I
f you walk through Montrose, you can see how Houston’s changing. Even as charming bungalows from the 1930s and 1940s still stand, their welcoming porches and sagging gables set back from buckled sidewalks and shaded by decades-old live oaks, you can see in stark contrast a twin pack of four-story townhouses with blinding white stucco towering above the street. For every historic brick quadplex, there’s a boxy contemporary thing taking up every one of the lot’s square feet.
Trends in residential architecture by Allyn West
What kind of city is this? But it’s not just Montrose, of course. Houston’s changing, just as cities, animated by new demographics and desires, are changing across the country. The migration by Baby Boomers and subsequent generations out and away from the city into the suburbs is being answered in the twenty-first century with a reversal back in again toward the city’s museums, parks, restaurants, bars, public transit and other urban amenities. It’s not just millennials, either. In fact, 49 percent of Harris County residents surveyed in the 2018 Houston Area Survey by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University reported that they preferred living in “a smaller home in a more urbanized area.” This preference has been driving the practice of Houston architect Brett Zamore. His firm, Brett Zamore Design, which has been based in the Heights since 2007, might be said to be at the forefront of the new Houston. Zamore has noticed two trends that dovetail with the findings of that survey: scale and
“...it’s huge for me to make sure my clients have a thoughtful and strong sense of location, and we design a new home that fits the neighborhood.”
location. “When we start a project,” he says, “it’s huge for me to make sure my clients have a thoughtful and strong sense of location, and we design a new home that fits the neighborhood.” And this often results in houses designed at a more intimate scale. Though Zamore competes with the big developers and homebuilders that are buying up lots in desirable close-in neighborhoods like the East End, Third Ward, Near Northside and Midtown, and demolishing those bungalows to throw up 4,000- and 5,000-square-foot houses to maximize their profit, he says he’s “trying to connect to place.” A good example of this effort is the “Shot-Trot House” in the East End, which incorporates building materials and a vernacular style that matches the history of the working- and middleclass neighborhood just a few miles from Downtown. In the end, Zamore says he wants to “build more modestly” and design “smaller homes with all the space being functional.”
Another trend, says architect Heather Rowell, is a changing idea of what “functional space” can mean in a house. With Eric Hughes, Rowell runs HR Design Dept, a new firm in Houston. Their clients have told them that they don’t want “McMansions.” “‘We don’t want all that space,’” Rowell says that her clients request. They don’t want formal dining rooms or huge master bedrooms. What they want instead are “public shared spaces, the spaces where they can spend time with their family.” Increasingly, Rowell has found, those shared spaces are spilling into the outdoors. More and more of their clients, Rowell has found, elect to give up wasted interior square footage so that the house “integrates outdoor living.” Clients want the ability to open up the house, which provides another place for their family to come together. Accordingly, she and Hughes are thinking
“The city has made a conscious effort to increase public greenspaces, and that has filtered down. Our clients are asking for it.”
more about how a house is sited on the lot in order to save trees and capture sunlight. “People are starting to embrace the strengths of [Houston’s] climate,” Rowell says. “The city has made a conscious effort to increase public greenspaces, and that has filtered down. Our clients are asking for it.” Scale, location, functional space: Though these trends might reflect changing desires as the city remakes itself in the image of new generations of homebuyers, architect Jay Baker might see constants in them, too. During the course of his 28-year career practicing in Houston, he has found that not much has changed. “Some clients are more desirous of new things. Some clients aren’t,” he says. “From an architect’s point of view, scale and proportion are really everything. They are about respecting where the place is, where you are, and how best to make it be. You want leave it better than you found it.”
