Dusted off and back on the market with a new . . . uh, MLS number for the new year: This Rancho Escondido number from 1986 out there in Willis, putting in at the far side of Lake Conroe. We’ve tracked it back as far as last May and a $975,000 asking price; the 4,535-sq.-ft. home on a half acre is now down to $845,000. From the street the 4-bedroom, 3-1/2-bath home plays it quiet and Ranch-like, but once you’re inside the animal-skin prints and views open up:
What’s the safety of your family worth, anyway? Is $2,052,218 really too high a price to pay for the security of knowing that when the revolution/apocalypse/nuclear winter/plague of locusts/hurricane/historic designation comes, your loved ones could be comfortably ensconced in their very own bomb shelter? And look! A trained school of security fish stand guard by the shelter’s entrance — in their very own BB-proof booth. Plus, right next door, there’s a $5 million home!
This early Nixon-era single-story at 418 Thamer Circle, which hit the market a few days before Christmas, offers plenty of domestic secrecy: no windows onto its Hunterwood surroundings, a walled-in central courtyard with a pool, a long and curving front driveway, and a three-quarter-acre lot on a cul-de-sac. And you’ll find plenty of era design in this home just north of the fairways of Houston Country Club, too: skylights, crimson laminated countertops, an old-school intercom system, and a showroom’s worth of sliding glass doors. Plus some old wallpaper styles that you didn’t think you’d have to kick around anymore:
Remember this home in Spring Branch Woods? Maybe not. Because the last time it went up for sale the home was in such bad shape the listing agent resorted to illustrating it with a gallery of cheesy stock photos, along with such enticing adjectives as “inhabitable.” And then there was this classic offer: “A diamond in the WAY rough, enter at your own risk, with a mask.”
The next day, enterprising Swamplot reader Claire de Lune drove by the property, and sent in a few photos of the place, including the one above, which helped explain the agent’s photographic choices — at least the image of all those children, running.
On October 15th, the home sold for $80,000, down a bit from the $110K asking price. And tax records dug up by a reader show the buyer, Titan Premier LLC, financed $71K of it — not exactly the “cash only” offer the seller had wanted. Then, at the beginning of December, the home went . . . gasp! . . . back on the market.
How does it look now? Just a little different:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE MODS AND THE BANKERS 
“My fiance and I have wanted to purchase this home for over a year. We’ve heard the banks won’t approve financing due to the foundation problems; we’d love to restore it to [its] original glory, it needs a MCM loving family–maybe you’re an investor who’d like to help us out? We don’t want this house to get into the wrong hands, it’ll break our hearts.” [Jessica Define, commenting on Scouting Report on a Walnut Bend Mod]
So many cute little diamond shapes on display at the front of this redone 1963 Ranch on the western bank of White Oak Bayou in Timbergrove Manor! And a few more show up elsewhere: In the tile floor of the breakfast room and den, and on the lily pond backstop wall. But still, so many other places a new owner could add them:
Why isn’t there an address given in the auction listing for the “1872 Bungalow Cottage” near the former police headquarters at 61 Riesner the city is trying to get rid of? Because the streets it used to be on have all faded away. The home is tucked almost under the Gulf Freeway at the eastern edge of the surrounding city parking lot. Museum of Houston director (and GHPA staffer) Jim Parsons tells Swamplot the home is all that’s left of an old residential area at what used to be the eastern tip of the Sixth Ward. According to Parsons, the original address was 34 South, and later 22 Artesian Place. Now it isn’t visible from any street.
The final deadline for bids is 8 pm tonight.
What’s it like inside the only house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright ever built in Houston? The latest edition of the Houston Architectural Guide describes the 1954 Usonian — designed by the master architect for local insurance executive William Thaxton — as “so perverse that it has engendered several sets of alteration intended to make it more livable.” The concrete-block structure featured parallelogram-shaped bedrooms with “claustrophobic proportions.” Among the later additions meant to correct the faults of the “willful and contrary” work of America’s master Modern architect: ionic columns and pineapple-shaped finials on the corners of the roof.
