As reported on Unfair Park this morning, Preservation Dallas’ Landmark Commission Designation Committee is heading to the late Stanley Marcus home at 10 Nonesuch Place, the home now owned by the Lovvorn family. Not only will the Committee figure out if 10 Nonesuch should be a Landmark House, they are going to figure out how and where the owners can add on to the 9,000 square foot structure. You may recall the Lovvorns debated scraping the home last summer, but decided to save it. The purpose of tonight’s meeting is, as reported, a site visit so the Commission can see what they have — inspect which parts of the house are historic and cannot be touched, which parts are, well, not significant so that the Lovvorns can go to town remodelling those areas. PD’s Katherine Seale did tell me the Lovvorns are planning an extensive addition, and what she has seen thus far looks great. The whole point, which she thinks the homeowners realized last summer, is there is flexibility in owning an historic home. It’s not like you have to call the “Preservation Nazi’s” every time you want to paint a wall.
I’m told the Dallas City Council voted against making Little Forest Hills a conservation district, yes? So what do we think about this?
Looks like we’ll be footing the bill for the former president’s security, at least for awhile. Question: doesn’t Mayflower Estates have a private police patrol program?
I wondered when this would come up — and now it has, thanks to The Huffington Post. (Channel 11’s Bud Gillette called me about this Friday.) HP is stirring trouble, not telling the whole story. The James Meaders Restrictive Covenants are (sadly) typical of the way developers created sub-divisions post World war II in Dallas when the city was growing. I have experience with these because we also have them in our neighborhood. In fact, almost every Dallas neighborhood does! When we closed on our home in 1999, I was shocked when I read them. Homeowners in our ’hood extended our deed restrictions in 2005 as a means of “protecting property values” — so they are, in fact, effective today. But the racist clauses are illegal and un-enforecable and have been so since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Our ‘hood fixed our’s in 2001, and it appears that Mayflower beat us to the punch and amended, second to the last page, on July 16, 2000:
“Item 11 shall be deleted.”