Houston’s Bayou Bend: The Origin Story of Texan High Culture

The visionary Ima Hogg bought the best old American furniture, silver, ceramics, and textiles to inspire good taste in design.

O ver the years, I’ve written half a dozen or so stories about the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, but I’d never been to Bayou Bend, the historic house in Houston where the museum displays its stellar antebellum American furniture, silver, textiles, glass, prints, and portraits. Bayou Bend is a place — it was once the grand home of Houston philanthropist Ima Hogg — but it’s also shorthand for a distinguished collection, a lovely formal garden, and a philosophy of art display called the period room. It’s the origin story for high culture in Houston as well.

I’m high on the MFA in part because I’ve seen so many good exhibitions there but, mostly, because I’ve seen the place develop over 40 years as a greenhouse for high culture in the South.

So what’s Bayou Bend? It’s a house museum that started as the Hogg family home. Ima (1882–1975) was the daughter of Jim Hogg, a pioneer oil magnate and Texas governor. In the late 1920s, she and her two brothers, both of whom were in the family business, commissioned the 40-room, pink-stucco house and its cast-iron details in a New Orleans colonial style. It’s among the earliest estate houses in River Oaks, the elegant, planned community that the Hogg brothers developed for Houston’s newly monied elite. Ima developed lovely formal gardens over the years. By the late 1920s, the Hoggs were collecting art, so they wanted a home with rooms that could serve as galleries. Ima lived there until 1965. She’d already given the house and her collection to the MFA. A year later, Bayou Bend — gardens and house — opened to the public.

There are 28 period, or theme, rooms displaying 2,500 objects, mostly in home settings, though, here and there, small galleries display objects like silver and ceramics in cases. Rooms with the best objects in pristine settings examine a unified style in home decorating. Permutations of Jacobean; William and Mary, which is mid-Baroque; Queen Anne, Chippendale; Federal; Empire; and early Victorian get the spotlight. Objects date roughly from the 1630s, when the early English and Dutch settlers started to think about style instead of subsistence, to the 1876 Centennial.

Since I wrote on Thursday about the Getty’s brush with incineration in the Los Angeles fire, I’ll first look at Bayou Bend’s own share of natural disasters. Neither Hurricanes Ike in 2008 nor Harvey in 2017 trashed the 40-room house, but Ike’s winds demolished the gardens, and Harvey’s rain caused the river below the estate to rise 50 feet. Bayou Bend is indeed on a slow-moving creek in Houston’s historic River Oaks neighborhood, and in both storms things got wild and wooly. A suspension bridge for pedestrians connects the parking lot to a cottage used for the shop and the guard station. Water from the flooded bayou rose 50 feet to the bridge’s towers. It was a huge mess, to say the least, but the MFA is hurricane-obsessed. The formal gardens had to be redone, but the house and collection survived intact.

Ima was one of the first serious collectors of early American furniture, anywhere. While grandees in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston had been hungrily buying good English and European furniture since the start of the Gilded Age, American colonial furniture wasn’t as prized — it was seen as primitive, prim, and Puritan. It was quaint, not opulent, of the past, not the future, hand-hewn, not high-tech perfect. It took a Texan to find quality in it. Ima didn’t hanker for the past. Rather, she was forward-looking. She saw a bright, cosmopolitan future for Houston, to be realized through oil and industry but also through high culture, without which Houston wouldn’t draw and keep an educated, enlightened public. Good American taste, she believed, started with antique Eastern Seaboard furniture, glass, silver, and textiles from the colonial and Federal periods. Once she started buying in 1920, she couldn’t and didn’t stop.

She was on the cusp. Serious attention to Americana started after our WWI victory kindled a new pride in America’s past, as did the 300th anniversary of the Mayflower landing. Ima was ahead of her time, too, in seeing material culture — the things we use in everyday life — as art worthy of collecting and celebrating, on par with painting. In a country as disparate as ours, and as big as ours, design, she felt, was a unifying force. Each room at Bayou Bend is a total, unified work of art, with fireplace mantels and tiles, moldings, carpets, draperies, ceramics, furniture, silver, and paintings from the same period.

What a smart lady, and a rich one whose copious giving bolstered a sound philosophy based on connoisseurship and education. Many women philanthropists today, including MacKenzie Scott, Laurene Jobs, and Melinda Gates, are blinkered, faddish, and rootless. They pour their millions into false values that debase rather than elevate humanity, causes such as DEI, celebrate-your-abortion, and controlling the weather, of all things. I don’t know whether Ima would have laughed or cried or delivered a tart rebuke sweetened by a Texas drawl.

Ima acquired almost everything in her 50 years of collecting and arranged many of the rooms herself in the 1950s and ’60s. Each room has at least one treasure. A sitting room reflecting Queen Anne style, say the 1730s and 1740s, displays a Boston card table with a needlepoint top, as rare as it gets, and a dazzling Chinoiserie lacquered high chest of drawers, also from Boston.

Queen Anne style, and all colonial Baroque styles, emphasized bulk, which meant solidity and fixity. Americans hardly abhorred flashy decoration. By then, the Puritans had come and gone. The Chinoiserie chest of drawers is packed with gilded doodles and shiny brasses. What Americans liked was substance and weight, which most clearly conveyed wealth. Even American Chippendale, best called Rococo, isn’t as light and airy as English Chippendale. American forms are more attenuated, and palettes are more pastel as opposed to saturated, but objects tend to feel closer to terra firma.

Rarity comes in many forms at Bayou Bend. A double chair-back settee and eight matching side chairs from Boston from the 1760s would, in nearly all cases, have been split up, but Ima found an intact group owned by a Brahmin family. And not every room reflects lifestyles among the very rich. On the one hand, the Maple Bedroom is close to folksy, a look augmented by one of many versions of Peaceable Kingdom, by the Quaker Edward Hicks. On the other hand, a fancy, grand Federal-era dining room is unique for the shimmering, gold-leaf canvas wall covering that Ima commissioned in the 1920s. It’s hand-painted with Texas dogwood branches, peonies, and butterflies. There’s a room devoted to German-Texas furniture, too. After the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, tens of thousands of Germans fled to America. Many moved to new settlements near San Antonio. Craftsmen brought German styles with them.

Bayou Bend is a one-stop university for the study of American decorative arts, which, we see, is far from derivative. Americans have always been superb amalgamators, not surprising since we’re a melting-pot country. English, French, Irish, and German styles blend to create something unique. The study in style alone, using the highest-quality objects, makes for repeat visits.

Bayou Bend is essential visiting for a culture trip to Houston. Its obvious challenge is its separation from the main campus of the MFA. I wouldn’t call it forlorn, but it doesn’t have the buzz of MFA Central right now, in part because it’s static, in part because I went off-season garden-wise, and, in part, because of building and visitor-flow choices that seem awkward. The visitor-service vigilantes who help make the MFA so elegant don’t seem to focus as much on Bayou Bend.

I’d suggest a few things, most small but one or two of big consequence. I’m all for rules, but cheap plastic sandwich signs with “don’t do this” rules on photography in the gardens need to go, replaced by more discreet instructions, printed more handsomely. I found a “no guns allowed inside” sign to be unsettling. Signage on cheap white paper that’s taped to doors won’t do. Bayou Bend is a high-class place. Its shop is small, and that’s fine, but almost all of it was given over to Christmas clearance, so it looked like a going-out-of-business sale. That said, I happily bought a half-price Christmas ornament, a show of how much I like Houston and Bayou Bend.

The visitor center, a nice building constructed in 2010, features an introductory gallery focusing on the Hogg family’s essential, absorbing story and their philanthropy. It has hors d’oeuvres cases, mostly filled with American silver, to excite us about the treasures in the house. It also has a succinct but comprehensive history of American decorative-arts styles. These are important since the historic house has no interpretation, though docent tours are available. The problem is that the visitor center is off a main drag in River Oaks and on the other side of the estate, far from the house itself. Why is the visitor center so far? It and the house need to exist in tandem. Bayou Bend needs a new parking lot, too, and one with quality landscape elements. It’s as ratty as an old drive-in movie lot.

I always have a great time in Houston, and the NRI crowd there is articulate, perceptive, inquisitive, and fun. “I’m not in New England anymore,” I thought, when I saw that the coffee tables in my hotel lobby displayed rows of Cigar Aficionado. What a breath of fresh air, so to speak. What an antidote to lobby magazines with retread covers touting Michelle’s lifestyle challenges as she bravely juggles mansions in Kalorama, the Vineyard, Maui, and Chicago’s Gold Coast, or Hillary’s newest bromide bio, or Jilly from Philly’s Vogue couture, rented, of course. Happy Inauguration Day! May the new broom sweep clean!