Raised Victorian and craftsman houses with deep porches on a platted grid, and the corner Terms of Endearment used as the Horton family home.
What Houston Heights looks like
Houston Heights sits on a raised, platted grid a few feet above the surrounding streets. Its wood frame houses are mostly one and two storeys, many lifted on a lattice skirted foundation with steps up to the porch. Deep porches run the width of most fronts, some stacked two tiers high. They carry spindlework, square columns or a corner turret. Mature oaks and crepe myrtles shade the sidewalks, and the lots are marked by low hedges or wrought iron fences rather than tall walls.
runs the length of the neighborhood split by a wide grass esplanade planted with oaks, a paved walking path down its centre. Houses along the boulevard sit further back than those on the side streets, several of them raised higher still with wraparound galleries.
Nineteenth Street is the commercial spine, a run of low storefronts under shared awnings. Antique shops sit beside record stores and a boutique or two, with the Heights Theater's vertical marquee reading HEIGHTS over the sidewalk. The street holds enough open sky above its rooflines for a wide shot down either direction.
and carry the smaller houses, closer together than the boulevard's larger lots. One is a green clapboard cottage behind a dark iron fence under old trees. Another has a small roof cupola behind a wrought iron gate and pink flowering shrubs.
Shot in Houston Heights
Terms of Endearment placed the Horton family's Houston home at 1148 Heights Boulevard at the corner of East 12th Street, before Emma and Flap move to Nebraska. Wes Anderson shot Max Fischer's father's barbershop scenes a few blocks south at Doug's Barber Shop on East 11th Street for Rushmore. The shop is still cutting hair under the same name today.
Terms of Endearment, 1983
Terms of Endearment places the Horton family's home at 1148 Heights Boulevard at the corner of East 12th Street, before their move to Nebraska. The production used a garage apartment on the property for their scenes, dressed into a real Houston address rather than built on a lot elsewhere.
Rushmore, 1998
Rushmore renamed the shop Bert's for Max Fischer's father's haircutting business, but the real address is Doug's Barber Shop at 219 East 11th Street. The barber pole and glass storefront on camera are the same ones on the sidewalk now.
Carroll Avenue's Queen Anne houses share the same steep gables, spindlework porches and bay windows as the Heights' own Folk Victorians raised on similarly narrow single family lots. Both grids date from the same few decades, the 1880s into the 1900s. Carroll Avenue climbs a hill with the city rising behind it, so a Houston stand in works best in tight porch level shots that keep the horizon out. Try searching Queen Anne porch houses now.
Gold Coast in Alameda, California
Alameda's Gold Coast mixes Queen Anne Victorians with Craftsman bungalows on a flat tree lined grid much like the Heights, built out across nearly the same decades. Deep porches and clapboard siding repeat block after block in both. Alameda's bay fog and eucalyptus read differently on camera, so a Gulf Coast production would need to watch the light and keep palms and pines out of frame. Try searching Craftsman bungalow porches now.
Cabbagetown's mill cottages are wood frame with the same gabled roofs and front porches as the Heights' smaller houses, built for a similar working population in roughly the same years. The lots are tighter and the houses run shotgun plan rather than bungalow, so it is a plainer cousin rather than a twin. Keep the frame to porch and gable level, since Cabbagetown's narrow footprints and close set houses would show in any wide shot next to the Heights' bigger yards. Try searching wood frame mill cottages now.
