House designed by renowned architect who trained in S.A. on the market
The grand home in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood that the late Fayez Sarofim and his wife, Susan Sarofim, lived in — at 3425 Sleepy Hollow Court — is on the market for $13.5 million.
The house is 7,807 square feet, sits on a 1.6-acre lot and has four bedrooms, 4 ½ bathrooms, four fireplaces, a gated swimming pool and beautiful gardens.
But perhaps its best feature is its architectural pedigree: It was designed by one of Houston’s best early residential architects, Birdsall P. Briscoe, in 1937, who spent part of his time learning his craft in San Antonio.
Another house that Sarofim owned and used for entertaining — at 2124 River Oaks Blvd. — was purchased in October of last year by Astros owner Jim Crane, who demolished it in July. That 16,000-square-foot house had seven bedrooms, but Crane’s lawyer, Giles Kibbe, said its basement had flooded four times, it was not up to city building code and it needed a lot of repairs.
Before demolishing the house, Crane had a lot of materials from inside and outside the home removed as salvage. That home was designed in 1937 by renowned architect John F. Staub.
Sarofim, who died in 2022 at 93, founded his Fayez Sarofim & Co. investment company in 1958 and spent many years on Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires. An arts patron, he spent several decades acquiring a significant collection of American masterpieces and donating millions of dollars to many causes.
Stephen Fox, the architectural
historian who wrote highly regarded books on both architects — “The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe” in 2022 and “The Country Houses of John F. Staub” in 2007 — describes both men as early architects whose work set the tone for how wealthy Houstonians would live after the 1901 Spindletop oil gusher and the 1914 opening of the Houston Ship Channel boosted the city’s economy and population.
Though the Staub house on River Oaks Boulevard is gone, Fox said he hopes the Briscoe house on Sleepy Hollow survives.
“In a time of climate crisis, it is irresponsible to demolish a soundly constructed house of outstanding architectural and historical significance rather than rehabilitating it,” Fox said of the Sleepy Hollow house.
The Sleepy Hollow home, built in 1937 for second-generation oilman J. Curtis Mckallip and his wife, Carrie Jones, is considered the architect’s grandest design from the 1930s.
While Briscoe’s homes tended to be “light and graceful,” this one was about “amplitude and authority” in Regency style with
classical Greek detailing and a “monumental” double-height garden portico, said Fox, a fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas and an adjunct lecturer at Rice University and the University of Houston.
Briscoe, born in 1876, crafted a career by learning drafting and working for architects in San Antonio and Houston, since in his early years no university in Texas offered an architecture program. (Texas A&M University didn’t start its architecture program until 1905, with the University of Texas following in 1910.)
His family may not have been financially wealthy, but they were rich in cultural capital and entrenched in the state’s history. Harris County was named after his great-grandfather, and his paternal grandfather was an officer in the state’s war of independence and later the first chief justice of Harris County. His grandmother’s cousin was attorney general of the Republic of Texas and later the law partner of Sam Houston.
While others were designing bungalows, Four Square and columned Colonial Revival houses in the 1910s, Briscoe shifted to more sophisticated and elegant country houses, focusing on planning, composition, proportion and detail.