MOVING ON UP
Artful couple makes the leap from townhome to high-rise living
When Lisa Spain and Harry Bassist retired, their plan was to travel and play more golf.
Spending time and money on a home that required a lot of upkeep wasn’t in the equation. So the couple decided to do what so many retirees are doing: They moved into a high-rise.
“We started thinking about where we were going to go with our lives. I was going to sell the store, and he was going to retire,” said Spain, 63, who owned the Cotton Club Collection women’s clothing boutique for 28 years before selling it. “We wanted a place that was one story.”
There are plenty of highend luxury towers in Houston, but Spain and Bassist, who were living in a two-story townhome, needed a condo in a lower price range. They looked around and found a unit at The St. James near the Galleria, but the deal fell through. Then they quickly found The Bristol, on Richmond just outside the Loop, and saw its potential.
“We knew we weren’t going to move into the new condos that cost $1 million. We knew the price point we could afford. We wanted to do a lot of traveling and be able to lock and leave and not worry about it,” said Bassist, 71, who retired from Macy’s, where he was a personal shopper in the home store. “We wanted a place that when you’re older they’ll bring your car out and help bring your groceries in or whatever. To be honest, the first month we lived here, it felt like we lived in a hotel.”
Built in 1983, The Bristol features condos in three sizes — 1,451 square feet, 1,955 square feet and 2,178 square feet — plus a handful of penthouses in varying sizes. The couple settled on a midsize unit that had an additional 322 square feet in a balcony that wraps around two sides.
Once they had the location and price they wanted, the next step was to renovate the condo’s interior to what they wanted. It started out with a galley kitchen and lots of walls that created a small dining room in the center of the main living space.
A resident there introduced Spain and Bassist to contractor Juan Martinez, of 66 Construction, who is the building HOA’s contractor and has renovated several units there.
“It took some vision, but when Juan came in and said we can do this, and this and this … well, the rest is history,” Spain said.
Before-and-after photos show a dramatic transformation from a sequence of small spaces — despite the modest square footage — to an open living area flooded with light from the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround the kitchen/dining/living room.
Walls in the center that created a small, separate dining room came down, completely opening up the main living space. They gained more kitchen workspace with a longer counter deep enough to accommodate a handful of acrylic barstools.
“Some people like a galley kitchen. A friend of mine likes hers because when she has company, she doesn’t want anyone to see her washing dishes,” Spain said. “I’m happy to have people in there helping me wash the dishes.”
A small portion of the kitchen wall that holds plumbing remains, but it gets good use by holding some of the colorful art that livens up the couple’s mostly neutral color palette. Similarly, an opposing wall that once formed the far side of the dining room has plumbing for a wet bar. They liked the idea of a small wet bar, so they kept a portion of it and added glass shelves that hold vintage decanters and barware.
Spain and Bassist, two native Houstonians who met on a
“It’s not downsizing, square footage or financially. It’s about simplifying their lives.” Alan Pactor, Ladco Design Center
blind date in 1991 and eloped to Las Vegas five months later, bought their condo in The Bristol in July 2017, and work started around Labor Day that year, just as Hurricane Harvey was flooding neighborhoods all over the city. In just two and a half months, Martinez had transformed the main living area and completely redid both bathrooms.
It didn’t matter that their new place has just two bedrooms. The couple’s three children are grown — she has two sons, Brian Miller, 40, and Michael Miller, 37, and four grandchildren, and he has a daughter, 33-year-old Elissa Bassist.
Once finished, their condo soon became a popular stop for Realtors who wanted their clients to see what was possible there.
Home renovations seem like hundreds of tiny decisions, but Spain’s background in fashion and Bassist’s career in homestore goods made the work easy.
Their previous home — similar in size but with three bedrooms — had been transitional style, and they both wanted a fresh start with a more contemporary look. They hired an interior designer and bought a couple of modern pieces at Cantoni, then went to the trade-only Ladco Design Center, where their friend Alan Pactor is operations director.
“I knew what I wanted, and I know what I like,” Spain said. “We could go and make a decision on the spot.”
That said, they made a few more decisions than they originally planned.
“We were looking for a couch, and Harry saw the dining table and said ‘I want that,’ ” Spain said. “It’s so beautiful I didn’t think I wanted to eat off of it. Then I said, ‘Well, I’m not sleeping in that old bed anymore,’ and then Harry wanted a new chaise.”
Except for a hand-made custom cabinet along one wall, everything in the condo is new.
It’s easy to think you’re going to get a new sofa until you realize the pretty new sofa makes everything else look old and shabby. Little by little, you find yourself buying a new rug, lamps and chairs and, suddenly, you’ve got a whole new room.
Or, in the case of Spain and Bassist, a whole new condo.
Now, the living room has a big gray sectional sofa that sits on a thick cushy rug with a concrete coffee table and a lime-green upholstered bench. Nearby, a pair of comfortable chairs with a fur-covered ottoman sit in the center of a bay window.
Spain loves the gray furniture, but the stylish woman can’t live without color. So she added colorful decorative pillows to the sofa and artful vases of fresh flowers to give more life to the scene.
The couple also expanded their art collection, picking up new pieces through Laura Rathe Fine Art.
In a section of a hallway wall that leads to the bedrooms, a large media painting by artist James Verbicky greets visitors. The colorful collage-like work is made of strips of vintage Parisian magazines attached to wood and coated in shiny resin.
The foyer has two more colorful pieces, a piece by Gian Garofalo that looks like long, thin drips of pigment, plus a floral abstract by Meredith Pardue. In the kitchen, a Stallman Studio piece of sculpted canvas and acrylic might just be the most gorgeous way to cover an electrical breaker box ever.
Martinez’s knowledge came in handy when the art was installed and he recommended new swivel lights that shine exactly where they needed more light.
Though many people automatically think that empty-nesters’ or new retirees’ moves are about smaller homes, that’s often not the case. What they want are living spaces that are simplified or have floor plans better suited to grown-up entertaining.
“It’s not downsizing, square footage or financially. It’s about simplifying their lives,” Pactor said.