Historic Courtlandt Place home is a jewel on AIA Houston home tour
When a building inspector declares a structure an “imminent total failure,” that’s generally not the time a home buyer is going to think, “Yeah, that’s my dream house.”
For Jerry Hooker, though, it was far too late. He’d been in love with the possibilities for this Courtlandt Place house for years, admiring the enclave of grand historic homes on the edge of Montrose since he first laid eyes on them.
He and his husband, Jacob Sudhoff, purchased their home at 6 Courtlandt Place in a sorry state of disrepair in the fall of 2016 and then spent two full years on structural repairs, interior design and elaborate landscaping to make it better than it was when it was finished in 1909 for Houston banker C.L. Neuhaus and his wife, Emilie.
Hooker, a principal at Mirador Group, and Sudhoff, CEO of Douglas Elliman Texas, aren’t strangers to hard work. As an architect, Hooker has worked on the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum and the World Trade Center, and Sudhoff has managed large multifamily housing units. With business partners, they now have the Giorgetti condo building under construction on Kirby.
Their restored home will be one of eight open to the public on the annual AIA Houston Home Tour Oct. 19-20. Other homes on the tour include the work of Collaborative Design Group Architecture & Interiors, Collaborative Designworks, studioMET Architects, Reagan Andre Architecture, CONTENT Architecture and Paul N. Brow Architect. The homes are scattered throughout the city in Spring Valley, the Heights, Tanglewood, West University Place and Montrose.
They range from traditional
to modern, but the Hooker Sudhoff home is an amalgam: a historic preservation effort that honored the home’s early-20thcentury Colonial Revival architecture and mostly stuck to the original floor plan inside — but added modern European interior design and a slew of contemporary and modern art works.
Originally, the home was 6,400 square feet with an ugly utilitarian kitchen and crumbling basement. Walls had cracks and chunks of plaster missing. Crown molding was missing in parts and an awkward second staircase was built in the center of the house, not that far from the grand main staircase. A carriage house in the backyard — where they had once housed horses, goats and chickens — was unsafe to enter. Brush had taken over the backyard and anything that might have been in a big side yard was long lost.
Their grand plan got a big boost in the fact that the home’s original architectural drawings by Sanguinet & Staats were still around so they could see what was originally intended — even though few internal changes had ever been made.
They dug out the dilapidated basement to reinforce it and had to remove the massive concrete porches and repour them. In place of the carriage house meant for animals is a guest house designed for visitors. In fact, the guest house was finished first, and Hooker and Sudhoff lived in it for a while as work continued on the main house, which was finished early this year.
Italian marble was brought in for bathroom counters, but the kitchen has marble dubbed Lincoln Memorial because it’s the stone used for the late president’s monument in Washington, D.C.
Extensive landscaping makes everything from the gardens to the driveway beautiful. Concrete was poured in diamond shapes with strips of grass in between for a look that’s pretty and porous. A side porch that had been enclosed was reopened and leads out to a space filled with Tivoli fountains, olive trees and other shrubs. A pair of towering red sculptures that look like flowers blowing in a breeze among ornamental grasses and a trio of sculptures line a flower garden that runs along the hall that leads from the main house to the guest house.
Inside, the floors are now 180-year-old French oak from Listone Giordano, a brand carried at the CASA Houston home furnishings store filled with modern European wares, including Giorgetti, Poltrona
Frau, Rimadesio and Viabizzuno.
Despite its size and many rooms and floors, the kitchen and family room are where Hooker, Sudhoff, their 7-monthold daughter, Brinley, and their American Staffordshire terriers, Bella and Buddy, live. It’s a comfortable space with a sectional sofa they all pile on to watch TV. In the back is a gleaming white kitchen with marble counters and a gorgeous La Cornue range that is so jewel-like you might not want to actually use it.
But Hooker and Sudhoff say they are homebodies who cook and eat dinner as a family nearly every night, then go to bed by 9 p.m.
At the front of the home is a formal living room with superdark gray walls and gray sofa with a pair of chairs and a patterned rug. It’s sleek and masculine and a favorite spot for Sudhoff, who spends quiet time here every day, sometimes just admiring the sprawling oak trees he sees through the front windows.
A second living room is more Hooker’s style, bright and light, with a leather sofa facing an upholstered one and in the back a conversation grouping with four yellow chairs grouped around a table.
The master bedroom has a large canopy bed on a dark blue rug and a pair of dark gray chairs to relax in, and an elaborate master bath filled with slabs of Italian marble and a large closet that rivals a display in any men’s clothing store.
Brinley’s bedroom has a beautiful fireplace surrounded by gray veiny sculpted marble, the room’s showpiece is a oneof-a-kind gift from Giorgetti, the Italian furniture maker who is the couple’s collaborator in the condo building under construction and whose wares they stock in their furniture store, CASA Houston.
The base is shaped like a bronze I-beam, a sign of architectural strength, then topped with an egg-shaped crib that swivels. It’s surrounded by an oval ring made of walnut, from which netting dangles. When the Giorgetti staff found out that the two men were starting their family through a surrogate, they spent months designing and making the special crib.
The home is filled with original art, much of it purchased from emerging artists in Houston or various cities the men travel to.
This will be their first Christmas season with Brinley and in this house. Hooker — a Christmas fanatic — plans to go all out.
“I’m a super Christmas nerd. I take a week off of work and put on Christmas music to decorate. Brinley’s a really good baby, so she may be strapped to my chest when I do it,” Hooker said.
He spent his childhood helping close family friends with elaborate decorations that took weeks to put up, and the holiday bug stuck. Even in a small college apartment, he still managed to decorate at least a few Christmas trees.
This year he’ll have 16 or 17, each with its own name and theme, and he’s hoping to copy something he saw at the Biltmore Estate, the Vanderbilt house museum in Asheville, N.C. There, a large room holds four trees, themed summer, spring, fall and winter.
“It looked pretty impresive at the Biltmore. This isn’t the Biltmore, but I think this room can hold four trees,” he said.
His holiday touches won’t be on display for the AIA Tour, but you’ll have a chance to see the home again — and decorated for Christmas — the first weekend after Thanksgiving, when Courtlandt Place holds its occasional holiday home and garden tour to benefit Preservation Houston.
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