From our interview with homeowner Philip LeBlanc.

I’ve always been interested in historic preservation and modern architecture. I grew up near Houston and moved around the country early in my career [as a designer]. When my wife, Mandy LeBlanc, and I were raising our family, we lived in the suburbs of Houston. Then when our kids left for college, I wanted to move back into the city, closer to my office. I had the idea that I was going to build a house for my wife and me, or I was going to buy a house that needed to be restored.

In 2019, my former employer, who is on the historic preservation commission here in Houston, told us about this house, which is the middle unit [in a three-unit townhome complex]. These townhomes were designed as demonstration homes for the American Iron and Steel Institute, in partnership with the Houston Lighting & Power Company and General Electric. They were built to demonstrate how steel could be affordable to the general public. The National Association of Home Builders had its convention in 1969 at the Houston Astrodome, which had just been completed in 1965. It was a World’s Fair–type environment, with this idea that people could come see the homes of the future. They had 40,000 people at the convention. All the homes were featured in Architectural Record and Architectural Digest and other magazines. It was a big deal.

But back to our house-hunting. We had been looking at multiple places, and this one was outstanding compared to everything else we had seen. But it was 50 years old and had been modified enormously. A previous owner added a third story with a gabled roof, totally covering the original flat roof. The forecourt had been completely enclosed. A lot of things that made it special were gone. It’s a house in the International Style that took its cues from Mies van der Rohe, and that just hadn’t been embraced. It felt like someone had tried to convert it into a more suburban house. It needed a lot of work.

It was on the market for three months. But then it suddenly went off the market, and we were bummed. We had met the people who lived next door through [nonprofit organization] Houston Mod. I asked them if I could get their neighbor’s email to see if they were still interested in selling. I wrote a nice letter to them, and they responded and said yes. They agreed not to put it on the open market, and they sold it to us as-is.

After that, it was a couple of years of pretty aggressive let’s-tear-this-down-to-the-studs work. There was mold damage, and the air conditioning was not sized correctly for the building. We opened up that forecourt that had been enclosed and re-stuccoed the walls and rebuilt the cedar sunscreen that was there originally. I studied the original drawings of the house to figure out how to rebuild that. There were so many elegant little steps designed to make it look like the wood sunscreen is floating above. We also rebuilt the front brick privacy walls, which had been removed. We took off the third-story gabled roof. The original flat roof was underneath, but it had a lot of damage, so we had to replace that. And we had to fix the drainage.

The house had many previous owners, and we learned that a lot of things, like the electrical and the plumbing, had been kind of Frankensteined over the years. We didn’t think it was as bad as it was until we started digging in. A previous owner had moved the laundry room to the second floor, and they did a squirrelly workaround with the plumbing, snaking it all through the house. When we were re-doing the flat roof, the roofers saw some PVC pipes sticking out. We cut into them, and water started spewing out for several hours until the plumber could come and cap it off.

We had several moments like that, where we had no idea what we were getting into. The first time it rained, I thought, “Oh, this is great, we’ve fixed everything.” But then it turned out that storefront glass in the front of the house that I thought was solid leaked like a sieve. And both our neighbors started getting water in their space. I was like, “What have I done? I’m trying to do right by this house, and now I’ve just created problems for my neighbors.” It was the worst feeling.

I went to the Houston shipyard, the most corrosive type of environment [because of] the salt water. A colleague connected me to painters who do coatings there. The painters came out last year and did a very fine job of removing an enormous amount of rust and corrosion and several layers of paint that had built up over multiple decades. They applied four coats of primer and epoxy grade coatings that are typically used in marine conditions. And they ended up painting my neighbors’ homes, as well.

We have to be diligent about maintenance. For the most part, it looks perfect. But you can get areas of rust, where maybe a screw went into the steel not quite right, and it created a place where the metal was exposed and oxidized. And then you’ll see a little rusty or reddish spot on the white paint, so you have to go all the way down to the metal and clean it out, then you patch, prime, paint, and maintain. I have some touchup paint and a rotary tool to remove rust myself, and it has been going very well.

I know that I have talked a lot about the hardships, and years later, I’m still doing restoration work on the house. But there’s something very fulfilling about this work. I love it. When you take back the layers and you make discoveries, like old wallpaper or bits of tile, it’s so fun. And it’s inspiring.