Cowboys fans have many ways to express their enthusiasm for the team and its history. They can buy a Personal Seat License and a pair of season tickets, they can customize their truck to an absurd degree (including a fully airbrushed portrait of Tom Landry on the hood), they can try to track down items that were auctioned off following the implosion of Texas Stadium… Or, if they’re really determined to demonstrate their devotion to the Landry-era glory days, they can just go ahead and buy the coach’s old house.
Landry’s place is an impressive, if understated, piece of Dallas luxury. The Preston Hollow home was custom built in 1962 by the coach, and the couple that Landry sold it to is the current owner, which means that the degree of separation between the Cowboys icon and prospective buyers is minimal. (There might even be a fedora tucked in a box in the attic somewhere that nobody ever checked, who knows?)
Granted, Landry’s house is modest by the terms of latter-day NFL heroes. Landry’s final salary was a mere $1 million a year, which is nothing compared to what, say, Deion Sanders earned during his tenure with the Cowboys. Which is probably why the Landry home is a tasteful, well-appointed home in a nice part of Dallas, and not a palace an hour north of the city with a bowling alley, a movie theater, a beach volleyball court, multiple swimming pools, and a custom-made circular bed in the middle of the bedroom.
Rather than the Primetime-like amenities, Landry’s place—a 4,000 square foot, four bed/three bath ranch-style house—boasts features like “custom cabinetry” and “granite countertops,” which are nice, but which also reflect the fact that Landry’s place costs a mere $795,000, which is a fifth of what Deion’s house ended up fetching at auction. You’d have to be wealthy to afford Landry’s house, obviously, but you wouldn’t have to be the same degree of stupid-rich that it apparently took to buy Deion’s house.
Indeed, it’s three million dollars less than what current Cowboys coach Jason Garrett listed his house at when he put it up for sale in 2011, and that one doesn’t even carry the legacy of 20 winning seasons along with it (yet, Cowboys fans said with hope in their hearts).
Of course, it’s possible that the prospective buyers will make their real estate decisions based on something other than the NFL pedigree of the home’s previous owners, if they’re boring nerds. But for the moment, we’ll assume that anybody looking at Landry’s place in Preston Hollow is doing so out of a desire to own one of the more unique pieces of Cowboys memorabilia on the market. Might we recommend painting it silver and blue?
(images via NTREIS / Dave Perry Miller Real Estate)
