After Harvey, a dream home comes true
Bucket-list items checked off list to bring family maximum enjoyment
Greg and Denise Savage have lived in a variety of homes in and around Memorial Glen for the past 28 years, devoted to the area near Memorial Drive and West Sam Houston Parkway where they’ve always felt connected to neighbors.
Since their three children live nearby and have all started families, the couple decided to finally build a 6,000-square-foot dream home that everyone could enjoy.
First they considered a spec house by Trinity Estate Homes, but when a contract fell through, they started from scratch. They liked so many Trinity builds in the neighborhood that it seemed smart to hire that company and its primary architect — Todd Rice of Rice Residential Design — and bought a lot in Memorial Glen four streets from one of their daughters.
The Savages’ checklist was long: They wanted five bedrooms, including a bunk room for three grandchildren; large dining spaces where everyone can eat together; a pool and outdoor living area for summer play; and an upstairs game room where they can do everything from watch TV, play ping pong or pool, read a book or even mix a drink at a bar. They wound up carving a media room out of an abundance of attic storage space as well.
“Once we decided to do it, it became a bucket-list thing; we kept adding this and that,” said Greg, a partner at the HooverSlovacek law firm. “We don’t travel all over the world. I’ve got my office, and I still work a lot of hours, so let’s spend our money building one last big house we can enjoy until we’re ready to downsize.”
Partway through construction, however, Hurricane Harvey hit, leaving most of Memorial Glen under water after the reservoir release. The Savages were living in a rental house that took on several feet of water. They evacuated for their daughter’s house nearby, and then had to evacuate that one, too, carrying their grandchildren through water to safety. (That home was one of only a handful in the neighborhood that didn’t flood.)
Their home under construction suffered, too. Despite sitting about 18 inches higher than the previous home on the lot, floodwater forced builders to remove insulation and lower cabinets, then install new ones after everything dried out. Those repairs and some additional work slowed completion by about six months. Harvey also cost the Savages their furnishings, including a few things they’d already bought for the new place and all of their Christmas decorations.
“I’m such a minimalist now that we lost everything,” Denise said. “I looked at the piles of everything on the curb when they cleaned everything out and I thought, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ It makes you rethink how much stuff you really need.”
For their new home’s interior design, the Savages hired Steve Clifton of Scene One Interiors at the Houston Design Center, requesting a combination of transitional and French country style: light, neutral colors without a lot of fuss.
“They have kids and grandkids and wanted to make sure it was very usable and livable but elegant as well. Most of our work was getting the look right, but making sure the fabrics are all performance — even the gorgeous white velvet sofas,” Clifton said. “You could literally drop Diet Coke on it and wipe it up. We use those most all of the time.”
In the front of the home, the dining room impresses with windows that flood the room with natural light, and the same brick that’s on the home’s exterior covers the vaulted ceiling and an impressive gold chandelier adds to the room’s grandeur.
“We had to get texture in; if not, this house would die being so neutral,” Clifton said.
Across the hall in the study, leather chairs and a wood desk sit on a cowhide rug. Visual interest comes courtesy of a coffered
ceiling and unusual bookcase treatment with the shelves and front painted light taupe and the backs of them left in a taupe wood stain.
The great room — which includes living, kitchen and breakfast areas — lets the whole family stay together even when they’re doing different things. Even the breakfast nook can accommodate a handful — because there’s no telling how many will be there for any meal of the day.
Clifton’s touches go beyond the beautiful white velvet. Brick also was installed on side walls, framing a center wall with a fireplace and built-in bookshelves; the back wall of the kitchen and breakfast area has it, too. More warmth comes in reclaimedwood ceiling beams.
Clifton had one more trick up his sleeve in the kitchen: What looks like a piece of furniture is a huge refrigerator.
“The refrigerator looks like a big armoire with an arched top,” Clifton said. “People just flip over that. The top of the fridge is storage, and it looks like it has drawers at the bottom, but it’s a faux
front. I started doing that six or seven years ago because I hate looking at big old refrigerators. I like when we can camouflage them.”
A first-floor guest-bedroom suite for now is used as a pool room, and in construction they added different windows to improve its view into the backyard. The spacious master suite has a coffee bar and a roomy bathroom with an interesting floor treatment with a mosaic pattern framing each floor tile.
Two guest bedrooms and a bunk room await upstairs, but a good deal of the second floor is devoted to family fun. A game room that actually gets used has a bar and a seating area, its own powder bathroom, plus a window seat flanked by bookshelves, a pool table and room for pingpong.
The bunk room is sweet, but Denise said her grandsons mostly like to climb on the top bunk to play rather than sleep. Shelves that hold bins of toys have surely dedicated this room as much a play space as for napping or sleeping. The idea for a bunk room came from ideas Greg found as he perused home-design websites looking for things to include.
As work progressed, Greg was perplexed by the huge amount of space devoted to attic or storage on the second floor. They’d just lost everything to flooding and really didn’t have anything left to put in there. So he instructed them to install a huge TV screen and nine leather recliners for a media room that gets used a fair amount.