Their fascination didn't lie in the house's excellent River Oaks location, across the street from Elliott Park. It wasn't the house's asking price, just over $2 million. And it certainly wasn't the relatively plain brick exterior of the 1934 house, an unremarkable but pleasant piece of the gracious historic neighborhood.
The astounding thing was the house's interior.
Swamplot.com - the online clubhouse for those real-estate obsessives - quickly blogged about the place. "The House of Wow," said the headline. And then, mostly, the photos spoke for themselves: the over-the-top-and-to-the-moon patterns and colors, the like-nothing-you've-seen wooden chandeliers, the gleeful exuberance of the place, so full of wonderments that at first glance it was possible to miss the wooden palm tree (palm tree!) at the center of the living room's yellow pouf seat. To my surprise, I loved the place.
In Swamplot's comments section, opinions were sharply divided. A few hated the décor, arguing that the intricate paint job and custom woodwork ought to be scrapped. "OMG, OMG! MY EYES, MY EYES!!" one writer hyperventilated. "One big steaming pile of ugly," grumped another. And: "Looks like the Cheesecake Factory designer hatched this while high on Twinkies and LSD."
But the lovers slightly outnumbered the haters. "An eccentric masterpiece," they called it; "the House of Fun," "straight out of the movie Auntie Mame," a welcome departure from the "beige walls and granite countertops" that people choose only to protect their resale values.
Both sides speculated on who might live at the House of Wow: Willy Wonka? Mr. and Mrs. Claus? The ambassador from Bhutan, which measures its Gross National Happiness?
I had to know.
Fabulous, fabulous
"Brill," repeats Patricia Brill, a small woman with red glasses, when her real estate agent introduced us. "Like 'Brillo' without the O," she laughs. "Except that I hope we're not abrasive."
She and her husband, Jimmy, moved into the house 45 years ago. They were a fairly typical River Oaks family then: Jimmy, an up-and-coming probate lawyer; Pat, tasteful and restrained, given to wearing elegant knits; and their boys, 5 and 6 years old. In the house's "before" photos, the place seemed to match the family: tasteful, pleasant, nothing unusual.
The change began in '86. After the boys left home, Pat decided to redecorate their bedrooms. But when the second-floor project began spiraling into disaster, as remodeling projects tend to do, she began looking for a new decorator. Her reliable paint contractor - one of the only bright spots in the project - suggested that she call his brother, George Weinle.
"We weren't interviewing George," Pat remembers. "He was interviewing us."
Weinle, it turned out, had been a big deal in Studio 54-era New York; his client list included Yoko Ono and the Broadway producer David Merrick. But after returning to Houston to care for his ailing mother, he was growing bored. And the Brills, he says, struck him as "fabulous, fabulous people."
He created a second floor that would make Jonathan Adler, the famous advocate of antidepressive design, look droopy. In the media room, the walls were mint green, the couch pink; the rug, pillows and blinds carried the colors through the room.
For one of the bedrooms, he scrutinized a fabric pattern that Pat liked. "You like Asian things," he told her, as much a decree as an analysis. She decided that he was right.
"We finished the second floor in the spring of '87," Pat remembers.
Hearing that, Jimmy raises an eyebrow: "With George, can you ever really use the word 'finished'?"
It might be more accurate to say that they moved downstairs - to the rooms that eventually made the second floor look tame.
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