Saving small pieces of history
Malaysian couple falls in love with Houston’s historic homes
The tidy yellow home on Keene Street in Houston’s Near Northside neighborhood has a fresh picket fence, green grass brightened from recent rains and a magnolia tree providing shade to anyone on the front porch.
On the other side of that fence, though, is an empty lot with freshly turned ground, awaiting construction of a new home that will be a historically correct new neighbor for the 106-year-old home.
The co-founders of FW Heritage — Dominic Yap and Lin Chong — saved that Keene Street home and are determined to preserve what they can of inner-city Houston’s original homes.
Their latest venture on Keene is a gamble: Are there people who want to live in a Victorian-style home that isn’t 100 years old?
“I want to maintain our vision for preserving history and do it without losing my shirt,” Yap said. He and Chong will build a new, Victorian-style home similar to an ornate home they restored on Sabine Street in the First Ward.
Yap and Chong are both natives of Malaysia. Yap, a geologist, went to work for Occidental Petroleum in Malaysia years ago and later worked for Noble Energy. Over the years he has lived and worked in Oman, Qatar, Libya, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia before landing in the U.S., where he first lived in Bakersfield, Calif., before moving to Houston about six years ago.
It was during a trip home to visit his family in Kuala Lumpur when he met Chong. They dated, she moved here and a year ago they married.
Yap had planned to retire at 50 and dedicate himself full-time to his business concept, but the energy crash and subsequent layoffs beat him to it by seven months. Instead of panicking, he and Chong simply launched FW Heritage a little ahead of schedule. Teardowns and townhomes
Plenty of others have their eyes on big homes in early elite neighborhoods, hoping to restore the city’s jewels. Yap and Chong, however, set their sights on the city’s early working-class areas.
They began by writing letters to homeowners and knocking on doors. In fairly short order, 10 people offered to sell.
FW Heritage isn’t the only buyer, though. Developers are swarming through the same areas looking for teardowns they can replace with lines of three-story townhomes covered in modern combinations of stucco, brick and stone. The First Ward has many.
Many of the lots are 5,000 square feet, and the city allows builders to put up three townhomes in that space. Yap and Chong stick to one, small-ish single-family home on the same size lot.
In the three years they’ve been in business, Yap and Chong have completed 10 restorations. Already they’ve been recognized by Preservation Houston for their efforts.
They received the 2016 Martha Peterson Award, as well as Good Brick Awards for two of their projects, one on Edwards Street and another on Sabine.
“They’ve taken a lot on, for basically small investors,” said David Bush, acting executive director of Preservation Houston. “But it shows what can be accomplished if you’re committed to the work.”
Bush noted that as development has strengthened inside the Loop, homes everywhere have become teardowns — and not just small, older homes. Saving any of them has an ecological side: keeping the demolition debris out of landfills.
“There are people who want modest-sized houses,” Bush said. “There is a market for those projects, and at the same time there are people who don’t want to do the work, to take on the restoration of any size house, honestly. This gives them an opportunity to own a historic house that suits their needs.
FW Heritage projects include eight homes in the First Ward on Dart, Edwards, Bingham, Sabine, Crockett and Shearn streets, plus another in nearby Woodland Heights that they live in. Then there are the Keene Street projects, in the Near Northside.
Their architecture is largely Victorian, but there’s also Queen Anne, Craftsman, Folk Victorian and an American Four Square in the mix. One home was built as a duplex and another was a triplex, but Yap and Chong turned them into single-family homes.
And every FW Heritage restoration is finished with a red door: the universal sign of welcome. Elbow grease
Just this week they closed on their Edwards Street project, handing the keys over to its proud new owner.
That home — officially called the Bammel-Long House and one of their Good Brick Award winners — came about when they were working on another restoration on Shearn Street. A sympathetic townhome developer approached them, offering to give the home to them, and he gave them six months to find a lot to move it to.
Considered Folk Victorian style, the home hadn’t changed much since it was built decades ago. Its original owners were Henry Bammel and his wife, who had one daughter, Maybelle. She inherited the house from them and, in 1981, willed it to her caretaker, Sadie Long.
Yap and Chong believe the house was built in 1899, and it still had many original features — 12-inch baseboards, 3-inch floorboards, original windows and door trims — still in good condition.
The couple calls their work “respectful restoration” because, like many updating older homes, they have to make them livable for people now.
So when homes like this have just one bathroom, Yap and Chong redesign space to create a second bathroom. Kitchens are often expanded, though cabinet styles are matched when possible. Updated closets get drawers and extra rods that weren’t needed by earlier residents, who clearly didn’t have shopping addictions. For the Edwards Street home, they also added a deck on back, where its new owner can enjoy the downtown skyline.
Yap and Chong began their business knowing they had a lot to learn. Yap had strong skills as a longtime project manager; Chong, a teacher, decided she would learn everything she could about the aesthetic of historic homes.
For their first home, they hired a contractor and told him that they needed to learn from him. They basically went to school, Yap said.
“In many homes, we are stripping out all the things that were bastardized over the last 100 years and bringing it back to the original,” Yap said. “I just pull out the things that were poorly added on, and then put back the stuff that would have made the house look like it was when it was built.”
Sometimes it means scavenging for architectural salvage to install old windows and doors or simply finding old-style doorknobs and drawer pulls.
Their efforts respect each home’s bones, inside and out. So wood floors are refinished and trim and baseboards often need plenty of TLC. Even paint colors get researched; colors don’t have to match each home’s original, but must be true to its architectural era.
“Just like this kitchen,” Chong said. “We know it was added on in the 1920s, but we’ve had feedback that says it’s not a kitchen that people would want today.
“If you said to us, ‘Pull it all out and give me a brand, spanking new kitchen,’ we will say to you, ‘You are not the right buyer.’ It needs to be functional, it needs a little elbow grease. It’s staying.”
Their other Good Brick winner is a colorful Queen Anne style home on Sabine Street, built in 1883 and known as the Hirzelvon Haxthausen House. It still has many original features: its bay windows with wood shingle details, original wainscoting, pine floors and a huge wrap-around porch with turned-spindle decoration that begs for a party.
This 1,680-square-foot home’s second owners, August and Minna von Haxthausen, ran the city’s German-language newspaper, the Texas Deutsche Zeitungand, and he was a state representative from 1909 to 1917.
With each project, Yap and Chong get to know their neighbors and notice that their efforts are contagious. It’s not unusual, they said, for other homeowners to get busy.
“Realistically, I think people want to do work to their house when they see their neighbor doing it,” Chong said. “People who love their house want to participate, and the easiest way to do it is some paint and landscaping. Sometimes when our tradesmen are here, they’ll come over and say, ‘can I borrow your plumber?’ ”