The ranch-style home looks simple from the curb: a fairly common brick exterior and pairs of pillars across the front porch, all sitting behind a pair of sprawling live oak trees.
It’s what you see in the Del Monte II neighborhood, beyond the Galleria but not quite to Tanglewood, a subdivision still dominated by the original inventory of single-story homes built in the 1960s or so. Outside, it’s a flashback to decades ago, but inside, most houses have had significant remodeling, updating kitchens and baths and adding more current furnishings.
It was the exterior that made Aashish Shah stumble a bit when his wife, Roseann Rogers, led him to the front door a few years ago. He thought he was a new-house kind of guy, and she was prepared to convince him that this older home would be full of character and personality.
“We spent forever, looking and not finding,” Shah said of a new-home search that lasted about a year and a half, only to leave them empty-handed after visiting at least 40 homes. “It came down to you finding the right house, and it’s the wrong part of town. You find the right part of town, and it’s the wrong house. You find kind of what you want but, on total, it’s not.”
Shah, 44, is an Ob-Gyn who works as chief health care value officer at MD Anderson’s Proton Therapy Center, and Rogers, 50, is well known as the former “Buzz Lady” at KPRC-Channel 2. She is now sales manager of Stewart Title’s Houston division. They had lived in large homes in Bellaire, and when Shah’s career took him to another state for a couple of years, Rogers and their son, Nikhil, now 13, got an apartment in an Uptown midrise.
They loved the sense of community there, the lock-and-leave lifestyle and simply having less home to take care of. When it was certain that Shah was returning to Houston, they knew they needed to find another home.
Rogers had been looking for several months, and Shah joined in for another year. He joked that often they’d pull up to a home in separate cars, and Shah would leave without even getting out of the car.
One day he suggested she look in the area around St. Michael Catholic Church, where Rogers worships and Nikhil goes to school. Since she has a real-estate license and works at a title company, she’s skilled at finding homes just as they’ve hit the market.
That’s how she found the home they’re in now — one that, on paper, had almost nothing Shah was looking for.
But Rogers got him in the front door and he liked it. He liked the formal living room — they call it their parlor — and he loved the kitchen. Shah couldn’t always visualize what they could do in any particular room, but he knew he could live in this house.
Rogers used her friend Allie Wood of Allie Wood Design Studio to decorate, and all was good.
Then Hurricane Harvey hit, and the family felt blessed that their home was dry, even as they worked for hours to help friends whose homes flooded.
Until one day Shah realized the wood floors felt moist and eventually started buckling. Nikhil joked that he knew they didn’t have a ghost, but something was making baseboards pop off the walls.
They didn’t know it, but an air-conditioning pipe in a wall between a brick fireplace and a guest bathroom had separated, spilling up to a gallon of water an hour into the bones of the home. Five contractors were stumped: They all knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what.
After days of head scratching, the problem was identified. Water was turned off to that part of the home, but the damage was done. Wood floors were ruined, baseboards and the bottoms of walls needed to be replaced, and that guest bathroom was going to need a lot of work.
The family chose to see it as an opportunity for some remodeling and a face-lift for every room with new colors and new furniture. Getting it done took longer than it probably should have because contractors in town were all busy helping repair flooded homes.
It may be a ranch-style home, but it’s a spacious 3,862 square feet on a lot that’s considerably bigger than it looks from the street. Though many ’60s-era ranches have lots of walls and separated rooms, Shah and Rogers embraced the floor plan instead of taking down walls to create big open spaces.
With Wood’s help, they transformed the home into a stylish and sophisticated space that perfectly fits who they are today.
“Roseann always said, ‘I want a house with character,’” Shah said, looking at framed photos of homes they lived in before. “I’ve gone from liking new houses that are lacking personality, not fully understanding what that even means in a home. Now, it’s, ‘This is character and personality and how a home should feel.’ That is growth for me. This is really Roseann’s style and is becoming mine.”
“Before” photos show a home that was comfortable but more than a little too beige. They had nice artwork but wanted more. And at the back is what they called “the ugly room” — more on that later.
Wood’s goal wasn’t to lighten or brighten the smallish rooms. Instead, it was to add drama and sophistication with a simple palette of grays and blues with pops of red in art and accessories.
When Shah and Rogers relax in the parlor — a room without a TV — they look like they never want to leave the space. The walls, ceiling beams, brick fireplace and open, built-in bookshelves were all painted a moody dark gray, and a dark-blue sofa shares space with a pair of white leather chairs and two dark-blue chairs with ottomans.
Wood and Rogers took care of the furnishings, and Shah curated the art, acquiring several pieces in the process. Over a fireplace is his pride and joy, a piece from Reuben Nakian’s Leda and the Swan series. It was the first piece of art that he bought some 20 years ago when he finished his residency — the last baby he delivered was his own son more than 13 years ago. In time, he decided to get rid of the painting, but recently he regretted it and started a search to find it and buy it back.
He’s also drawn to the colorful modern work of John Pavlicek and Robert Rector — their work is at Gremillion & Co. Fine Art — and shelves hold luxurious coffee-table books and accessories that represent the world travelers that they are.
“They like an eclectic style and a collected feel, and they build a much more interesting room because everything has to be important to them,” Wood said. “There’s nothing in here that was bought just because it was the right color.”
The guest bathroom with the broken pipe got a big makeover, in dramatic black and white. In fact, they painted the door red so that when they entertain they can just say, “The bathroom is down the hall; look for the red door.”
A nearby guest bedroom was converted into a very masculine study for Shah. The once white walls and built-in bookcases were all painted dark brown. A gorgeous desk was found through Meredith O’Donnell, and contemporary lighting was added overhead. A barn-style door covers the closet — now with shelves and used more as a bar — to make it look less like a bedroom closet.
At the end of the hall, what used to be a simple storage closet was turned into a spectacular wine closet. Wood replaced the bland wooden door with a glass one, wallpapered the space and added wine-bottle holders to the back wall. It was a genius move that anyone could replicate — that is, if you don’t need the storage space.
“We’ve always had houses, but now we have a home. That is how I feel about it,” Shah said. “They introduced me to things I never would have thought about it … and it was always uncomfortable for me. But there’s nothing in the house I don’t like.”
Nikhil was the unluckiest one of the family — his bedroom was hardest hit. But in his room makeover, he got a couple of handsome nightstands, an industrial-style desk and an iconic Eero Saarinen red Womb Chair. For the seven months of the remodeling and redesign, Nikhil slept on a sofa in the ugly room.
But it’s not ugly anymore. It’s filled with comfortable furniture and a table and chairs where they can play board games. Overlooking the vast space is a mounted red stag, which Shah shot on a hunting trip in Argentina.
There’s a courtyard in the center of the house, and most visitors at first assume it’s the backyard. Not so. The real backyard — a huge space with a large swimming pool — sits outside the family room.
“This is us to a ‘T.’ We would never have come up with this on our own. It’s the difference between character and just a nice house,” Shah said. “This speaks volumes about us.”
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