Thoroughly modern men taking step back into history
The temperature was flirting with triple digits and humidity hung in the air like Spanish moss, but Jerry Hooker and Jacob Sudhoff looked like two guys ready to throw a party.
Grinning from ear to ear, the men greeted guests, pointed them to a table of cool beverages and urged them to wander.
There was a portable table with wine and cheese and a dispenser of Gin Shandy punch, plus another holding a collection of photos of the house through the years.
Otherwise, the 6,400-square-foot Courtlandt Place home didn’t have a single stick of furniture.
The air conditioning wasn’t on, but that didn’t stop neighbors and members of Preservation Houston’s Pier & Beam group from streaming in for a look at the deteriorating structure that Hooker and Sudhoff had just purchased.
The big topic of conversation for the evening: the extensive plans for restoring the 106-year-old Neuhaus Home to its original luster.
Now, paint chips dangle from the front staircase and trim throughout the home. Walls are cracked and show brick or wood where chunks of plaster are missing. Its hardwood floors are worn and have darkened with age.
The planned restoration will take up to 18 months, and when it’s done, not a single thing will look the same.
Hooker spent the past five years writing letters to the owners of this home and another down the street, hoping to persuade one of them to sell. He also spent that time convincing Sudhoff, his more practical husband, that spending up to $3 million on restorations would be worth it.
“For me, it’s a place to lay our roots and start a family,” Hooker said. “It took us a while to get it, but … it’s a forever house.”
Modern men
Hooker, 30, and Sudhoff, 35, weren’t sure if they’d ever have a chance to buy their Courtlandt Place property, but when the opportunity came, they jumped on it.
The couple, who married last year after meeting in 2010 through a mutual friend, had already built their dream home on Persa. They sold it last year and moved into a high-rise while building another home on Westgate. It should be finished in a month or two and will be the next place they land before their Courtlandt Place manse is ready.
Their spacious, Spanish contemporary home on Persa was filled with contemporary and transitional art and furniture. It gleamed with pale limestone, white marble and an open floor plan.
The home on Westgate, Hooker said, will be everything that they wanted their Persa home to be, and more. With a contemporary Neoclassical exterior, the flooring on the entire 3,000-square-foot first level is white marble with an inlaid black marble perimeter. In fact, the entire home is done in black and white.
The Courtlandt Place home in Colonial Revival architecture will dial the style clock back.
First, they’ll oversee extensive infrastructure work to shore up crumbling basement walls in the back half of the home. The kitchen was built for servants to work in, not two men who like to cook and entertain, so it will get a complete update, as will the fourand-a-half bathrooms.
A master bedroom suite will be added to the back of the home, not visible from the street.
The inside of the home and the landscaping, too, will get Hooker’s deft touch. His day job is as a principal at the Mirador Group, a firm providing interior design and commercial, residential and landscape architecture services.
Sudhoff owns Sudhoff Companies, providing consulting, marketing and sales services for builders and developers.
Hooker, Sudhoff and Mirador Group together have launched Hooker Home, a unique staging company that furnishes builders’ spec homes for quicker sale. Additionally, all of the furnishings used for staging are for sale, too.
One of those homes — part of a Mirador Group-designed townhome project called Courtlandt Manor because of its proximity to Courtlandt Place — falls into the contemporary-transitional category. It has dark wood floors covered with lush rugs and white walls that serve as a backdrop for large, contemporary paintings. Its furnishings are creamy white or gray, but pops of color show up in the artwork and accessories.
Courtlandt’s beginnings
In 1906, a small group of businessmen created the Courtlandt Improvement Co. to plat what would be one of Houston’s earliest elite neighborhoods. Modeled after the private place neighborhoods of St. Louis, Courtlandt Place, as they would call it, would sit on 31 acres in the city’s far-flung suburbs.
Today it’s part of Montrose, but back then it was a long haul from the downtown offices where its homeowners worked.
A list of its first homeowners is a who’s-who of Houston businessmen in the early 1900s. A.J. Hamilton, T.A. Cargill, Sterling Myer, John M. Dorrance and James Autry are just a few. They were
“For me, it’s a place to lay our roots and start a family. It took us a while to get it, but … it’s a forever house.” Jerry Hooker
bankers and lawyers or businessmen who earned their fortunes in cotton, lumber or ranching.
Their roomy homes were built by famous architects of the day, Sanguinet and Staats, Warren and Wetmore, John F. Staub and Birdsall P. Briscoe. Together it’s a hodgepodge of architectural styles from the Eclectic Movement that dominated at the time: Colonial Revival, Neoclassical, Tudor, Italian Renaissance and Spanish Eclectic.
“At the turn of the 20th century, there was a move to having open, airy homes,” said David Bush, acting executive director of Preservation Houston. “This would have been in that movement, where you wanted a lot of light and air, a reaction to the Victorians that had heavy ornamentation and moving away from heavy drapes and rugs.”
The first to complete a home on Courtlandt Place was a banker, C.L. “Charley” Neuhaus, and his family, who moved into their Colonial Revival-style, fourbedroom home in 1910.
The home had 10 rooms, including four bedrooms and three-anda-half bathrooms. (Later, one of the bathrooms was divided so that each bedroom had its own bathroom.)
There was a carriage house in back, where they parked cars and likely kept horses, goats and chickens. And 800 square feet of thirdfloor attic space was finished at some point with a bathroom and living space to house the family’s servants.
“It was the first house in Courtlandt Place, so that’s something. Actually, it was a modern house for 1909,” Bush said.
Later, the home was sold to the Charles B. Sanders family and then to the Karl Doerner Jr. family. Sudhoff and Hooker are the home’s fourth owners.
By the mid-1920s, most of Courtlandt Place’s homes were built, ranging from 3,600 to nearly 10,000 square feet of living space and on some of the largest residential lots in the city.
The original homes are intact, and the neighborhood is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Individual homes throughout the neighborhood have a smattering of city, state and national historic/ landmark designations. International influences
Hooker and Sudhoff love to travel and spend time photographing things they like: architecture, landscaping, any small details that inspire.
A trip to England left them loving the Jacobean architecture of Wroxton Abbey and its 17thcentury manor house. The exterior styling influenced the exterior of the Courtlandt Manor townhome project.
In London, the unusual brickwork in a Georgianstyle home caught their eye, and Hooker worked it into a River Oaks spec home he and Mirador designed.
An adventure in Mexico connected them with unique and colorful artwork by emerging artists. And a stop in Croatia during a Mediterranean cruise had them taking detailed pictures of various structures for use later.
Hooker’s plan to renovate their newest home was done before they even closed on the house. It sailed through the city Planning and Development Department for a certificate of appropriateness since the home has historic protection.
“When you take on a house like this, especially in a place like Courtlandt Place, which has a strong tradition of historic preservation, it’s really a commitment you’re making to the whole neighborhood,” Bush said. “It’s very gratifying to see people who are willing to take on these projects.”