Oh, but all those little problems with the home at the end of a cul-de-sac in Bunker Hill Village have long since been fixed. Author Stephen Fox notes the Guide description was written well before the home’s most recent transformation, designed by Bob Inaba of the local architecture firm now known as Kirksey. In the early nineties the home’s new owners contracted them to wipe away earlier add-ons, then create a long, tall U-shaped annex that hugs the 1,200-sq.-ft. original structure, forming a courtyard with the swimming pool at the center:
How many stories are hidden within the walls — or better, are covering the walls — of this 60-year-old home on Tupelo Ave. in Pasadena, about a mile south of the city’s namesake freeway? There are so many sides to it. Including, inside, what looks like a theatrical one:
This expansive custom home creation resides on just under 3 1/2 acres in the Tomball subdivision of Haven, right near Oklahoma (the one in Texas). There are 5 bedrooms and 5 baths in the main building’s 5,700 sq. ft. But if that doesn’t give you enough space to to maintain your sense of privacy, there’s always the 1,300 sq.-ft. 2-bedroom guesthouse out back. Garage space is ample enough for a 7-car motorcade, with entry protected by an automatic gate. Interior moods at the main house range from masculine to woodsy to golden to pink; additional perks include a private cinema chamber, exercise room, plus that multi-tiered entrance fountain. More views:
The family that owns this brick-and-redwood-wrapped 1960-model River Oaks Mod designed by Houston architect Arthur Kotch hasn’t listed it on MLS. But they’re hoping this Sunday’s open house organized by Houston Mod will help attract a “preservation-minded” buyer. They’ve owned the place for 45 years: a 4-bedroom, 3,371 sq.-ft. home on a 9,750-sq.-ft. lot a couple blocks behind the Lamar-River Oaks Shopping Center on Westheimer. But really, who’d pay $1.9 million just to muck it up?
“I’m sure there are a 100 foreclosure auctions a day in town,” says a neighbor of this expanded and tarted-up house on 8th 1/2 St., “but this is the only outwardly visible one i’ve seen in the Heights.” Main clue for our tipster that the usual sales process wasn’t working: the Auction.com signs now posted “on every possible surface.” The 3-4 bedroom home is still listed on MLS for $359,000, but bidding will start at $139,000 in Wednesday’s live event at the Intercontinental Hotel near the Galleria. The home — vacant for about a year but painted twice during that time, we’re told — fell into the hands of Fannie Mae in July, and was listed for $369,000 at the beginning of August. Next door: 2 vacant lots that face Studewood, listed for sale the old-fashioned way.
Longtime Ferndale resident Carol Barden (yes, that Carol Barden) clues us into the recent appearance on MLS — at $549K apiece — of 2 out of the 3 wood-frame residences that now make up Jas Gurney Antiques. “It’s such a great little street,” she writes. “All the neighbors are so afraid that some awful developer will demo the houses and build junk. Jas has maintained gardens, old-growth trees, he plants flowers for every season.” Gurney reportedly would prefer to sell his entire inventory of “museum-quality” antiques along with his houses, but hasn’t been able to find a buyer. Also on that mixed-residential stretch of Ferndale, between Westheimer and Alabama: townhouses, plain ol’ houses, 4 more antique stores, Jill Brown’s lighting store, plus several more businesses.
Included in the $1,470,000 asking price of this just-finished 3-bedroom, 3-1/2 bath house in the northern reaches of Boulevard Oaks: a pair of doors from a 19th-century house near Osaka; that Chinese wine pot (of similar vintage) sitting at the end of the central hall by the kitchen; a 46†Sony Edgelit TV; those planters on the back terrace; the dining room table and chairs; and of course the coffee table, upholstered pieces, and Buddha in the living room. “Many of my buyers have relocated to Houston without anything to sit on,” explains developer Carol Isaak Barden.
Barden’s house replacement at 1916 Banks St. is the 15th project she’s built to sell — if you count each townhouse in her earlier multi-unit ventures separately — and the second one designed by Seattle architect Rick Sundberg. Sundberg, who’s since left to start a new firm with his daughter, was still with Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen when he designed Barden’s Wabi Sabi house a few years ago (they’re now down to Olson Kundig without him). Barden called this house Wabi Sabi II until she started spending a lot of time coordinating the work of local designers and craftsmen on the project.
Longtime Swamplot readers may remember Richard Maier as the listing agent who advertised his own Talbott Wilson modern as a freebie that just happened to come with the 1.35-acre lot on Glencove St. he was selling. (The pitch was successful, luring buyer David Mincberg and later, a demolition crew.) Michael X. Flynn was the designer and contractor responsible for transforming a small Upper Kirby office building into this little villa of vaguely Corbusian pleasures. (That one’s still on the market.) Now they’ve put their own little uh, white house on the market. The pair moved into 26 Crestwood Dr. a few years ago, though they previously owned the 2 properties that flank it. All 3 mansions share a gated driveway that faces directly into the southern reaches of Memorial Park.
Now’s your chance to peek around what they’re leaving — the scene of that Annise Parker fundraiser you missed:
