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
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Tag: Modern Design
COMMENT OF THE DAY: MIDCENTURY STYLING WAS THE PSEUDO TUSCAN OF ITS DAY “. . . But let’s be honest with ourselves, if we can step out of our trendy mid-century loving selves for a moment . . . just because something was original doesn’t mean it was good, or desirable. Let’s not fall into that elitist trap. Honestly, I’m not crying over replacing that gawdawful carpet with anythingbutthatgawdafulcarpet. Yes, a lot of the updates are generic “what’s popular/mainstream right now†sort of stuff. But what they’re replacing is the exact same sort of mainstream styling, just with a healthy dose of nostalgia wrapped around it. Let’s not kid ourselves . . . as much as I personally like midcentury style, most of these houses were just as generic as the pseudo Tuscan places going up all over the area. They simply have the benefit of being fewer in number these days. There is nothing inherently better about one era’s overused style elements than another. Novelty is not the same thing as absolute superiority.” [JB, commenting on Fixed That for You: A Memorial Hollowed Modern, Corrected]
Yes, the shots above are front-yard views of the exact same house on Kimberley Lane in Memorial Hollow, before (at top) and after a thoroughly de-Modernizing revamp completed earlier this year. Just about every sixties-era feature of the original home has been scrapped and “corrected” with — well, something else. The ask for this brilliant flip: a $224K premium over the sales price of the home from December of last year. You are so welcome:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE HOUSTON DESIGN SWEEPSTAKES “MacKie and Kamrath seem to be winning the award for most demolished landmark buildings in the last 18 months. . . .” [Matt, commenting on M.D. Anderson Planning To Extract Dental Branch from Med Center]
Last fall, the restoration-minded owner of this stretched-out 1956 Mod by architect Lucian Hood in Braeburn Valley told Swamplot he was fixing to sell his property. Now, having finished reviving the redwood exterior from beneath the paint that covered it up and sprucing up the brick and ledge stone walls, Jason Jones reports his 5-year project is ready for its closeup, just listed, and now asking $365,000. The home is located on a big corner lot across from Braeburn Country Club greens — and next to Maison DeVille, a Mansard-roofed apartment complex from 1962, later converted to condos.
As mods go, this one in Tanglewood is just one of that neighborhood’s thinning pack of mid-century homes. What sets this property apart? Maybe the bomb shelter out back — and the property’s brush with Hollywood as a film set in Breast Men, the 1997 HBO David Schwimmer flick that finally gave Houston its due as the birthplace of the boob job industry. The mid-July listing of this property for $1.1 million calls the 60-year-old property on Sugar Hill Dr. a “wonderful building site” and leaves it at that. But preservation advocates at Houston Mod met with the home’s current, long-term owner and gleaned some tidbits to share about the home’s origins and features:
Listed yesterday: This 1957 Mod in Glenbrook Valley long nicknamed the “Sputnik” house — after the custom-built light fixture its original owner hung on the front porch when he moved in. The light’s still there, but all the furniture’s been cleared out for sparkly photo shoot, so you can even imagine the place filled with Hummel-bedecked Ethan Allen if you like. The 11,694-sq.-ft. lot sits across the street from Sims Bayou, half a mile west of the Gulf Fwy., a couple miles north of Hobby Airport, so it’s got real southeast Houston street cred. The neighborhood, which includes a lot of homes of similar vintage, was designated a historic district not too long ago. Your guess on the home’s asking price?
It turns out the construction work Swamplot readers noted last week on the vacant lot at 1401 Binz St., catty-corner from the Children’s Museum, is for a 4-story structure combining ground-floor shops, 2 floors of medical office space, and a top-floor residence — all in less than 30,000 sq. ft. A small courtyard will separate the building from a linked multilevel 160-car parking garage. Half the office space, reports the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff, will be taken up by medical clinics operated by UT dermatologist Stephen Tyring; he also owns the property and is an owner of the development firm, Dermedica Property Group. Bailey Architects notes on its website that the building “will reflect the architectural fabric of Houston’s premier museum district buildings.” Sarnoff’s translation: It’ll look Modern. Contractor Arch-Con expects construction to be complete early next year.
- Sarnoff: Ministry makes Midtown move [Houston Chronicle]
- Museum Point Medical Office Building [Bailey Architects]
- Previously on Swamplot: Clearing an Empty Lot in the Museum District
Rendering: Bailey Architects
One of the reasons Brookesmith resident Vicki Scarpato bought the 1890 cottage on Archer St. pictured above last year was because of the 2009 Modern addition at the back: “I love the mix,” she says. Her home is next door to the modern structure architect Jeromy Murphy designed for his family and not far from the Cordell St. shipping-container house — all in a neighborhood that she calls “an interesting mix of beautiful new modern, Victorian cottages in various states of repair, and only a very few instances of three-to-a-lot townhouses.” Here are some pics of the back:
House or lot? While the listing mentions this home’s architectural pedigree, most of the photos in the description feature the heavily wooded 2.8 acres on an oxbow of Buffalo Bayou in Memorial’s Village of Hunters Creek.
