Within the sprawling urban landscape of Houston, America's fourth largest city, are "secret" Houstons that tell other stories about this Texan city and how it evolved. Architect John F. Staub's Houston is one of these cities-within-a-city. The dignity, civility and amplitude of Staub's country houses, set in lush, southern, woodland gardens, represent his and his clients' vision of Houston as a garden city.

The Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America (ICACA) will sponsor a weekend study tour of John Staub's Houston, his country houses and the neighborhoods where they were built. Staub (1892-1981), from the mid-1920s through the 1950s, designed 56 houses in Houston, in addition to non-residential buildings. Staub was an eclectic architect, who displayed a rigor and an imagination in adapting historical models to the exigencies of a subtropical climate and the flat landscape of the Gulf coastal plain. These factors make his houses all the more exceptional.

Stephen Fox, architectural historian, and Susan B. Keeton, Houston landscape historian, are organizing and leading the tour. Stephen Fox was assistant to the Houston architect, Howard Barnstone, author of The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South (1979). Fox is now at work on a new book on Staub. Keeton chairs the board of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership.

TOUR HIGHLIGHTS

Visits to several privately owned Staub houses in the Broadacres Historic District, an enclave planned in 1923 by architect William Ward Watkin for the lawyer James A. Baker, Jr., father of the former Secretary of State.

An excursion into the Broadacres-Main Boulevard-Hermann Park-Rice University precinct - Houston's humorously described Cradle of Culture - where the vision of Houston as a southern garden city was given its fullest exposition.

A tour of Staub houses in Houston's most famous neighborhood, River Oaks, with which the architect was identified from the time of its founding in 1924. Here we see, in terms of size and stylistic models, the range that characterized Staub's career.

Staub's most famous house, Bayou Bend, will be a private tour. It was built in River Oaks in 1928, and given by his client, Ima Hogg, to the Museum of Fine Arts, along with her highly regarded collection of American decorative arts. A tour of the gardens of Bayou Bend will reveal the spatial themes of the house into the bayou woodland setting.

Exclusive entrée into Rienzi (1954), the former country house and gardens of Harris Masterson, III, in which Staub sought to synthesize the Palladian and the contemporary to support his client's aspirations to cultural leadership.

An in-depth visit to the pine-forested Memorial neighborhood, where Staub produced weekend retreats and ex-urban houses.

The extended weekend will include a dinner and lecture at a Houston club.

A special reception will be held at a house designed by the contemporary classical architectural firm of Curtis and Windham.

Participants will stay three nights at the Lancaster, a charming boutique hotel.