The next chapter of Houston housing Just as his parents did in the 1950s, de Menil scion still seeking to shape city with durability and affordability at the fore

Houston Chronicle Sunday8 Sep 2019By R.A. Schuetz STAFF WRITER

Clarence John Laughlin / Menil House archives The de Menil house sits at 3363 San Felipe, a Modernist structure that baffled Houstonians at the time.

John and Dominique de Menil shook up the Houston housing scene in 1950 when they built the first grand Modernist home in Texas. Now their son, Francois, wants to do the same.

“There’s a large influx of folks coming to Houston, and there’s insufficient housing for them,” de Menil, an architect, said. And so he has made it a goal “to provide as nice of design as we can for a relatively smaller price to provide housing to people coming into Houston that’s affordable.”

De Menil’s office is in New York, but work and family history keep him tied to Houston. His designs include houses here as well as the headquarters for Esquire magazine in New York, inspired by the modern gentleman, and the Seneca Art and Culture Center in upstate New York, a modern take on traditional Native American longhouses.

Architecture, his website explains,

tells a story. And when he thinks of the architecture that best characterizes his hometown, he begins with the homes from his parent’s day — one-story, ranch-style homes slung low enough to take advantage of the shade of sprawling live oaks.

“They were designed with those attics that pull the air through at night,” he said. “Pull the hot air through and release it out; really a pre-air-conditioning strategy.”

Air conditioning solved the temperature problem, leaving architects to grapple with a different set of issues.

As the climate changes and population grows, new challenges will begin to affect design. And when de Menil thinks of the stately homes lining North and South Boulevards, he feels nostalgia. “They’re very much old Houston in a sense. Not the new Houston.”

De Menil has a unique view into both.

His parents moved to Houston from Paris during World War II because it was the U.S. headquarters of Schlumberger, the company Dominique’s father founded and John

helped develop. They brought with them rising artists and architects, including the Modernist Philip Johnson, who designed their River Oaks home.

Now an iconic structure, it was shocking at the time — boxy and with few windows facing the street. Many Houstonians did not know what to think; at least one compared it to a dentist’s office. Johnson went on to design many Houston landmarks, including the Rothko Chapel, Pennzoil Place and the academic mall and chapel at St. Thomas University.

When the University of Houston professor Bruce C. Webb wrote about the de Menil home, he said it “stimulated a generation of midcentury Houston architects.”

What, exactly, Houston’s next incarnation will look like is a question their son wrestles with. One thing he is sure of : It will be denser than the single-family homes of the past.

The Houston area added 120,000 people between 2016 and 2017, according to census estimates. And frequent flooding, de Menil explained, means that not all of Houston’s land is truly buildable.

“Usable land is diminishing,” he said. “You can, of course, go out farther and farther. But ultimately, everyone wants to be in some level of proximity to jobs and downtown, where the work is.”

Higher density, lower cost

As de Menil explored the question of how to provide well-designed, inexpensive homes, he sat in on presentations by architecture students at Rice University at the end of the spring semester, taking in their efforts to find ways to tastefully and affordably increase density in Houston neighborhoods. Their designs ranged from clusters of stand-alone homes with small footprints and shared outdoor space to a large, 72-unit complex resembling a stadium.

One student’s design took the raised porches, gabled roofs and spacious backyards common in the Near Northside’s singlefamily homes and adapted them to fit four times as many families. The design subdivided a 40-foot-wide building built on a 50-footwide lot into four long, two-story units. The raised porches made space for a partially subterranean parking garage underneath, and the combined backyard created a large space for families and gatherings — even larger if a similar development was placed on the opposite side of the block.

The result was akin to townhomes, but with a full-sized yard and porches lining the street instead of garages.

De Menil studied the renderings and noted that the homes seemed to simultaneously idealize ownership — each unit had its own gabled roof and porch, and sharing — the yard was communal and the parking area combined. “It’s kind of like a psychodrama in a sense,” he said.

His own attempt to develop affordable housing, in 2016, looked outside the Loop to find enough space so such tensions would not have to exist.

His plan was to develop an artists’ enclave in Acres Homes. The 14 sleek homes were slated to occupy lots of between 4,500 and 7,600 square feet — small for the semirural neighborhood where plots settled by African American cowboys were typically at least an acre. Star Massing, a real estate agent who worked with de Menil on the project, said at the time that the homes would be priced between $300,000 and $450,000.

But the project fell through as cost became an issue.

“In order to get the price point to where it needs to be to sell the house… you have to use very poorquality materials,” de Menil explained. “There are levels beyond which it just doesn’t work.”

Persistent challenge

It’s a problem developers across the city are struggling with. Lawrence Dean, regional director of the homebuilding consulting firm Metrostudy, said demand for affordable housing is so high that developers are hungry for solutions. “They would all do it immediately because they know it would sell immediately,” he said.

But even with greater density, high construction and land costs make it hard to build a unit that will sell for less than $200,000, Dean said. “The math doesn’t get you there, unfortunately.”

One place where it might work is the Near Northside, where vacant land could be purchased for as little as $100,000 for an eighth-acre lot or even less for land owned by the Houston Land Bank.

“At that point, because there is not high land cost or any land cost, that’s where builders could build closer to the narrative of the missing middle,” Dean said, referring to the term for middle-density housing that is affordable for the middle class.

De Menil is retooling his Acres Homes plan to target middle-class homeowners who need inexpensive housing but have slightly larger budgets and fewer design requirements than the artist community.

“It’s a little more reasonable price range that I think is possible,” he said. “So we’re morphing the Acres Homes project into that.”

Now, he’s on the lookout for land where he can build the next chapter in Houston’s housing story.