“Brown finds itself at the epicenter of two major design styles that [have] swept the country,” declares Cote de Texas’s Joni Webb. And those would be? “The Belgian and Industrial looks.”
In Houston at least, Jill Brown appears to have cornered the market on large lantern-style lighting fixtures and European instructional charts. On separate recent visits to her last-name-only shop on the corner of Ferndale and W. Alabama, Webb and fellow design blogger Paloma Contreras documented the finds:
The mysterious Tunnel Mole, posting on Houstoned, provides a succinct list of shopping features missing from the not-so-glamorous Downtown daytime underground scene:
It’s got infinite ways to get annoying chores done, except it’s devoid of the most annoying ones that you want to do while you’re on the clock, like upgrading your cell phone. And here’s what else you don’t have in the tunnel:
*Music
*Movies
*Television
*Sex (not that we’ve noticed, anyway)
*Liquor
*Dreams of a Houston team snaring the pennant/Super BowlIn short, anything that could sweep you up from the realities of life. The tunnel’s very grounded, because duh, it is in the ground.
Photo: “In space no one can hear you scream,” by Flickr user Matthew Wedgwood
The teaser website for the apartments-and-retail complex slated for that large, recently scraped site at the southwest corner of Kirby and Westheimer is up! What will you find there? For starters, a trance soundtrack you’ll have a tough time figuring out how to turn off, plus slick rendered views and a whizzy video of a dark and urban-looking streetscape where pedestrians wield shopping bags and hover precariously on balconies.
This is the former site of the River Oaks Tennis Center. The development is named West Ave, and to prove it they’re putting in a new street by the same name just west of Kirby, extending from Kipling to Westheimer. Of course the big news is the two floors of retail space facing Kirby, West Avenue, and Westheimer. On top of that: five stories of apartments, managed by Gables Residential. The parking garage is tucked in back.
After the jump: The plan and more images.
