The Day After: Positive Press On Houston

I can understand that if you really like the stuff you can get at Fingers or Star or Gallery. But, if you don't like oak/cherry/walnut furniture that is dark, ornate, etc, and you don't have $2000 to spend on a table with no chairs, Ikea is your best bet.

Solid wood is fine unless that solid wood is ugly as sin. Since neither Mrs JB or I can stand big overstuffed recliners, leather sectionals, big bulky walnut dining tables or dark cherry china cabinets, it's either Ikea or nothing.

 

Just not a fan (no offense Max ). Mrs JB and I really like mid-century modern type furniture - blonde woods, very clean lines, no points, carving or anything even remotely ornate. Stuff like Heywood Wakefield from the 50's.

The problem is that if you want Herman Miller or Wakefield or furniture of that style, it is EXTREMELY expensive. The most expensive piece of furniture in our house is a chair and footrest from Bo Concept (no longer around) that cost $1400 and that was the CHEAP compared to some places that have similar chairs for two or three times that. It is a very specific taste that isn't for everyone, so the ONLY place to find affordable options for that kind of furniture is Ikea.

The other significant problem is that Ikea is the ONLY place in town where you can buy furniture that isn't built for GIGANTIC rooms. We live in a small old bungalow in the Heights. Our sofa is a love seat because a full-sized sofa would just overwhelm the room. The vast majority of things we've looked at in stores other than Ikea just doesn't fit in our house.

European furniture is built for smaller spaces and that works for us.

I know Max that we are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but, hey, too each his own!

 

Back on topic...

A BRIGHTER HOUSTON: Super Bowl host's makeover isn't perfect, but it proves that the little things matter
February 3, 2004

BY JOHN GALLAGHER
DETROIT FREE PRESS

HOUSTON -- Critics have not been kind to Houston. Sprawling over several hundred square miles, Houston has long been derided as the city without a zoning code, a place where skyscrapers rise next to single-family houses, a flat, sunbaked landscape that unfurls in strip-mall monotony to the horizon.

The last week I spent covering the Super Bowl events showed me that Houston's reputation for visual blight is, for the most part, deserved. But I also found several delightful examples to the contrary. And I saw signs that the city is finally a generation or two behind the curve, learning the right lessons about good city building.

Houston thus offers lessons to Detroit and other cities waging their own campaigns to enliven their communities. I hope the Detroit leaders who came here last week to bone up on Super Bowl preparations learned the right lessons about what makes a city really work.

Houston does not, and perhaps never will, offer the urbane, walking-around qualities that make Seattle's Public Market or New Orleans' French Quarter or so much of Chicago's urban core such memorable places to visit. But Houston, a generous city of vigor, hospitality and entrepreneurial spirit, is finally beginning to get a cityscape to match its other qualities.

Perhaps the newest improvements are mere brush strokes on the enormous canvas of urban sprawl. But they have been large enough and important enough to allow Houston to host the Super Bowl this week in a manner that produced happy memories for many visitors.

Most encouraging is Houston's belated attention to the small and seemingly insignificant sidewalk-level amenities that are so important to urban vitality.

A variety of projects are remaking the older sections of downtown Houston in areas known as Market Square and Courthouse Square and along Main Street. Here dozens of historic two- to four-story brick structures have been reclaimed as restaurants, clubs, loft apartments and condominiums, and these formed the heart of Houston's raucous Main Event street party of the last week. Houston threw a New Orleans-quality street bash for several days, and it would not have been possible had not all those historic structures been brought back to life.

This emerging district of human-scale residences and enterprises stands in contrast to the rest of downtown. Houston enjoys a remarkable skyline, one of the most modern in America, and the roster of big-name architects who have crafted skyscrapers for corporate leaders is impressive.

But many of those skyscrapers that make such good corporate logos from a distance meet the street in chilly isolation. These almost blank walls of granite and glass repel any street life. Just consider: Even a few blocks outside the renovated area, this skyscraper district remained all but deserted last week, even at the height of the festivities.

Houston also has just opened a new light-rail system known as the METRORail that adds to the mix in unexpectedly helpful ways. The rail line runs along Main Street, and the stations and related public artwork fill in the middle of what otherwise had been just another five-lane thoroughfare. The result: A livelier, denser, more crowded urban scene.

Stephen Fox, an architectural historian and teacher at Rice University and the University of Houston, says the rail line and other downtown projects have Houstonians thinking about urban space in new ways. "It's the little things that count, that are making the difference, and that is what was overlooked in Houston from the 1950s to the 1980s."

Nor is downtown the only area getting a makeover. For several years, a district known as Project Row Houses, in a predominantly black district about a mile south of downtown, has been remade by a collection of artists. The artists have renovated and decorated tiny shotgun houses -- small, one-story dwellings of the poor -- in a way that enlivens the neighborhood.

These newly remade districts join Houston's already existing areas of distinction. The area known as Hermann Park, a grand, City Beautiful monument to Houstonians' foresight three-quarters of a century ago, provides the broad spaces and elegant vistas that many other cities lack. Rice University, in the heart of the city, has long offered a distinctive campus setting. And there are pockets of prettiness showing up here and there elsewhere.

Houston still has a long way to go. Some months ago Houston architect Dan Barnum wrote an essay in the Houston Chronicle in which he lamented, "We have no aesthetic roots, no aesthetic foundation, so we don't complain when there is ugly all around us." The riot of reaction to the piece showed the barb had sunk home.

Mostly the problems have resulted from Texans' famous ability to think big, perhaps too big. All those skyscrapers were done with the best of intentions. So were the old Houston Astrodome and the newer Reliant Stadium, where the Super Bowl was played Sunday. The side-by-side stadiums are remarkable themselves, but they sit in the middle of nowhere amidst acres of asphalt.

Even the city's theater district, a collection of newer buildings on the edge of downtown, somehow doesn't get it right. While individual buildings there are remarkable, such as architect Robert A. M. Stern's incandescent Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, the district is landlocked by an expressway and surrounding streets. The problem with expecting the theater district to generate spontaneous street life is that there's no place for it to happen.

So in looking for examples of ugly urban sprawl, Houston still offers a target-rich environment. Why, then, did so many people enjoy themselves last week? Clearly because the city's newfound attention to the smaller, seemingly insignificant aspects of a true urban street life have caught the imagination in a way all the skyscrapers and other monuments never did.

What is most notable about all this is that it turns one of our most common bromides upside down. You hear it all the time: Focus on the big stuff and don't sweat the small. That might work in life or in business. But in urban planning it's a prescription for disaster.

JOHN GALLAGHER is the architecture critic for the Free Press and coauthor of "AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture."