Real estate watchers will have their eye on a midcentury modern house that goes on the market this week; it’s in a neighborhood where most don’t expect to find a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity like this one.
Broker/owner Robert Searcy of Robert Searcy Properties has just listed a Meadowcreek Village home that was designed by two of Houston’s most renowned early modernist architects, Fred MacKie and Karl Kamrath.
The 2,800-square-foot brick home in Southeast Houston (5226 Berry Creek Dr) is not far from Glenbrook Valley, another well-known neighborhood full of midcentury gems. Most surprising of all, its price tag: $450,000. “Of all of the houses I’ve listed, this may be the most significant I’ve listed in my career,” Searcy says. “If you have $2 million or more, you can find one of the few remaining MacKie & Kamrath homes scattered around River Oaks or Memorial, but to find one for $450,000 that’s been well maintained on an attractive street—that’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
Located on a street locals call “Doctor’s Row,” once popular with physicians who worked at a Pasadena hospital, this home has a modest three bedrooms and two bathrooms. At the same time, the home, which was designed in 1965 and built three years later, boasts an abundance of floor-to-ceiling glass panels and a handful of original Prairie-style stained-glass windows.
Searcy says that he expects it to sell quickly. It could even be the subject of a bidding war.
Most of the finishes in the home are original, except for changes to the flooring and appliances in the kitchen, which still feature the original laminate counters. Built-in desks and counters in bedrooms that date back to the 1960s also remain. “Their work was so high-end and their clientele so sophisticated and affluent that it’s rare to find their work outside of River Oaks and Memorial,” Searcy says. “We’re looking for its next steward. If somebody comes in and says it needs a lot of updating, then this is not the house for them.”
Both MacKie and Kamrath believed in the principles of Usonian architecture espoused by Frank Lloyd Wright: smaller structures with simple details and organic materials. You’ll see it in the size of the bedrooms, the tiny closets, and built-in seating in the living rooms and bedrooms, just like those in the home now for sale on Berry Creek Drive.
Many of MacKie and Kamrath’s best-known Houston works have been demolished, but good examples can be found in the original Phillis Wheatley High School, Congregation Emanu-El on Sunset Boulevard, St. John the Divine Church on River Oaks Boulevard, and Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church on Memorial Drive in Bunker Hill.
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