Built in 1967, the home looks very much as originally designed by architect Richard S. Colley a decade earlier. Houston Mod recently spotlighted the distinctive domain, dubbed the Greer House after its original and longtime owners. Beneath its rooftop pyramid, which has a span of about 30 ft., there’s an even larger interior courtyard with ancillary gardens and a 200-year-old fountain from Mexico. The plantings are a bit overgrown these days since the owner moved out 5 years ago. But here’s how things looked when the property was still occupied:
SELLING THAT MIDCENTURY MODERN TO THE BIG-HAIR CROWD 
A reader notes an agent’s efforts to sell the sleek 1956 mod at 434 Faust Ln. in Memorial Bend — the 2,233-sq.-ft. property was listed at the end of last week for $549,000 — on those little conveniences. Reads the listing caption to the image at left: “Large custom travertine shower niches are big enough to accommodate shampoo bottles purchased from Costco.” [HAR, via Swamplot inbox]
Live from the corner of Westheimer and Drexel, photographer Karen Dressel sends Swamplot this first view of the Highland Village Apple Store, which opens Friday at 8 am. The black paper covering the panels on the company’s first-ever glass-roofed, double-sided store was just removed this evening, in front of a dozen or so new-iPad camper-outers lined up in back.
- Drawings Reveal Highland Village Apple Store’s Secret Spaces Above Paper, Cupcake Stores
- Highland Village Apple Store coverage [Swamplot]
Photo: Karen Dressel
Who snuck all the wood paneling into this 4-plus-bedroom Meadowcreek Village mod on Berry Bayou? Its original owners, according to the home’s seller, who reports they ran a Houston lumber shop called All Woods Schroeder. The shop was located in the industrial complex at 5401 Lawndale just west of Country Club Place; this home served as a showcase for some of the exotic and fine woods it carried. That’s teak paneling you’re looking at above, wrapping the kitchen. For walnut, try the living room and dining room:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE ORIGINS OF THE FRANKENTUSCAN STYLE “. . . It is an extremely unfortunate and yet pervasive fallacy to equate contemporary, non-kitschy architecture with splashy, risky design and poor quality construction done with non-durable materials. There are plenty of examples of understated, elegant, and yes, conventionally constructed and well-built modern design here in Houston. They include local firms such as Lake|Flato (designer of the new HEB) or Kirksey. It’s silly to lump all of modernism together, but depending on your definition of it, Modernism in one form or another has been extensively practiced all over the world ever since the Bauhaus school attempted to develop a formal pedagogy for it in the 1920′s. I *think* over 100 years and x-number of buildings later, we’ve figured out how to build it without leaks. Your second false assumption is that Marvy Finger builds in the Faux-traditional style because it’s ‘tried-and-true’ or ‘inexpensive.’ Ok, well maybe if you go faux all the way (as in crappy plaster cast stone facades) then it would be cheaper. But either way, I’d wager that Finger, who didn’t get to where he is by . . . losing money, is pitching his products at a very specific market segment. Namely, wealthy people and those with aspirations of even more wealth. In the United States it seems that modern architecture is associated with public buildings and some kind of suspicious, alien, and vaguely socialist agenda. Who wants their family, friends, or boss to think that they’re weird or some kind of communist? Hence, the best way to have your dwelling embody your conservative social stance and financial aspirations (or status) is to live in a nice replica of a Tuscan Pallazo or French chateau. Of course, this is absurd and impossible to pull off when you try to cram all the programming and functions of a multi-family apartment or condo building into it, so you usually end up with some kind of a hideous Frankenstein behemoth. Witness any Randall Davis project as an example. It’s alive… ALIVE!!!!” [JL, commenting on Comment of the Day: In Defense of the Same Old-Looking Stuff]
What’s the difference between the new H-E-B Montrose Market on the site of the former Wilshire Village Apartments at the corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama and the Buffalo Market — designed by the same San Antonio architects — the company opened last year? Well, at 75,000 sq. ft., the new store is a bit bigger and has wider aisles, and the site it sits on is a bit more storied. Plus, photographer Candace Garcia notes from her preview tour, the doors on the milk coolers seem more sleek and contemporary. And the new store carries Philosophy skin-care products. Clearly, the Menil influence shows.
In front, below a couple of preserved trees, are several outdoor-eating and gathering options:
