A few of the tenants inside this 7-unit, now-up-for-sale apartment building on Hawthorne St., 2 blocks from Spur 527 appear to be on the same page design-wise. The photo above shows the living room inside one of the building’s 6 one-bedroom apartments done up with a Persian rug, atop which sits a glass tabletop covered in curios surrounding a floral centerpiece.
Now, compare that to that to the living room the building’s sole 2-bedroom unit, shown below:
Wooden siding now covers up all but a small portion of Shake Shack‘s coming store at 1002 Westheimer, in the spot where Burger King collapsed 2 months ago. The new coverings have the restaurant looking a little more like what’s shown in the rendering put out by the burger brand at the end of last month, right around the time that work started on its new building.
Here’s what progress looks like from the west, outside Blacksmith:
 
By its own count, Mattress Firm now has just over a dozen shops open inside the 610 Loop after closing its 202 Westheimer location next to the (also recently shuttered) Njoy Thai restaurant on Sunday. The full-strip store pictured above took over from Hollywood Food & Cigars #3 and its neighbor Tejas Boots under the name Mattress Pro 3 years ago before its parent retailer scrapped that pseudonym and rebranded all of its locations under the Mattress Firm moniker.
Over the last year, the chain’s shut down hundreds of stores — reports USA Today‘s Nathan Bomey, who echoes other murmurs that the retailer’s South African parent company Steinhoff could soon file for bankruptcy. And as the legal battle between Mattress Firm and a trio of brokers it says profited through reckless dealmaking continues to play out in court, the company’s been hit with another suit. In it, mattress brand Tempur-Pedic — which lost its contract to sell products in 3,300 Mattress Firms last year — alleges that the retailer’s “Therapedic“-branded product line is a copycat version of its own bedding and that gullible consumers will be “will inevitably be confused and harmed,” by the knockoffs.
POSTINO WINE BAR IS GETTING ALL TINGLY AGAIN ABOUT OPENING A NEW LOCATION IN AN OLD BUILDING 
Back in April, the Chronicle’s Greg Morago reported that the management behind Postino Wine Bar “got goosebumps†while checking out the portion of the old Pappas Restaurants complex off Yale St. that eventually became their debut Houston location in Heights Mercantile. Now, the sensation has come back to haunt them: “Walking into the old Montrose Mining Company – such a storied space that’s been a neighborhood gathering space since the 1970s – gave us goosebumps,†the chain’s owner tells him. And so: Renovations will begin soon to bring the longtime gay bar at 805 Pacific St. back into service as Houston’s second Postino. The venue’s former proprietor Charles Armstrong sold it to a group overseen by Fred Sharifi — the owner of the neighboring Baba Yega Cafe — in January, following the bar’s shutdown in 2016. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplox inbox
Note: The neighborhood names in this story have been updated.
Arden’s Picture Framing and Gallery bows out of Lancaster Place for a spot in Avondale mid-next-month. It’s been in the brick building pictured above at 1631 W. Alabama St. for 18 years (though the business is more than 3 times that old).
Its new converted house at 239 Westheimer will fit a workshop, design area and gallery space. Previous tenants there have dealt mostly in the insurance and financial realms — with the exception of Smoke Alley, a vaporizer store that split from the 1915 building a few years back.
Photos: Arden’s Picture Framing and Gallery
4 FLOORS OF APARTMENTS EYEING AVONDALE HALF-ACREAGE BEHIND BISTECCA 
The owner of 214 Avondale St. has plans to build a 4-story apartment complex on-site and is now seeking an off-street parking variance for the would-be development. If the planning commission signs off on it next month, the building would be permitted to go up with 60 spaces, 5 less than city rules mandate for the just-under-half-acre site, 2 blocks west of Bagby and directly north of Bistecca Ristorante. (Seven bike racks capable of holding 28 bikes total would also be included.) The public hearing for the proposal goes down on Thursday, September 13. Map: Houston Planning Commission
The outline of a 20-story apartment building called Montrose Gardens made its first public appearance late Friday in the city’s planning commission agenda, where its footprint covers over that of the Khun Kay Thai Cafe on the corner of Montrose Blvd. and W. Clay St. Only 9 of those stories will be for living, so what’s going into the rest? According to the building’s engineer: “A variety of retail stores, restaurants, and coffee shops” — all 24,000 sq.-ft. of which would be buffered from the 150-or-so upstairs apartments by 9 stories of resident-only parking. Underground, a separate 2 floor garage will gobble up retail traffic from an opening on W. Clay.
Also present on the 19,900-sq.-ft. site where the apartment’s staking its claim: the restaurant’s 2 parking lots. The northern one ran over the duplex-turned-psychic-shop directly south of it after the structure — memorialized in the aerial below — was demolished in 2016:
The aftermath of Bacco’s Wine Garden’s latest design choice at 3611 Montrose Blvd. has the place looking a little less like a homeless shelter and more like a bar. Empty bottles were as close as the venue could get to the real thing before its TABC license got approved on Tuesday. Now that that’s all squared away, real booze will be stored inside.
It’s a marketing strategy similar to the one Postino employed with the bright yellow wine promos hung up on its Heights Mercantile patio before it opened. Except by the looks of their attachment, these reds, whites — and even a few proseccos — are here to stay.
They line the bar’s fencing all the way out to the sidewalk:
The recent removal of Drew’s BBQ’s signage at 819 Richmond Ave has left a piece of its predecessor Tonala Rustic Furniture uncovered along the street. The barbecue joint closed down last month after 3 years in the 100-plus-year-old house pictured above, tucked in the southeastern portion of Montrose near Spur 527 that’s known officially as Roseland Estates.
When Drew’s first picked up there in 2015, the house was white-ish and fronted by signage for the Living Mosaic Inclusive Christian Church. That display moved, along with the church itself, to The Montrose Center’s 3 story dingbat building 7 blocks away:
MONTROSE SHAKE SHACK CONSTRUCTION IS ABOUT TO BEGIN 
A building permit filed yesterday for the corner where Burger King’s been lying in pieces on Westheimer near Montrose Blvd. reveals construction is imminent on the Shack Shake set to replace it. Upon completion, it’ll be Houston’s fourth Shake Shack location, after the one in Rice Village, at the Galleria, and in section 157 at Minute Maid Park. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: Swamplox inbox
Everything is operational now at the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology‘s hulking white headquarters north of the Menil — which took the place of a house earlier this year. The organization’s mission is to study the role of art in everyday life by supporting “experimental work at the intersection of art and anthropology.” It’s one door down from the intersection of W. Alabama and Yupon St., next to the Neon Gallery bungalow partly visible in the photo above.
Inside, a first floor gallery is divided by a central stairway that climbs up to a roof deck and garden:
No need to knock on your way into 2309 Morse St. — the mer-person standing in the doorway will see you and can even receive envelopes through a crotch-level mail slot. On the other side of the door, the dining room’s decor is less watery, with a peacock perched up on the accent wall shown on the left in the photo above.
Although it’s now under contract, the house is still showing, so here’s a closer look at those wallflowers:
MW Cleaners’ bowtie logo is now going out of style on the corner of Shepherd and Colquitt St. as the franchise dresses down all of its 36 black-tie-branded locations in Houston and redecorates them under the Tide detergent logo. At the Montrose shop, the tall sign pictured behind the dumpster in the photo at top looking south is just about all that’s left of the cleaners’ old look.
New lettering and logoing at 3425 Shepherd has already taken the place of the old (pictured above), and under the angled porte-cochère, fresh window decals mark the transformation as well:
Houston’s latest Bacco-branded wine venue Bacco’s Wine Garden has begun its takeover of 3611 Montrose Blvd. by adding this corral to the house’s front parking lot, although nothing’s being consumed on site yet; a TABC application is still pending approval. Now enclosed within the pen: the gable-roofed sign once colored by the logo for Tony’s Place, the homeless center for LGBT youth under 26 that relocated last summer to a Midtown space it shares with the Salvation Army’s own youth shelter on McGowen St.
On the north side of the building, Bacco’s’s own sign is now up:
A Swamplot reader sends a photo (top) of the trees that appear to have grown up outside the former McGowen Cleaners real fast since plant life was first added to the bed (above) earlier this year. That’s because the crew now converting the place into a restaurant called Vibrant tore out the bushier trees just over a week ago and replaced them with a row of taller new cedars.
The swap-out left the bed short on plant life last Wednesday and Thursday:
