Oh, to be a fly on the heavily patterned wallpaper when statesmen and royalty make their appointments! In this home on Richelieu Ln. in Shepherd Park Plaza, for instance — what sage counsel was offered, followed?
A look at the royal treatment:
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Tag: Homes for Sale
Missed out on putting in a bid on that pinkish coke palace up in Ponderosa Trails that went up for auction in March? Of course you did, because it didn’t sell. So now the 5-bedroom, 8,024-sq.-ft. mansion at 17907 Elk Valley Circle will be back on the virtual auction block again this May 18th to 20th— starting at the same $471,250 minimum bid.
Alas, the 2.54-acre property will be available “for inspection” just once, for a couple of hours on May 12th — by special appointment only. There’s a “Waiver, Release & Indemnity Agreement” you’ll have to sign to participate. And no, the former owner won’t be available to answer your questions about maintenance — Daron Odell Jones is still serving a 13-year prison sentence for cocaine possession with an intent to distribute.
According to law enforcement officials, Jones led a drug empire supplying the Mobile, Alabama, area and had ties to a violent Mexican drug cartel. (If he hadn’t cooperated with authorities, pled guilty, and forfeited this home, a small car collection, and some snazzy jewelry, he might have received a longer sentence and faced more serious charges.)
What distinguishes this druglord’s lair from all the lookalikes and wannabes builders have been putting up all over Houston?
Eastside mod chaser (and Swamplot advertiser) Robert Searcy reports on a peculiar property he toured last week on Allendale Rd., not too far from Meadowcreek Village Park:
“. . . it is an odd mix style & architecture wise. The exterior looks like some suburban office building while the interior has a semi-commercial utilitarian feel with a heavy dose of Boogie Nights decor. The rooms are all ridiculously large with huge vaulted ceilings and lots of glass. Giant room dividers, not unlike what you see to partition off hotel ball room spaces, divide the giant open kitchen from . . . large U shaped front living areas. Could be a living room and a den, or a conference room and a reception area. Walking through the cavernous space, which appears much larger than HCAD records, you find yourself describing the rooms with sentences that all start with “well it could be either….”
Seems to fit right in with another hint in the listing: If you like that cute little white home you see next door [see bottom photo], it’s . . . available too!
Always on the lookout for striking images, art blogger Robert Boyd discovers an intriguing pattern in the map included in the listing of the nearby Fabulous Flea property discussed a couple of days ago on Swamplot. He asks:
Do you think the property lines of of those houses were deliberately designed to look like a man? (Sort of like the Vitruvian Man, don’t you think?)
Boyd dubs the pattern — found on the lower portion of the Upper Kirby blocks surrounded by Elbert, Bammel, and Sackett — “Elbert Street Man.”
But there’s a more direct reference. The anatomical property lines are the mark in Houston’s real-estate landscape of a much more well-known figure:
Allen R. Stanford.
A reader with a longstanding appreciation for the party house at the corner of Harold and Graustark in Montrose writes in to provide a little background on the property for Swamplot readers. After sitting on the market since at least last September — and working its way down $130K to an asking price of $514,900 — the mammoth early-eighties brick in-town home with 4 bedrooms, 4 full- and 3 half-baths, and 4 staircases is now nearing the end of an online foreclosure auction. Who will end up with this 9,111-sq.-ft. prize?
The house is large and an odd mixture of no expense spared features (marble floors throughout, wood floors cut on bias, acres of woodwork…) and typical early 80’s tract home construction techniques. Design features include the dance floor off the master bedroom (complete with freestanding bar and speakers in the wall!), brass banisters on the winding marble staircase, scads of quick exit staircases and mirrors on the ceiling of every shower.
Oooh! Can we see any of that in the pix?
Today, tomorrow, and Thursday are the final days for The Fabulous Flea: After this sale, shop owner Mary Daly and her husband hope to sell the little Bammel Lane antique store — along with their cozy 4,018-sq.-ft. house next door. The compound, designed by Kurt Aichler, also includes a pool, an open-air poolhouse, and a small collection of courtyards on a 15,000-sq.-ft. lot.
