A tipster informs us that the lovely 1.35-acre lot at 6040 Glen Cove in Memorial — which had been languishing on the market for about a year and a half — has finally been bought! The purchaser: County Judge candidate David Mincberg.
And apparently, Mincberg isn’t too interested in that free Talbott Wilson Midcentury Modern home that comes with it.
Photo of 6040 Glen Cove St.: HAR
Hines has “finalized the acquisition” of the Main Street block between Texas and Capitol Downtown, Nancy Sarnoff reports. That’s the site of the secret new 742,000-sq.-ft. office tower reported here a week and a half ago.
If you’re curious what the upper reaches of Montrose Blvd. look like from the viewpoint of an actual pedestrian, you’ll want to see blogger Charles Kuffner’s recent annotated photo walking tour of the area. Kuffner, who lived on Van Buren St. in the nineties, describes more recent developments on and around Montrose and Studemont — from West Gray north to Washington:
I did this partly to document what it looks like now – if you used to live there but haven’t seen it in awhile, you’ll be amazed – and partly to point out what I think can be done to make the eventual finished product better. . . .
My thesis is simple. This is already an incredibly densely developed corridor, and it’s going to get more so as the new high rise is built [see Swamplot’s story here] and several parcels of now-empty land get sold and turned into something else. It’s already fairly pedestrian-friendly, but that needs to be improved. And for all the housing in that mile-long stretch of road, there’s not enough to do.
Kuffner’s guide is a Flickr photo set. You’ll get the most out of it if you view it as a slideshow with the captions turned on (on the link, click on Options in the lower right corner, then make sure Always Show Title and Description is checked).
After the jump: A few more photos from Kuffner’s tour, plus an ID on those new condos behind Pronto!
Just a few blocks north of the site of the new Houston Texans YMCA, the University of Houston has bought 43 acres immediately southeast of its main campus.
The new UH land looks like it’s part of MacGregor Park, but whether it is — or was — was a matter of intense . . . legal interest. The property was originally part of a larger 110-acre parcel that was donated by the MacGregor family to the City of Houston in 1930. More recently, the donors’ heirs sued the city for violating the terms of that gift, which required that the city turn the land into a park. By 2002, the MacGregor heirs had won back rights to the wooded 41 acres between MLK and Spur 5, on the north side of Old Spanish Trail.
The MacGregor heirs’ sale of the property to UH for $25 million closed in February, according to a report by Jennifer Dawson in the Houston Business Journal. The new UH property is south of the gigantic Wellness Center, across Buffalo Brays Bayou.
The land gives UH a possible new entrance on Martin Luther King Blvd., but it’s also likely to give the campus a fifth light-rail station: a MacGregor Park stop will be the second station on the Southeast line, which begins at the new transit center planned for Palm Center.
Rendering of planned Southeast light-rail line on MLK, south of UH: Metro
This massive 20,000-sq.-ft. home featured on New York Architect Alexander Gorlin‘s website is under construction at 2950 Lazy Lane in River Oaks. The Museum of Fine Arts’ Bayou Bend Collection is next door.
Gorlin’s client is the youngest member of the Forbes 400 list of the Richest Americans (he’s number 317): 34-year-old former Enron trader John Arnold, who now runs secretive Centaurus Energy, a small but extraordinarily successful hedge fund company that trades energy commodities.
Four years ago, Arnold bought a recently renovated 1926 home in the French Norman manorial style in the Homewoods subdivision of River Oaks. The home, which had sat on the market for close to three years, was designed by Houston architect Birdsall Briscoe in collaboration with John Staub, who also built the Bayou Bend estate for the children of former Texas governor James Hogg next door. Briscoe’s creation was dubbed “Dogwoods” by Hogg’s son Michael, who lived there for many years with his wife.
A year after purchasing Dogwoods — currently valued by HCAD at $4.9 million — Arnold angered River Oaks preservationists by tearing it down.
After the jump, more illustrations of the house John Arnold will be trading into, plus a few photos of the one he didn’t leave behind.
This 1.35-acre lot at the end of the cul-de-sac on Glencove St. has been on the market for almost 16 months, so you can imagine during that time owner-broker Richard Maier has been trying just about every marketing angle possible. There’s some evidence of it too: The records are a little screwy, but it appears the asking price has been raised three times and lowered four. As of last week, we’re on an upswing! At $2.65 million, it’s back up $51K from its all-time low, but still down from the $3 million of early ’07.
So what do we got?
ABSOLUTELY ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SETTINGS NEAR DOWNTOWN JUST BEFORE MEMROIAL PARK. GORGEOUS VISTAS OF ROLLING HILLS, RAVINES, GARDEN TRAILS, CREEKS AND TURTLE POND! ALL LANDSCAPED WITH THOUSANDS OF EXOTIC PLANTS AND TREES! IRRIGATED BY PRIVATE WELL AND LIGHTED BY NIGHT! THE GROUNDS ARE CONTIGIOUS WITH ACRES OF NATURE PRESERVE & BIRD SANCTUARY!
