12/24/13 10:00am

15402 Lakeview Dr., Jersey Village, Houston

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Light makes bright by day or night in this Jersey Village contemporary. Its bold colors further ramp up the lumens sneaking in from a plethora of windows. The grounds-hugging, mostly single-story property, which occupies more than half an acre across a low gate from privately owned Jersey Lake, has been on the market since May 2013. Its relisting by a new agency last week set a new asking price of $900,000. That’s down a few tads from previous listings, which began at $1.15 million, tiptoed to $1.099 million in September, and hit $945,000 in November.

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Primary Property
12/19/13 11:30am

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Once billed as “Somerset Estate,” a 1960 home designed by well-known Houston architect John Staub occupies a waterfront lot in the Bay Breeze neighborhood, located an amble down the road from the Kemah boardwalk. The Bermuda-style stucco home with aluminum roof sold for $1.9 million back in February, though that previous listing had a $2.8 million asking price. When the property popped back up on the market in June, it featured a slightly trimmed footprint along with much-tidied undergrowth along its curving driveway. The repackaged property’s $1.8 million price tag still includes the furnishings:

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A Walk from the Boardwalk
12/02/13 3:00pm

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In the Morgan’s Point Historic District, a 1997-vintage custom home’s water-view windows and width-of-house veranda (visible through the window in the top photo) provide vantage points for some relaxing Upper Galveston Bay surveillance. The waterway is likely to be full of passing activity; the Barbour’s Cut shipping terminal is nearby. The bayside property, designed by Bruce Conaway and built by John Wycoff & Associates, includes an updated 1900 carriage house, which sits closer to the street on this deep lot with a 103-ft.-long private beach and a 400-ft.-long shared pier.

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11/07/13 4:00pm

A waterfront estate in Coldspring’s Paradise Cove on Lake Livingston pumps up the nostalgia. It’s not just the charming merry-go-round (top), a tilted bit of grandchild bait strategically placed on the grounds. Built in 2007, the sprawling, multi-peaked home mirrors grand-scale cottage escapes of another era. The references play out in the home’s scale and interior sprinklings of somewhere-in-time architectural “finds” from round-the-world. Vintage touches blend in with modern building materials made to look old, such as the exterior’s bricks and replica slate roof  with griffin and copper finials. Meanwhile, the chimney stacks hail from England, the front door from France, and the gazebo from Egypt. How convincing is the assembly? Only the custom newel posts from New England get a close-up in any of the listing photos, which also indicate a penchant for heavy, dark-stained trim, red velvet accents, and claw foot tubs.

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05/24/13 1:15pm

The ‘bay’ at this multilevel 1990 property in Walden on Lake Conroe is a 2-story space with a modern, multi-pane frame of the water. Photos of the vista-boosting room — and its contemporary decor — dominate the early-in-May listing. The asking price, $925,000, apparently includes the furnishings.

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05/22/13 10:00am

Norman and Contempo leanings are but the start of the stylin’ mashup incorporated into a large waterfront property in the Village of Panther Creek in The Woodlands. On and off the market since the summer of 2010, when its initial asking price was $3.2 million, the 1990 custom estate popped back up last month as a re-relisting seeking $2.5 million. Earlier this month, the ask dropped to $1.95 million. That’s a price point a previous relisting sought for nearly a year, ending in May 2012 at $1.85 million.

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08/17/12 2:44pm

Over in La Porte, a Bayside Terrace home has — a bay-side terrace. The waterfront property has a panoramic view of Upper Galveston Bay and its existing spill islands and wildlife refuge. And that vista just dodged a soggy bullet: On Wednesday the Port of Commission nixed a plan that would have placed a 475-acre island of sludge in the bay in the middle of it, built from material dug up from dredging at the Bayport Container Terminal in neighboring Shoreacres, near the Houston Yacht Club. (The dredging will go ahead, but the material go onto berms at Atkinson Island instead.)

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