Underwood and Clara Nazro House
Houston, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
THIS HOUSE, THE ONLY ONE OF GEORGIAN REVIVAL STYLE IN COURTLANDT PLACE, IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY RESIDENTIAL WORK OF FORT WORTH FIRM SANGUINET AND STAATS. THE RED BRICK VENEERED HOUSE FEATURES A FRONT ENTRY PORTICO WITH FULL ENTABLATURE SUPPORTED BY SLENDER COLUMNS WITH COMPOSITE CAPITALS. UNDERWOOD NAZRO, HIS WIFE CLARA, AND THEIR TWO CHILDREN LIVED HERE FROM 1916-28. NAZRO WAS VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE GULF OIL COMPANY AND ALSO DID BUSINESS IN FINANCE AND COMMUNITY INVESTMENT. BANKER IKE McFARLAND AND HIS WIFE, PRESERVATIONIST MAE WYNN McFARLAND, LIVED HERE FROM 1940-69.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Georgian Revival house — the only one of its style in Houston's Courtlandt Place — was designed by the noted Fort Worth firm Sanguinet and Staats in the early 20th century. Gulf Oil vice-president Underwood Nazro and his family lived here from 1916 to 1928, followed by banker Ike McFarland and his wife, the preservationist Mae Wynn McFarland.
Why it matters
It reflects the oil-boom prosperity that built Houston's elite residential enclaves and later became a cause for the preservationists who saved them.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To understand this house, start with the money that built it. In 1901 a gusher at Spindletop announced that Texas sat atop a fortune in oil, and within a few years the state had become the center of a new American industry. Fortunes were made fast, and the men who made them wanted homes that announced their arrival. The early twentieth century in Houston was, in large part, the story of oil wealth reshaping the city.
One place that wealth expressed itself was in private residential enclaves — quiet, tree-lined streets set slightly apart from the commercial city, where the newly prosperous built substantial homes. Courtlandt Place, developed in the early twentieth century, was exactly this kind of address: a small, elite neighborhood whose houses were meant to last and to impress.
The architecture followed suit. This is a Georgian Revival house — a style that reached back to the dignified, symmetrical brick homes of the American colonial and early republican eras — and it is the only one of its kind on the street. Its red brick veneer, its front portico with a full entablature, and its slender columns capped with composite capitals all speak the confident, backward-glancing vocabulary of a wealthy family building for permanence in a boom town.
People & events
The house takes its character from the people who lived in it, and it had two very different chapters. The first belonged to Underwood Nazro, his wife Clara, and their two children, who made it their home from 1916 to 1928. Nazro was a vice-president of the Gulf Oil Company and also worked in finance and community investment — precisely the kind of figure the Texas oil economy produced, a man whose career braided together petroleum, capital, and civic life.
Gulf Oil itself grew out of the Spindletop boom, so a Gulf executive living in one of Houston's finest enclaves is almost a portrait of the era in miniature: the industry that came up out of the ground turned into corporate offices, into salaries, and finally into brick-and-column houses on private streets.
The second chapter began in 1940, when the banker Ike McFarland and his wife, Mae Wynn McFarland, moved in and stayed nearly three decades. Mae Wynn McFarland was a preservationist, and that detail quietly closes a circle. The same kind of grand early-century houses that oil money had built were, by mid-century, beginning to look old-fashioned and vulnerable — and it was preservation-minded residents like her who helped ensure that neighborhoods like this one survived to be admired today.
Its place in the American story
The design of the house connects it to a wider American story. Georgian Revival was a national style, part of a broad early-twentieth-century enthusiasm for looking back to the colonial and founding eras for architectural inspiration. A red-brick, symmetrical, columned house in Houston was speaking the same visual language as revival homes going up in cities across the country — a shared national taste for dignity, order, and historical association.
The firm behind it, Sanguinet and Staats of Fort Worth, was among the leading Texas architectural practices of the period, the kind of firm whose work helped define how a rising region wanted to present itself. Their residential work in a place like Courtlandt Place shows how professional architecture followed prosperity — where the wealth went, the notable buildings followed.
And the arc from Nazro to McFarland captures something larger than one address. Across America, the elegant enclaves built during early-century booms eventually faced the wrecking ball as tastes and neighborhoods changed. That so many survived owes an enormous debt to preservationists, and this house — built by oil prosperity, later home to a woman devoted to saving such places — holds both halves of that national story under one roof.
If you visit
Before anything else, remember that this is a private home on a private residential street. It is a place to appreciate from the public way, not to enter or intrude upon — enjoy it the way you would any handsome house glimpsed on a walk, with respect for the people who live there now.
From the sidewalk, let your eye do the work. Look for the features that make this house singular on its street: the red brick, the front portico with its full entablature carried on slender columns, and the composite capitals crowning them. Because it is the only Georgian Revival house in the enclave, it rewards comparison — notice how its symmetry and colonial-revival calm set it apart from its neighbors.
A visit here pairs well with a slow, unhurried look at the surrounding enclave as a whole, which was laid out in the early twentieth century as a retreat for prosperous families. Take in the mature trees and the sense of a small, deliberate neighborhood, and let the street stand in for a whole vanished world of Houston's oil-boom gentry. It is a short stop, best folded into a broader wander through the city's older residential districts.
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
- · Underwood Nazro
- · Clara Nazro
- · Mae Wynn McFarland
Themes & tags
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