Clearly, though, Maier’s latest sales tactic has just got to work — now he’s even gonna throw in a genuine Midcentury Modern home with the property. Absolutely free!!!
ALSO INCLUDED IS A CLASSIC MID CENTURY MODERN HOME BY NOTED ARCHICTECT TALBOT WILSON WITH 14 FT.WALLS OF GLASS!
Yeah, it’s a risky strategy: This is Memorial. So better end the listing on a more direct note:
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!
After the jump, exotic plants!!! Plus an actual interior shot of the 5,000-sq.-ft. 1950 home Maier snuck in.
That parking lot at the corner of Richmond and Post Oak, where the Steak & Ale and Mason Jar used to be? Very popular:
In 2007, Houston-based Hines Interests LP sold 9.4 acres to Rich Oak Properties LLC, an affiliate of Boymelgreen Developers LLC of New York. Sources put the purchase price at $86 per square foot, or roughly $33 million . . .
Rich Oak ultimately opted out of building on the site and chose to sell the entire 9.4 acres.
On Dec. 21, 2007, the land was acquired by Lasco/Hicks Ventures Ltd. Sources estimate the purchase price was $140 per square foot, or roughly $57 million.
A $24 million profit? Not bad for a few months’ work. And they said the days of the Houston land flip were over!
On the same day, Lasco/Hicks flipped six acres to Elegant Development Group Inc. The buyer is affiliated with Elegant Development and Investment Inc., a Houston-based construction services company that does commercial and residential work . . .
Less than two weeks later, Elegant Development flipped the six acres to Deyaar Development.
Deyaar Development is based in Dubai, and likes tall towers.
Available now: A whopping 286.4 acres of lovely and historic waterfront property . . . inside Beltway 8! Easy freeway access. Close to . . . everything! Sealed bids are being accepted until April 7th.
Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm listing the site, said the property contains some of the last remaining large tracts of . . . land with water frontage in the Gulf Coast region.
This sounds almost too good to be true.
Photo: Georgia Gulf
That 10-acre Holy Name Retreat Center parcel in Bunker Hill Village is being snapped up by Black Diamond Development and Abercrombie Builders, who tell the Memorial Examiner they’ll build 19 new homes on the property that “exhibit the degree of quality consistent with the affluent neighborhood.”
They’ll also apparently exhibit the degree of enormity consistent with extracting the highest possible price from the dollars-per-square-foot equation: the houses will range from 5,000 to 7,000 square feet.
A reader writes in to report that a house discussed recently on Swamplot had also been featured in Architectural Digest last October. And so it had! But really, they called it “Trapezoidal Transcendence”?? Whatever. Swamplot had the guts to call it what it really was: A River Oaks teardown.
Oh, well — there’s no accounting for taste. Unless, of course, you consider demolition a form of judgment:
By the way, that amazing modern house in the Tall Timbers section of River Oaks is definitely toast.
In this case, apparently, the decision of that judge was final.
You couldn’t invent a street address this good. But hey, maybe it’s your lucky day: The market’s down and the owner’s got to give it up.
Huge price drop too, as of this week: from $250,000 to $189,900. And that’s for a 4.24-acre lot — where you can build. With real integrity, of course.
What’s that address?
0 Player St.
Straight shooters only.
Here’s the problem with these sleek houses on full-acre lots in River Oaks: They’re selling for too damn cheap! The gorgeous land at the southern boundary of Memorial Park fronting Buffalo Bayou at 3840 Willowick — hogged by this eighties-modern home designed by New York architects Stonehill and Taylor — got swept up for between $45 and $57 a square foot at the end of August.
At that price, wouldn’t your head be spinning with the themed-towering-mansion possibilities? Bring on the demo and stucco crews!
Well, the stucco and foam cornice pieces will probably take a while, but the big machines with the giant claws are on their way, according to this morning’s demolition report.
Photos, plans, and details of the house-that-got-in-the-way — including some fine examples of how to distract from a River Oaks land sale — after the jump:
Why has this property in Riverside Terrace been floating aimlessly on the market for almost five months? Sure, it’s being sold “as is” — and the “is” apparently doesn’t merit an interior photo. But the home has four bedrooms, contains 2,875 square feet of living space, and is apparently salvageable. Plus it sits on a 11,100-square-foot lot on a “lovely, tree-lined street” in a part of town that’s been pretty hot recently, no?
The lovely and heavily wooded Holy Name Retreat Center in Bunker Hill Village is selling off 10 acres of its 20-acre property at 430 Bunker Hill Rd. The Congregation of the Passion of Christ, which operates the retreat and is based in Chicago, needs the cash “in order to meet certain financial needs, including caring for elderly members of the religious order,” reports Norm Rowland in the Memorial Examiner.
Commercial buildings and apartments aren’t allowed in Bunker Hill Village, and homesites must be at least 20,000 square feet.
