MODERN MARVEL
When Steve and Martha Curry remodeled their Braeswood home, they uncovered a gem.
Steve and Martha Curry’s home is a mid-century gem, all skylights and built-ins, terrazzo floors and glass walls. But when they bought the place in 1992, it was an architectural showpiece in hiding.
The best features of this Old Braeswood home had been boarded over, sheetrocked and painted several times — enough alterations that even Steve Curry, an architect, didn’t recognize what a treasure they had.
“I have to give full credit to my wife,” he says, for discovering the house. Martha Curry, a pediatric nurse practitioner, drove by and knew it was intriguing.
Built in 1953 and designed by Houston architect Lars Bang, the three-bedroom, 2,100-square-foot house had charming quirks: Skylights in the bathrooms, built-in shelves in the hallway, a wall that jutted out into the backyard, splitting it in two. Years of ill-advised renovations, though, had covered up the home’s true grandeur.
When the Currys moved in, the home’s previous owner gave them a tattered copy of a Good Housekeeping magazine from 1954, which featured the house as one of its “10 Best Small Houses for 1954.” The magazine focused on Bang’s long, low exterior lines and the glass walls that erase the division between indoors and out.
“We spent 10 years living in the house and sort of talking about it and thinking about it and learning about it,” Curry says. “Then we moved out to begin restoration.” They moved into the house next door, actually, and took their time restoring the house, using those maga- zine pictures as a guide.
It was a long, complicated project that took years, but their efforts have been recognized by Preservation Texas and the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects. In February, Preservation Houston gave the Currys a 2016 Good Brick Award for thoughtful restoration. Their home will be one of the stops on next weekend’s Good Brick home tour, which features five restored homes that date back as far as 1872.
“It was a good thing that we could take our time,” Curry says. Instead of knocking out the interior in a matter of days, they dismantled it piece by piece, uncovering and saving original materials. They discovered a plywood ceiling hidden behind sheetrock and boarded-up clerestory windows above bathroom doors. They restored the indoor planters and planted philodendrons; now the garden outside seems to leap the glass boundary and continue into the living space.
The Currys ripped out the kitchen updates and returned the room to the open space it originally was designed to be, with a panel of cabinets suspended from the ceiling. “We came up with what I call an homage to the original kitchen,” Curry says: It looks much like it did in 1953, but with modern-day appliances and a bit more counter space.
The Currys did consider the scale of the house when they selected appliances, avoiding the supersized proportions of the 21st century. “We tried to keep thing small and low,” Curry says. “Everybody will sell you a 36-inch range or bigger, but 30 is enough.”
The same scale applies to furniture. The Currys have scavenged estate sales, demolition sites and trash piles to collect furniture and decor from the proper time period — post-World War II and early 1950s pieces that are appropriate for their setting. They have Russel Wright dinnerware and Paul McCobb chairs. In a guest room, a full set of vintage Conant Ball bedroom furniture looks nearly new, with the Foley’s tag still on the back of the bed frame.
“I don’t consider myself particularly nostalgic for the ’50s,” Curry says; in fact, he wasn’t born until the decade was mostly over. But even so, he says, “a lot of the ideas people were coming up with (in the ’50s) — architectural ideas, design ideas — that have contributed greatly to the way we live now.”
The home’s design still feels fresh and forwardthinking. Even the color palette, which is original, seems Technicolor-crisp: the ceiling is chartreuse, while built-in shelves are stained green and red. Amid the natural woods and stone, a few accents are painted a severe black.
The house was built in a post-war era when builders were throwing up houses as quickly as they could. The architect Bang, Curry says, “had loftier goals.” This house was “on the edge, in terms of design,” he says. “People ask me, ‘Why don’t they build them like this anymore?’ You know, they never really did.”