A beautiful old home at 2950 Lazy Lane is scheduled for demolition by its new owner. The updated historic property known as "Dogwoods," has a history that dates back to the 1920's. After spending more than 11 years on the market, the the home was bought by Mike and Anita Stude who later updated the house with new plasterwork and a new kitchen. Furthermore they were careful to preserve the home natural charm. Architectual Historian, Stephen Fox of Rice University has provided the following information on this attractive home:

The house at 2950 Lazy Lane, built in 1926-28 for Judge and Mrs. Frederick C. Proctor, and occupied during 1930s and 1940s by Alice Nicholson and Mike Hogg, is scheduled for demolition. The house, designed by the distinguished Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, was built in tandem with Bayou Bend, which sits next door to the Proctor House. The two houses shared a driveway. The Proctor House site contained the Clock Garden, planned by the Kansas City landscape architects Hare & Hare, the oldest designed landscapes in River Oaks.

Frederick C. Proctor was a prominent South Texas lawyer who practiced in Victoria and Cuero before becoming general counsel of the Gulf Oil Companies in Texas in 1905. Proctor and his wife Lucy Wofford moved to Houston in 1916 when Gulf transferred its headquarters from Beaumont. A friend of Governor James S. Hogg, the father of Will, Ima, and Mike Hogg, Proctor seems to have built the house on Lazy Lane to support of the Hoggs’ efforts to develop River Oaks and especially Homewoods, the most elite subdivision within River Oaks. John F. Staub, the architect who designed Bayou Bend, told his biographer Howard Barnstone that he and Briscoe were asked by both the Hogg siblings and Judge and Mrs. Proctor to collaborate on the designs of their adjoining houses. The two architects agreed that Briscoe would design the Proctor House and Staub Bayou Bend. Each always credited the other as associate architect.

Judge Proctor’s seven-acre tract had frontage on the golf course of the River Oaks Country Club and Buffalo Bayou. Briscoe set the house far back on the lot. It was a two-story house in the French Norman manorial style. Entrance to the house was through a cylindrical tower capped by a conical roof. This was the pivot point from which major rooms emanated, with a living room, dining room, library, and loggia projected outward to ensure multiple exposures to all the reception rooms. Until the 1950s, the exterior brick was painted white. Behind the house, Briscoe positioned a two-story garage and servants’ building with its own tower, a condensed replica of the main house. The famous Clock Garden spanned between the main house and the back building.

The interiors of the house were decorated with French classical detail. The entrance tower opened into a wide hall that ran the depth of the house. At the end of it, a cantilevered spiral stair with delicate railings rose to the second floor. Plaster work and classical moldings articulated walls and ceilings. Despite this detail, the house seemed light and airy because French doors in all the major ground floor rooms opened to the landscape.

In 1931 Judge and Mrs. Proctor sold the house to Mike Hogg and his wife Alice Nicholson. Alice and Mike Hogg called the house Dogwoods after one of the Hogg brothers’ friends, the popular humorist O. O. McIntyre, suggested the name because of the number of hunting dogs Mike Hogg kept. When Mike Hogg’s sister, Ima Hogg, had the landscape architects C. C. Fleming and Albert E. Sheppard design and install the Diana Garden, the most famous of Bayou Bend’s gardens in 1937, Alice and Mike Hogg got Fleming & Sheppard to design a very different kind of garden for them. Fleming & Sheppard planted masses of aspidistra in a ravine downhill from the house, threading narrow paths and steps through the profusion of lustrous greenery as well as installing a small terrace, where, Pat Fleming remembered, Mike Hogg especially enjoyed consuming his favorite cocktail, an Old Fashioned.

After Mike Hogg’s death in 1941, his widow continued to live in the house even after her marriage to her across-the-street neighbor, Harry C. Hanszen. Following Hanszen’s death, Alice Hanszen sold the house to Mr. and Mrs. T. R. McDermott, who eventually passed it on to their daughter Maxine McDermott and her husband Thomas P. Hull, Jr. During Mr. and Mrs. Hull’s tenure, the house was published in the magazine Texas Homes.

What do River Oaks and Houston lose with the demolition of the Proctor-Hogg House? A tangible link to historical personages associated with the property who were significant in the business, political, and cultural history of twentieth-century Texas. A work of residential architecture that represented a significant period in the development of River Oaks and was individually important as a major work of one of the finest architects to practice in Houston. With the destruction of the Proctor-Hogg House, Homewoods and River Oaks are diminished. The aura of the whole community has been depleted. The Hogg brothers, their sister Ima, and Hugh Potter, their associate in the development of River Oaks, understood that architectural excellence was essential if they were to establish River Oaks as Houston’s finest neighborhood. They used design excellence as an instrument to promote the community’s reputation, not just locally but nationally. And it worked. The tragedy of the destruction of this legacy is that most often it is replaced with new buildings inferior to those that have been lost, irrespective of their size and cost. Houston is trading its irreplaceable historic patrimony for substitutes that are ostentatious, mediocre, and grotesque.

Stephen Fox
Fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas
Architecture MS-50