Staub-designed house was home to power brokers
Now reduced to a pile of construction debris, the 17,000-square-foot home that once stood at 2945 Lazy Lane originally was considered some of the finest work of John F. Staub, one of Houston’s early notable residential architects.
The River Oaks home was designed in 1930 by Staub for oilman Harry Hanszen and his wife Katherine. Inspired by the 12th century Chateau Jacquot in France, it served as a residence for one Houston power broker or another in its nearly 90year life.
John W. Mecom Jr., an oilman and former owner of the New Orleans Saints, owned the home with his wife, Katsy, for many years. It was just a three-bedroom home when the Mecoms bought it, and they expanded it to accommodate their family. The couple raised their four children there, adding on a wing for more space. The home’s interior footprint had also changed greatly from Staub’s original design.
The home’s most recent appraised value was $12 million, according to the Harris County Appraisal District.
In its early days, though, it was considered by architect/author Howard Barnstone as one of Staub’s finest homes. He cited its “intensely romantic composition,” attention to detail and the balance of elements such as turrets, roof and windows.
Businessman Matthew B. Arnold is the current owner of the property that sits across the street from another Staub design — the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, once the home of philanthropist Ima Hogg.
Next door to Bayou Bend is the site of another home purchased and demolished by Arnold’s brother, John D. Arnold, a businessman and philanthropist. That home, architecturally known as “Dogwoods,” was designed by another noted architect, Birdsall P. Briscoe, with assistance from Staub.
Both homes once represented architecture that set the bar for grand, elegant homes in Houston. While the 2945 Lazy Lane home already had veered greatly from its original design, the loss of the Dogwoods home — designed in 1928 for Frederick C. Proctor — was a more significant loss to the city’s architectural history.
Realtors have said that homes designed by early residential architects such as Staub, Briscoe and others such as William Ward Watkin and Joseph W. Northrop, can command a higher price, and they don’t go on the market often.
Stephen Fox, architectural historian who is a fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas and an adjunct lecturer at Rice University and the University of Houston, said that the Hoggs and other wealthy Houstonians in the 1920s and 1930s sought the work of Staub and his peers for much more than nice homes.
Some 90 years ago they were the city’s grandest homes, but are considered modest by today’s standards. What were then homes of 4,000 or more square feet would be replaced by homes three to four times the size today.
“Clients who went to these residential architects, I think, wanted something from them that had more than simple economic value,” Fox said in an earlier interview about Staub’s work. “My sense was that his houses kind of formed an ideal image of what a Houston upper class home ought to look like. Its spacial organization, planning, proportion, attention to detail, framed an ideal way of life.”