No one can accuse Barry and Sherry Johnson of living in a cookie-cutter house. “We know what we like and with our architect, it turned out better than we could
have imagined. It really reflects our tastes,
” says Barry of their new modern dwelling across from Memorial Park.
Their home is a prime example of forward-thinking architecture that sprang from
a challenge. In this case, how to build a house on a lot that has a fault line
running through it? They turned to the Houston design-build firm MC2
Architects for the answer. Intrigued and motivated rather than deterred, the
founders and brothers Chung and Chuong Nguyen came up with a unique design
solution, one that dazzled the public during last fall
’s AIA Houston home tour.
“‘A fault line? Did you say a fault line?’” That would be most people’s reactions when they are told a fault line runs through a property,” says Barry, a man of vision through years of real estate development. “We were interested in this particular piece of property for a long time. Others
had looked and backed off, but they never really delved into understanding what
the fault line was about.
”
But Barry did his homework and found that a geologist and former University of
Houston professor had researched this particular fault line for 25 years.
“He found that it had moved only three centimeters in that time and only one
centimeter in the last 10 years. So that was good news,
” he says.
Barry had developed townhomes (the couple lived in one of them) just down from
this property. Rather than tearing down a little blue cottage house during site
excavation, he relocated it to the fault line property, purchased at a
discounted price. The plan was to eventually sell the cottage house.
“The house was on blocks, the fault line wasn’t active. It was no big deal,” he says. “My plan was to sell it. We eventually had the house under contract. But the guy
started getting real nervous. The day before we were going to close the deal,
he was changing his mind.
”
Barry remembers well the prospective buyer’s “gotcha” question. “His justification for backing out was, ‘Well, why don’t you build on it? Why don’t you live on the property?’ As a developer, I had distinct visions for this property. When he asked me
that, I started thinking,
‘Yeah, why don’t I?’”
So the couple moved the little blue house yet another time, to Garden Oaks, to
free up the lot. Plans for building their home then began in earnest.
“The geologist said that as long as you’re not sitting the house in the fault zone, you can do whatever you want,” Barry recalls.
In this case, the existing geological condition required that
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