Former San Antonio Spur point guard and former Dallas Mavericks coach Avery “The Little General” Johnson lost his most recent job a few months ago at the helm of the former New Jersey and now Brooklyn Nets — and now his home, built in 2005 in The Woodlands, is for sale. What can a long career in the NBA buy you? Well, this 7-bedroom, 14,396-sq.-ft. Mediterranean mansion is listed at $8,995,000.
The Mirabeau B. condos apartments in Hyde Park take a lot from the city: The sales center, for example, comprised a pair of recycled shipping containers that were powered by the sun. And now atop the building at 2410 Waugh a photovoltaic canopy is hoarding juice for each of the 14 units; cisterns are stealing rainwater that’s then used on the landscaping and rooftop greenery. Even the development’s moniker has been plagiarized. And so it makes a lot of sense that one of the building’s interior features is inspired by something just as local: a transformer box and a snarl of wires. Houston artist Randy Twaddle, for whom power lines have become something of a muse, installed 65 of these gypsum cement tiles in a 7 ft. by 25 ft. wall at the building’s entrance inside its parking garage. Each 40-pound tile, fabricated by Dallas firm Topocast at a lab at UT Arlington, features a 3D reproduction of one of the particularly twisted scenes that Twaddle can’t seem to help noticing.
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.
Early in the last-century rush to loft downtown properties, this 1914 warehouse got converted into 15 condo units, each with a glass-and-iron fronted balcony. That was back in the mid-eighties. A see-it-all-at-a-glance corner spot on the 2nd floor within the San Jacinto Lofts showed up in the listings last week for $195,000.
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.
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.
It’s not a James Turrell skyspace, but an updated midcentury home in Meyerland incorporates skylights, transoms, and other architectural cutouts to have some fun with the light and shadows within and around it. The 1959 property showed up on the market Tuesday, asking $499,750.
Painterly and lit in its listing photos like a Thomas Kinkade repro canvas, a 1972 townhome is part of a condo-ized pastel-and-wrought-iron block (at right) bridging the Charnwood-Briarbend neighborhoods near S. Voss Rd. and San Felipe. Last week, the well-stocked and comfort-padded property appeared on the market with an asking price of $429,000.
