Living up to old adage of everything’s bigger in Texas, a $34.5 million, 17,405-square-foot mansion in Houston has become the most expensive single-family home for sale in the state.
Sitting on the billionaire block known as Lazy Lane, The Hines Villa at 2920 Lazy Lane Blvd hit the market earlier this month. A 9-acre ranch that sold in Austin in spring 2020 was originally listed for $38.9 million, but at the moment, there is no pricier house than this one for sale in the Lone Star State.
Houston real estate developer Gerald D. Hines enlisted famed architect Robert A.M. Stern to build the Mediterranean-style mansion in the early 1990s and lived in it up until his death at age 95 last August.
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While the house itself is very large, it only has five bedrooms — the rest of the space is filled with a grand entryway leading onto a seating area full of art pieces and artifacts, a wood-paneled library, two kitchens, 11-and-a-half bathrooms and an attached apartment that can serve as a guesthouse.
The sprawling grounds include a tennis court with a spectator area, a swimming pool and ample landscaped areas featuring gardens, fountains and a trail that leads to the Bayou Bay water channel.
“You just get a sense of the outside even in the grand entertaining areas,” Cathleen Cagle, the Douglas Elliman agent representing the property, told realtor.com. “Doors open up into these beautiful gardens, so they tried to bring the outside in. You’ve got this very grand house, but you’ve got these very beautiful gardens — and they didn’t forget that in the design and conceptualization of the house.”
As the founder of the Hines real estate firm, Hines oversaw the firm’s growth into a company behind over 1,900 residential and commercial properties around the world. By the time of his death, the company owned over 679 million square feet of real estate and Hines himself was worth over $1 billion.
Over the last decade, Texas has seen some of the fastest growth and development in the country due to the number of highly-skilled professionals moving to the state for work. With ExxonMobil as the largest employer in the state, Texas’s economy is also highly dependent on oil. An average house on the same street as the Hines Villa was worth $15.4 million in 2015 and would likely have many of the state’s biggest oil magnates as neighbors.