Southampton & Boulevard Oaks

If you have ever driven North or South Boulevard beneath the live oaks and slowed down without meaning to, you already understand this part of Houston.

The area covering Southampton Place, Broadacres, and Boulevard Oaks was platted in the 1920s as Houston's professional and academic class settled around the newly opened Rice Institute. Broadacres, laid out in 1923 with landscape and planning input from architect William Ward Watkin — Rice's founding architecture faculty member — remains one of the most accomplished pieces of residential planning in the state. The double rows of live oaks along its esplanades were planted with a hundred-year view. They arrived.

The architecture is the draw. John F. Staub, Birdsall Briscoe, Watkin himself, and their contemporaries built here in Georgian, Italianate, Tudor, Spanish Colonial, and Mediterranean vocabularies, on lots deep enough to hold them properly. Boulevard Oaks and Broadacres both carry historic district protections, which is why the streetscape reads today much as it did eighty years ago. Interiors have been renovated relentlessly and often brilliantly — plaster and millwork preserved, kitchens and systems brought fully current, pool houses and studios added at the rear.

The setting is the other draw, and it is difficult to overstate. Rice University's campus is across the street. Hermann Park — with the Japanese Garden, McGovern Centennial Gardens, Miller Outdoor Theatre, and the Houston Zoo — is a few blocks east. The Museum District's nineteen institutions begin at the northern edge: the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston with its Steven Holl–designed Kinder Building, the Menil Collection campus, the Rothko Chapel, the Contemporary Arts Museum, the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

And the Texas Medical Center is immediately south. For those whose professional lives are anchored there, few Houston addresses combine this quality of architecture with this length of commute — frequently under ten minutes, and for some, a bicycle ride.

Rice Village and the restaurants of Montrose and Upper Kirby are minutes away. Downtown is a straight run up Main Street, with the METRORail Red Line running the same corridor.

This is Houston at its most European in feel and most rooted in fact — a place where the trees, the buildings, and the institutions have all been growing together for a century.