Myer-Hall House
Houston, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Noted architectural firm Sanguinet and Staats designed this 1910 house for prominent Houston attorney and civic leader, Sterling Myer, and his wife Alice (Bentley). In the 1920s, engineer and businessman James Donald Hall and his wife, Virginia (Dorrance), purchased the home; they lived here forty years. The two-and-one-half story Tudor Revival structure features two steeply pitched, forward-facing gables and two wings: a sunroom to the east and a porte-cochere to the west. The home is detailed with brick, plaster, and half timbering, and includes a full width porch supported by square columns. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark – 2011
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Myer-Hall House rose in 1910 from the drafting tables of Sanguinet and Staats, a firm that helped define the streetscapes of early-twentieth-century Texas. Built for attorney and civic leader Sterling Myer, the half-timbered Tudor Revival house later became the decades-long home of engineer and businessman James Donald Hall and his family. Its gables, sunroom, and porte-cochere capture the aspirations of Houston's growing professional elite.
Why it matters
It preserves a fine example of the revival-style architecture that accompanied Houston's rapid rise, and the work of one of Texas's most prolific early architectural firms.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Myer-Hall House dates to 1910, a moment when Houston was surging on the strength of Texas oil and the commerce it fed. The Progressive and modern era was reshaping the young city fast, and a new class of attorneys, businessmen, and engineers was looking for homes that matched their rising fortunes and their ambitions for the place they lived.
That ambition showed itself in architecture. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, well-to-do Americans embraced revival styles that borrowed the romance of the English and European past, and the Tudor Revival — with its gables, half-timbering, and air of settled old-world solidity — was among the most beloved. A house in that style told visitors that its owners had both means and taste.
This was also an age of invention and enterprise, when engineers and businessmen were as much the builders of the modern city as any politician. The home's long life would carry it from the era of one prominent owner into the hands of exactly such a man of industry.
People & events
The house was designed in 1910 by the noted firm of Sanguinet and Staats for Sterling Myer, a prominent Houston attorney and civic leader, and his wife, Alice Bentley Myer. From the start it was a substantial statement of a two-and-a-half-story home, built to be lived in and noticed.
In the 1920s it passed to a new family whose name it now shares. James Donald Hall, an engineer and businessman, and his wife, Virginia Dorrance Hall, bought the house and made it their own for four decades — a remarkably long tenure that folded the home into the life of a single family across the middle of the twentieth century.
The architecture rewards a close look at what those owners valued. The design sets two steeply pitched, forward-facing gables against the street and reaches out with two wings — a sunroom on the east and a porte-cochere on the west, where a carriage or automobile could pull up under cover. Brick, plaster, and half-timbering give the walls their texture, and a full-width porch on square columns anchors the whole. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2011.
Its place in the American story
The Myer-Hall House connects a single Houston lot to the broad American story of how boomtowns matured. All across the early-twentieth-century United States, the wealth of new industries was converted into fashionable neighborhoods, and revival architecture was the shared visual language of that arrival. This house speaks that language fluently.
It also preserves the work of Sanguinet and Staats, one of the most prolific and important architectural firms in early Texas. Firms like this one designed the office towers, banks, and grand houses that gave rising Texas cities their first skylines and their first fine streets — so a surviving residence from their drafting tables is a tangible piece of the state's architectural coming-of-age.
And in its two families — an attorney and civic leader followed by an engineer and businessman — the house quietly traces the kinds of people who actually built the modern American city: not only the famous, but the professionals and industrial men whose enterprise and civic energy turned a promising town into a lasting metropolis.
If you visit
Take your time with the silhouette. The two steeply pitched gables facing the street are the house's signature, so find the angle where they read most clearly, then let your eye travel out to the wings — the sunroom reaching east toward the light, the porte-cochere to the west that once sheltered arriving guests.
Look closely at how the walls are made. Tudor Revival is a style of texture, and here you can see it in the interplay of brick, plaster, and half-timbering, capped by a broad, welcoming porch on square columns. These are the details that separate a thoughtful revival house from a plain one, and they reward a patient gaze.
This is a natural stop on a tour of Houston's historic residential architecture, especially if paired with other early-twentieth-century homes nearby — together they show how the city's professional and industrial families chose to live. It remains a private landmark, so enjoy it from the street, and let its long life as one family's home for forty years remind you that these houses were not museums but places where ordinary decades of living unfolded.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Sterling Myer
- · James Donald Hall
Themes & tags
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