COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE’S MY FLORENCE NIGHTGOWN? “That closet – omg! – I could live in just that space! But the trouble with such thematic interiors is that your furnishings have to coordinate with it. Certainly none of your prized artwork could ever hang in there. You’ll probably feel your wardrobe isn’t quite right for the house. And your dumb dog doesn’t quite fit in either. (The cat under the pool table looks nervous.) It’s just too much stress to match your surroundings.” [movocelot, commenting on Huckleberry Tuscan: Unloading the New Farmhouse in Town]
Sign up for the Newsletter
Tag: Interiors
This new concoction in Briardale, just steps from the corner of San Felipe and Sage, isn’t your ordinary farmhouse-themed Tuscan-style mansion. No, this home is loaded up with actual materials snatched from actual old buildings in Europe! Among the repurposed Yurpian booty: limestone floors and stone surrounds from France, 19th century doors from a palazzo in Florence, and an 18th century stone sink. Plus plenty of antique brick from Chicago. A stone-vault-like Powder Room affords a relaxed, yet secure environment for guest excretions.
Completed just last year, the home was built by Burton Construction — best known locally for its not-so-Tuscan work at CityCentre — for the family of the company’s founder, Brad Burton. But the Burtons are now ready to sell, if one of you is willing to cough up the $3.5 million asking price. Here’s what you get:
A representative of Margie Beegle Sales expects this two-story home in Southgate across the street from Rice University to hit the market next month. If you’re interested in a sneak preview of the home or would enjoy the opportunity to participate in the frenzied dismantling of the rather astounding collection of collections mounted inside, here’s your chance. The estate sale at 2141 University Blvd. is this weekend. Looking for a Kabuki mask or a vintage Hell Driver Rodeo racetrack? You’re in luck! A few more featured items from among the assembled treasures: KISS Psychic Circus action figures, some rather large Nutcracker figurines, and two full size mirror-image representations of Cracker Jack’s blue and white logo-man Sailor Jack with his dog Bingo. A much abbreviated preview of the scene:
Modern architecture fans in Houston have been whispering about this 1964 Meyerland home ever since it went on the market late last month. Houston Mod featured it as its “Mod of the Month” open house a couple of weeks ago. Commenters on a Swamplot post about another modern-era home have also been discussing the 3,172-sq.-ft. home, which sits just a couple blocks north of Brays Bayou. As one of them noted, it’s the former home of Houston architect John R. Dossey, who bought it with his wife more than a decade ago and renovated it extensively.
If that name sounds familiar, it might be because Dossey pleaded guilty in federal court yesterday to possession of child pornography. The charges stemmed from the stakeout by an FBI unit in March of a feeder-road pay-by-the-hour Scottish Inn & Suites hotel in southwest Houston, where Dossey was arrested in the company of a 16-year-old prostitute. Dossey admitted to taking photos of the girl, and a later search of his home on Manhattan Dr. (yes, pictured here) netted his computers, the inevitable forensic hard-drive search, and the child pornography charge.
Dossey, who’s been in custody without bond ever since, transferred ownership of the home — and the 12,755-sq.-ft. lot next door — in May. And yes . . . both are now for sale! Which means you can conduct a little surveillance of the scene on your own:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: DESIGN EYE FOR THE CEO GUY “Being a visionary for your business doesn’t mean you’re a visionary for interior design.” [Carol, commenting on Helping CEOs with That Vision Thing]
Mod tracker and photographer Ben Hill believes this early-fifties Ranch is the best house Houston architect Wylie W. Vale ever designed in Katy. It’s a little less country — and features more rock — than this Swamplot reader favorite he designed a mile southeast, on Woods Hole Ln.
This 3,345-sq.-ft. single story, which sits on an acre of land near the center of the original town, has been on the market since mid-June, for $375,000. The home was originally built for former mayor Arthur Miller. And it was still in the family when Hill took these photos last year:
Jenny Lawson, known to her thousands of devoted blog and Twitter followers as the Bloggess, tells Swamplot her home in Southern Trails is “pretty and airy and there are NO ZOMBIES around. Unless you’re into zombies.”
And if we are? “Then I can get you zombies. Probably.” This is in Pearland, right?
