Heights Company’s Passion for Preserving History
After the recent Texas Supreme Court ruling, many Heights residents such as Gilbert Perez could breathe a sigh of relief. In 2008 due to 2.5 houses being torn down weekly in the Heights, Perez and others established Historic Districts within a city and state that shun such “zoning” practices. The Justice wrote that the “historic districts did not have the characteristics of a zoning ordinance.” and will stand for the preservation of the historic districts that he and others fought to maintain. Perez vows to continue his mission and passion for redeveloping the small bungalows that remain the signature of the Heights real estate landscape.
Many from the early 1900s.
Gilbert Perez, like so many, moved to Houston in the 1980s to attend law school but soon decided that was not for him. He worked in corporate America with Ross Perot’s firm EDS. he quit his job and decided to pursue his dream and got his interior design schooling at University of Houston and Houston Community College. Perez got his early design experience under the tutelage of Tim Hamrock of Beverly Hills in Houston’s Highland Village as his interior design assistant. Soon he was ready to go on his own and, in 1995, started Gilbert Joseph Custom Design and Interiors. He moved to the heights in 1996.
For about ten years, he worked as a designer but also began buying and flipping houses. He formed his company Bungalow Revival after buying then restoring, and selling his first bungalow. “I wasn’t planning to be a remodeler because I was busy doing interior design,” says Perez. Perez would restore “one or two a year and make as much as 100,000 or more on each flip.” “That was when properties were 125,000 for a 6,600 square foot lot, and I would put between 125 to 200,000 in them and sell them for a hundred thousand dollars or more profit. Now lot values are 400,000,” says Perez. Perez estimates he has restored between 35 to 40 homes in the Heights.
Perez became known as a remodeler and realized many people didn’t know about his interior design background, so in 2009 he opened his European-inspired retail design store, Bespoke on 19th Street. The store was there ten years until 2020, when his lease expired, and the building sold. His inventory went into storage, and he officed out of a garage apartment while he decided to renovate a building on Tulane and 11th Street that would house his retail and offices.
He bought the dilapidated structure in 2019 and had to build a skeleton to start. The building was in decay and infested with termites, but one would never imagine its previous state from its looks now. It was built in 1920 and previously was a lawnmower repair shop.
His new store just opened and is about 700 square feet and is packed with design specialties. “I love going to small New York shops and boutiques in Europe filled with stuff, and I wanted to bring that kind of boutique to the Heights.
While he enjoys the interior design part, Gilbert Perez’s true passion is in “redoing the small bungalows of around 1.200 feet with those seamless additions” that make the Heights what it is.