06/20/13 12:00pm

Fonde Park, Brays Bayou (and its hike-and-bike trail), and the Orange Show Center for Visionary Arts are among the outdoor diversions near this window-grilled 1977 home on a small lot in Hampshire Oaks. The neighborhood is tucked behind the former Schlumberger facility off the Gulf Fwy. and is just a TX-5 Spur away from University of Houston’s main campus. Aluminum-sided, the once-contemporary home is one of four in a row with the same tipped-top street elevation and similar proportions, though each sports its own signature tree or bush in its front yard. As the newly listed of the lookalikes, this home has an asking price of $109,900.

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06/18/13 12:05pm

Though that fuzzy border on this rendering suggest this is a gated community you’d see only in your dreams — or maybe in one of its namesake’s illustrated field guides — it appears that Audubon Hollow in Briar Hollow is already under construction. Plans describe 22 3-story houses, designed by Houston’s Butler Brothers, built on 3 acres on Briar Hollow Ln., tucked in that area bound by the Loop, Buffalo Bayou and Memorial Park, and San Felipe, west of River Oaks.

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06/18/13 10:00am

Party like it’s 1699 or so in this North Blvd. mansion in Edgemont, where an updated 1925 estate includes a full-blown concert hall, super-formal formal rooms, and a platoon of figures serving a variety of decorative and occasionally structural purposes. The palatial, seemingly performance-ready venue and its collection of antique architectural embellishments sits on the northwest corner of North and Mandell St.

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06/14/13 2:00pm

Queen Anne reigns in many of the original elements remaining in an updated 1906 Houston Heights cottage and its lookalike shingle-tipped garage. They share a short-sheeted lot across from Harvard Elementary School and a bit north of the hike-and-bike trail. Listed Monday, the property is asking $294,600.

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06/11/13 2:00pm

The deeply set lot of a porchified plantation-ish spread in Ridgeley Place lends a Southern — or maybe just South Fork — feel to this 6-year-old home in Hilshire Village. The south-facing Acadian-style structure also features plenty of  pull-up-a-chair gathering spots inside.

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