Carpet in River Oaks, TX

River Oaks was planned, and planned tightly. The Country Club Estates Company was chartered in 1923, the same year River Oaks Country Club opened with a golf course by Donald Ross. Deed restrictions set minimum home prices and dictated architecture; along Kirby Drive, for example, homes were limited to American Colonial or English Tudor. In 1927 Hugh Prather's River Oaks Shopping Center became Houston's first shopping center. On the bayou, Ima Hogg and her brothers built Bayou Bend, designed by John Staub and finished in 1928; she gave the house, gardens and collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1957.

That legacy still shapes the neighborhood. About 1,600 mostly detached single-family homes sit on roughly 1,100 acres between Downtown and Uptown, with values that run from about a million dollars to more than twenty. Houses change hands, and many are rebuilt. The city approved 80 demolition permits for River Oaks homes in 2018 and 2019, one of them a 1939 house on Pelham Drive.

So it is worth being clear about where a company like ours fits here.

What we do in River Oaks. We install new floors. Most of our River Oaks work is part of something larger: a new home going up on a cleared lot, a gut renovation of a house that is staying, or a primary suite, kitchen or bath being redone. In those projects we work alongside the builder, designer or general contractor, on their schedule. Typical scopes include wide-plank engineered hardwood through the main rooms, porcelain or natural stone tile in baths and kitchens, mosaic and wall tile, carpet in bedrooms and on stairs, and the stair treads, nosing, baseboard and quarter round that finish it all.

Why engineered hardwood is the usual wood choice. When a house sits on a concrete slab, Houston's clay soil swells and shrinks with moisture, moving slabs as it does. Gulf Coast humidity adds to it. Engineered hardwood puts a real wood surface over a stable layered core, which handles both much better than solid boards on a slab. It also comes in the wide, long planks that suit large rooms. We test slab moisture, use a vapor barrier where the product requires it, and acclimate the wood in the house before installation.

Tile and stone. Large-format porcelain and natural stone look superb in a well-designed bath or entry, and they are unforgiving of a moving slab. We set them over a crack isolation membrane and spend the time to get the substrate flat, because lippage and hairline cracks are what people notice in a finished room.

Water. Buffalo Bayou forms the neighborhood's northern boundary, and Harvey brought some flooding to River Oaks in 2017. For lower-level rooms, laundry, mudrooms and anywhere water is a real possibility, porcelain tile or a quality waterproof vinyl plank is the practical answer, even in a high-end house.

What we don't do. Many older River Oaks homes have original wood floors. If the goal is to bring those back, you need a specialist in that kind of work. We're an installation company, and we don't resurface existing floors. We would rather tell you that up front than take on a job that is not ours.

How we work. No showroom visit and no sales pitch. We bring samples to the house or the job site, walk the plans with you or your designer, measure and give you a free in-home estimate. Jose runs a family business, and he treats a River Oaks project the way he treats every job: as if his own family's name is on the floor.