10/16/12 1:02pm

ART OF THE DOWNTOWN HOTEL SUITE FURNITURE Blogger Robert Boyd’s upstart Pan Art Fair — now touting itself as “Houston’s smallest art fair” — has been digging deep into the furniture of its Embassy Suites hotel room venue (Suite 307) to find space for more exhibitors. Added to the showing space for the fair, which runs at the same time as the much larger Texas Contemporary Art Fair across Discovery Green in the GRB beginning this Thursday: exhibits in the end-table and dresser drawers. Four of the six sliding spaces, dubbed “micro-booths,” have already been snatched up by artists and galleries, according to the fair’s website. Still available: the south end-table drawer, listed as the former location of “the installation Gideon Bible Piece.” [Pan Art Fair; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Embassy Suites

10/05/12 3:45pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: EXPENSIVE TASTE “This may be a dumb question, but why is it that the higher priced the house, the worse the interior design? I mean it sincerely. Some of the absolutely, positively, worst interior looks seem to congregate in high priced homes. Is someone trying prove the adage about lots of money, zero taste? Or is it that the interior designers are just so marvelous at sales pitches that their clients will think, what the hell? We are paying them enough, they must know what they are doing! . . .” [Hanabi-chan, commenting on Exploring the Indoor Wildlife in a Pasadena Dead Animal House]

10/05/12 1:41pm

Game for a little house hunting? No guns are in sight, but a tour through this 4-or-5-bedroom, 3-1/2-bath habitat in Pasadena’s Cedar Lawn neighborhood just northeast of Ellington Airport proudly displays the spoils of several safari adventures. Animal attractions lurk in almost every room of the 4,705-sq.-ft. eighties colonial. But not all of them have eyes:

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09/26/12 1:25pm

A top-heavy brick tower tacked onto the front and Euro touches inside this designer-owned spread morphs a 1968 Lynn Park home into a something less provincial and more Provençal — or so the listing suggests. The slightly asymmetrical corner-lot property is a block east of the railroad tracks and two blocks north of Richmond Ave. at Drexel Dr. It’s a newly re-listed home seeking $899,900 with a new agent and agency, after a summer fling with a price tag $25K higher.

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09/25/12 3:20pm

COMMENT OF THE DAY: I’M SMELLING THAT LISTING ALREADY “I love this house . . . and I know exactly how it must smell: a homey mix of old furniture, mothballs, and mildew with a touch of Pine-Sol. I would buy it as is, furnished and everything.” [Miz Brooke Smith, commenting on A Lindale Park Cottage, Much as It Was]

09/25/12 1:00pm

A MEADOWCREEK VILLAGE HELP-YOU-SELL “SELLER WILL DO NO REPAIRS,” shouts the listing. But . . . um, visitors to this past Sunday’s open house did bring their own period furniture to dress up a brick flat-roofed Modern 4-bedroom in Meadowcreek Village celebrating its 49th birthday — as a foreclosure. That was for Houston Mod’s hastily announced Mod of the Month event. The instant living room arrangement from Heights vintage shop The Mod Pod is gone now, but the 2,558-sq.-ft. vinyl-over-terrazzo home at 2042 Forest Oaks Dr. is still on the market at $99,900. [HAIF; listing] Photo: Mod Pod/Karen Moyers

09/24/12 2:03pm

You’ve reason to believe that you will be received with some gentility at this Lindale Park home on Graceland St. just west of Irvington, 7 blocks south of the North Loop. The newly listed triple-peaked brick cottage on a double-wide lot gained central air conditioning in 2005, but otherwise the 1945 home appears to have retained the qualities of an earlier era. Note the glass knobs on the interior doors and the lack of a dishwasher (or disposal or microwave) in the piney-woods-paneled kitchen.

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09/12/12 4:02pm

A day after this Memorial West home hit the market late last month, its price rose by $15,000 to $465,000 — where it remained until today. Now, in honor of the new deep discounts on the iPhone 4S, it’s been cut to $425,000. The tidy ranch-style home sits upon the clipped suburban grasslands of Britmore (one “t”) Oaks, a neighborhood that appears to have pine trees and magnolias as well as the namesake oaks. Like its neighbors, It’s a mid-fifties single-story. The street is 2 blocks south of I-10 off Brittmore Rd. (2 “t”s), has drainage gulleys, dead-ends 9 homes in, and takes a bit of a jog right out front of the property.

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