The whole 4-6 bedroom, 3-1/2-bath package is priced at $1,995,000. But you might be able to find a few pieces of furniture for a little less than that at the shop’s final sale this week:
The Hometta blog features construction pix of the pair of houses going up on Hyde Park 2 blocks west of Montrose — designed by Collaborative Designworks, Houston’s most notable practitioners of those folded-spiral stucco balcony-wall-soffit wraparounds. 1212 and 1216 Hyde Park won’t go on the market for another few months, architect James Evans tells us, but when they do they’ll likely be priced “in the low $1M range.”
But . . . haven’t we visited this little corner of Hyde Park before?
An amused reader points Swamplot to the HAR listing shown above for a newly discounted home in Bridgeland. Conveniently, HAR highlights MLS listing price drops — and the occasional price correction — of a certain weight. And which one is this? The price for this 4-year-old “hardly lived in” 4,061-sq.-ft. home was adjusted downward by a little more than $4 million on . . . April Fools Day.
- 18618 Partners Voice Dr. [HAR]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW MUCH TO TURN IT TUSCAN? “It’s not even $8 million! Merely $7,999,000! I’d love to buy this place but I’m afraid I’d end up baroque.” [wilf, commenting on Deep Discount Madness Returns to Piney Point Village: Megamansion Now 60 Percent Off!]
A reader notes that the little Piney Point Village add-on project that TV executive Douglas R. Johnson and his then-wife Melanie bought in 1996 as a 6,000-sq.-ft. starter home is back on the market with a new agent, a new set of photos, and a new price that’s 60 percent lower than the original. But is that an air of desperation wafting up from the listing?
BUY NOW FOR HALF THE COST TO BUILD~ONLY A FEW DAYS LEFT FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY~ALL OFFERS CONSIDERED!
C’mon everybody, that’s more than 23,000 sq. ft. now for only . . . $8 million! What will you do with all the money you save?!!
How about hiring the domestic staff that’s gonna be hard at work dusting and polishing this:
Thanks to y’all of you for sending the Neighborhood Guessing Game out in style! Bolstered by all of your encouragement, NGG will likely spend its retirement tanning by the pool . . . and plotting a comeback. In the meantime, if you have any grand ideas for making an eventual NGG 2.0 better, stronger, and more fun-filled, please send them this way!
Nobody nailed the neighborhood in this final round, but the single-word entry from Susan was judged close enough for the win. Her prize: a one-year individual membership in the Rice Design Alliance. Congratulations!
Our runners-up this week are flake and wilf. And where is this place?
When last Swamplot visited the tiny Freeland Historic District at the foot of the Heights almost a year ago, Samantha Wood and her husband, architect Jack Preston Wood, had just given up on plans to purchase a little bungalow at 536 Granberry St., demolish it, and replace it with a new 1-1/2-story bungalow. The Woods’ earlier plans — to build two 4-story townhomes on the property — stirred up protests from neighbors and a rejection from the city historical commission.
Did all that hullabaloo in the newly-minted historic district scare off potential buyers? A Freeland neighbor says no — and suspects most of the neighborhood’s new attention is coming from builders:
525 Granberry Street (now listed on the tax rolls and MLS as 525 E. 5th 1/2 Street) went on the market last week. So many offers have been received they ask that final bids go in tomorrow, April 16.
Why would builders be so interested in this property?
Just a couple rungs down from the top of the market in Meyerland is this 17-year-old fantasy on Braesheather, designed in 1993 by architect Mark Mucasey. The richly painted stucco home just a block south of Brays Bayou and two blocks southwest of the 610 Loop features a 3-car attached garage, 4 bedrooms, 4 1/2 baths, and several interior hues you may not have encountered recently:
There were no winners in this week’s Neighborhood Guessing Game. We’ll save the prize — that one-year individual Rice Design Alliance membership — for the winner of next week’s game.
Want to see what none of you guessed?
Sure ya do!
Dude! Decorating an older home with flagstones is so choice! They go anywhere — floors, walls. All it takes is a little of that sticky stuff and a little, you know: imagination.
And there’s no heavy lifting, cuz you’re just sticking it on!
Like this one place, in Braes Heights? It was built in the early sixties. Wait’ll you see what we did to the garage!
