By Fred Albert
Photographs by Janet Lenzen
Burt Martin was just 6 years old when he began attending garage sales with his parents. “My dad and I were fanatics,” recalls the Texas native. “On Saturday mornings, we’d get up at 5 a.m. and start staking out places.” Young Burt was a good pupil: One of his first purchases was a Buck Rogers pistol. He paid 25 cents for it, and later sold it for $250.
By the time Burt earned his MBA, collections of comic books and world’s fair memorabilia had given way to art pottery. “I had Royal Doulton jugs in my apartment and people thought I was strange,” he recalls with a wince. One visitor, a woman named Ally, eyed the ceramic visages lining the walls and reported back to her friends, “This guy is kinda weird. He has all these heads in every room!”
Heads notwithstanding, the two eventually married. Then one day, Burt came home from a garage sale with an old Arts and Crafts desk. “It had about 15 coats of paint on it,” he recalls. “It took me two weeks to strip the thing.” Once he did, the pair fell in love with the furniture’s clean lines and warm oak finish, and craved more of the same. An estate sale at the home of Margaret Sullenberger (mother of pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger) yielded more treasures, as did trips to Brimfield and the annual Arts & Crafts Conference at the Grove Park Inn. By the time Burt and Ally celebrated their 10th anniversary, their collection had grown too big for their house.
The Martins found an available acre on an oak-lined street in Houston’s Bellaire neighborhood and asked Travis Mattingly of Architectural Solutions to design a house for it. Fans of the Prairie style, they asked Mattingly to create something reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie or Darwin Martin Houses. After tinkering with both options, Mattingly settled on the latter, adapting Wright’s blocky massing, elongated proportions, ganged windows and broad, outstretched eaves to the Martins’ requirements—with some exceptions. “Everybody in Houston wants 12-foot ceilings,” the architect laments. Unfortunately, Wright was just 5-foot-8, and designed like everyone else was, too. Mattingly couldn’t preserve Wright’s low-slung proportions with ceilings that tall. “I talked them into 11 feet downstairs and 9 feet up,” he recalls, “and they said that was fine.” … Subscribe to read the entire article.
