Are you a political junkie who has always wanted a 13,000-square foot home on the River Oaks Country Club Golf Course? Well, you might want to take a peek at Bob and Elyse Lanier’s mansion at 3665 Willowick Road. The 86-year-old former Houston mayor has been trying to unload his neo-classical River Oaks manse for sixteen months now.
The six-bedroom, three-story home could be yours for a mere $6,995,000, a full 41 percent lower than the original list price of $12,000,000, according to the Houston Business Journal. The recent $1 million drop is the third time the price has fallen since the house was put up for sale. And does your last name begin with L? Then you’re in luck. Lanier, who was the much loved mayor of Houston since 1992 to 1998, had the ceilings in the master bedroom suite monogrammed with large, pink, cursive letter “Ls.”
In 2006, Texas Monthly’s Mimi Swartz, writing for National Geographic, spoke to Elyse Lanier about her River Oaks home:
As Houston’s ebullient former first lady, Elyse Lanier, told me: “I’m not moving out of 77019. It took me a long time to get here, and I’m not leaving.” Once a friend told Lanier that by removing a fence in the yard behind her peach-colored mansion, she had made the house visible from the River Oaks golf course.
“Everyone can see you,” he pointed out.
“Exactly,” she said.
Laura Sakowitz Sweeney of John Daugherty Realtors is handling the listing, but perhaps Erin Mathews, described by Jason Sheeler in Texas Monthly as Dallas’s “very discreet real estate agent to the very, very rich,” should make a trip down from Big D to the Bayou City to help sell the property.