Oh, but the place looks so . . . normal? Maybe that’s because the Kitchen shamwow comforter insulation pictured above — installed late last month to absorb any suds that might emerge from a laundry-detergent-fortified dishwasher — is missing from the listing photos. The listing does include, however, this family Castle-Study Area:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: REAL MODERNISTS GO COMMANDO “The bathroom sinks are too shallow to soak your undies.” [miss_msry, commenting on Dunstan Lounge Plays House]
Just another one of those Sugar Land loft-plan Ranch renovations with some of the usual crazy ceiling action. This one’s right on Oyster Creek, with a dock in back:
Granite tile floors? Check. Floating island kitchen? Check. Valance-mounted bouquets? Check:
The Swamplot Price Adjuster runs on your nominations! Found a property you think is poorly priced? Send an email to Swamplot, and be sure to include a link to the listing or photos. Tell us about the property, and explain why you think it deserves a price adjustment. Then tell us what you think a better price would be. Unless requested otherwise, all submissions to the Swamplot Price Adjuster will be kept anonymous.
Location: 2412 Wichita St., Riverside Terrace
Details: 3-4 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths; 3,400 sq. ft. on a 10,200-sq.-ft. lot
Price: $729,000
History: On the market for almost 8 months. Price cut $21K at the beginning of May
A reader who lives in the “crazy quilt of a neighborhood” of this Riverside Terrace listing thinks this recently remodeled home dating from 1946 is worth considerably less than it’s going for:
Priced, as you can see, at just under 3/4 of a million (!) in a neighborhood where homes sell for around 200K on average. What? I mean it looks nicey nice and all, but not THAT nice.
Or is it? “It looks great in person,” admits our correspondent, after a quick drive-by. Did you catch those front doors, “replicas of those at the Chinese Embassy”? Or . . . what’s behind them?
How’d that foreclosure auction go for the humongous early-eighties brick house on Harold St. in Montrose used in recent years as a party pad and chainsaw test site?
Let’s just say that the auction listing is gone, the property is back on MLS — and the price has been cut another $45K. But unlike the sudden, swift, and unexplained felling of the mature street trees surrounding this property, the chopping of the list price has resulted from a series of 6 hacks, from $644,900 last October to $469,900 just last week.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: TRYING TO CLEAN UP IN THOSE MONTROSE BUNGALOW BATHROOMS “I can’t tell you how many bungalows, Victorians, and other 1910-1940 houses I’ve looked at in Montrose in the past year where the remuddlers have totally destroyed the character of the bathroom with the ultra-trendy stone floor and walls with the disgustingly unsanitary jetted whirlpool tub.” [GoogleMaster, commenting on Swamplot Price Adjuster: The Heights of 2-2ness]
How does the city look after a long, heavy shower? If you’re stepping out to grab a towel in the north-facing master bath of a 26th-floor unit in the Warwick Towers on Hermann Dr., maybe something like this. Which will lead you to the little perch below, one of the nicest we’ve seen set up for someone who’s naked, dripping wet, and maybe trying to get a little work done:
“How much further will it fall?” Swamplot asked back in January, not long after the list price for Ken and Linda Lay’s 33rd-floor penthouse in the Huntingdon on Kirby Dr. was marked down the last time. And now we have a partial answer: All the way to $10.25 million — for now, at least. That’s almost a 14 percent cut from the last price, but just under 20 percent off the initial $12.8 million ya-gotta-try pricing Linda Lay started with.
And really, you want to be coming down in regular increments. What numbers come next?
Well, whaddya know? Graphic designer Chris Nguyen’s tiny Marshall St. apartment (featured on Swamplot just last week) ended up as the grand U.S. prize winner in Apartment Therapy’s Small, Cool 2010 design contest. No fluke: Nguyen was, uh . . . thinking small from the get-go. Intrigued by the design website’s annual competition and the idea of living in a tiny space, Nguyen began his search for an apartment in Houston last July:
I really wanted this to be about a different way of living and not about compromises, so it was important that all my furniture remained real-sized. I carefully selected what I thought I needed and put away in storage extraneous collections and junk that we all end up hoarding over the years. . . .
I think the bedroom in the house I was living in last was the same size as this entire studio. It was a big room in a big house that was filled with an incredibly increasing amount of big things. That’s how we do it in Texas, right? All the while, I always held an admiration for smartly designed small spaces more commonly found in highly urban dense metropolises or cool under appreciated neighborhoods. Houston is not the first of those things, so I looked for something purposefully small in the latter.
And he found . . . ?
