317): 34-year-old former Enron trader John Arnold, who now runs secretive Centaurus Energy, a small but extraordinarily successful hedge fund company that trades energy commodities.
Four years ago, Arnold bought a recently renovated 1926 home in the French Norman manorial style in the Homewoods subdivision of River Oaks. The home, which had sat on the market for close to three years, was designed by Houston architect Birdsall Briscoe in collaboration with John Staub, who also built the Bayou Bend estate for the children of former Texas governor James Hogg next door. Briscoe’s creation was dubbed “Dogwoods” by Hogg’s son Michael, who lived there for many years with his wife.
A year after purchasing Dogwoods — currently valued by HCAD at $4.9 million — Arnold angered River Oaks preservationists by tearing it down.
After the jump, more illustrations of the house John Arnold will be trading into, plus a few photos of the one he didn’t leave behind.
Carol Isaak Barden, developer of the towering white now-a-lot-less-than- a-million-dollar townhouses near Allen Parkway, explains to Swamplot why she thinks the second unit hasn’t sold yet:
We always expected that it might take longer to sell the homes. They are bachelor pads. They are not for people with children, they are not for residents with bad knees, they are vertical structures for people who don’t mind using the stairs. Since both Francois [de Menil, the architect] and I have lived in Manhattan in buildings without elevators, we didn’t think it would be such a big deal. We were wrong.
Hey, nothing a little retrofitting can’t solve! Barden says a 4-story lift could be put in “easily” — but she hasn’t, because some potential buyers preferred it as the architect designed it, and “didn’t want to give up the extra storage.”
Francois lives in a 4-story townhouse in NYC, my first apt. in NYC was in the Apthorp, an old pre-war building on the upper east side without an elevator. I schlepped luggage and groceries up the stairs, and stayed thin and fit. Francois and I were dead wrong about the elevator issue. Houstonians valet park at restaurants, stores, hospitals, and even some churches. (New Yorkers don’t). And therein lies the problem.
608 Stanford Unit B sold three months after completion, last May. Unit A? Not so lucky:
The second unit has had contracts, unfortunately, none of them have closed. . . . we’re hoping to close on a contract with a buyer who happens to be an architect. It seems that the people who most appreciate these homes can’t afford them. (Architects, engineers, designers)
After the jump: what a bargain! Plus, a bit of news . . .
Remember those sleek modern million-dollar white-stucco townhouses designed by New York architect Francois de Menil for a small lot over in Temple Terrace, just behind Allen Parkway?
It was unusual to include the One-Two Townhomes being on the AIA Houston 2006 Home Tour in that they were, and are, unfinished. “My concern was that they would soon be sold,” says [developer Carol Isaak] Barden, “and then nobody would get to see them.”
She shouldn’t have worried. One of the units apparently sold a little less than a year later, and the other is still on the market — though it’s not a million-dollar townhome anymore. After construction finally ended last July, there were five successive price reductions. Since the end of last month this 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 2,845-sq-ft. townhome has been available for a humbling $779,000. If you count the garage level below and the rooftop deck as a single story, that’s almost as good as getting one whole floor . . . free!
After the jump, a brief gawk inside.
Why aren’t these $399,900 Heights bungalows-on-sticks selling? Tricon Homes has been trying to get rid of them since November . . . of 2006!
In the first part of 2007, Tricon dropped the asking prices for 2016 and 2020 Singleton twice from the original $449,900. But since June there’s been no movement.
They look like they’ve got everything: Cute front porches, plus garages with 13-ft. ceilings! Just completed! So what’s the problem?
Below the fold: How to slide a $400K house onto a 2900-sq.-ft. Heights lot!
Yes, that’s a hedge of dense kudzu wrapping around this long skinny house . . . and threatening to do the same to its Fifth Ward neighbors. The kudzu, a court of crushed oyster shells, a house-length porch, a cistern, Murphy beds, and a butterfly roof are the major features of House 99, one of five finalists in a local competition to design a “green” house for $99,000 or less.
House 99 was designed by L.A. architect and USC professor Gail Borden. The Rice Design Alliance and Houston’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects want to build the winning design of their $99K house competition at 4015 Jewel St., or on other properties swept up by the city’s Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority.
Below the fold: More drawings! More kudzu! More cost-saving measures! More greenness!
