River Oaks 1925: Houses for $7,000---and up.

     You bought your lot, but you could not build just any kind of house on it. There were regulations and restrictions. First, your house had to cost at least $7,000 (in today’s dollars, that would come to over $90,000). A panel of architects and citizens had to approve its design. If you built on Kirby Drive your house could be only English Tudor or American Colonial, and it had better be grand. (Drive down Kirby Drive today, and look at the results.)

      Elsewhere on other streets in River Oaks, there were homes of other styles. There were modest Cape Cod cottages, and massive mansions, Regency, Spanish Colonial, Georgian. There were Mediterranean-style villas. There were Olympic-sized swimming pools (one paved with imported Italian mosaic tiles), there was a Lalique crystal stair rail with a matching chandelier, and other such high-end touches.

       On the largest of the lots in River Oaks, fourteen and a half acres, the Hoggs built their own house in 1927.

      

       Ima called it “Bayou Bend.”