Hamptons of Houston, The

Southern Living, Mar 1998 by Ford, Gary D

There it is ahead, the bridge over the Brazos River, and beyond the land rises, ever so gently, like the spirits of all these Houston people in cars around me. We're an hour out of the city on U.S. 290, headed west for the weekend into those hills.

Now we cross the river, wide and brown beneath us, and I can almost hear the collective sighs around me as we climb the mounds, full of sun and colored with wildflowers. Up, up, and finally we're here in this place of rest hovering above the worries of the workweek.

Already, I imagine, John Ames and Carol Salley are sipping iced tea on the front porch of their 1846 farmhouse, their weekend retreat near Chappell Hill. "My office closes at 3 p.m. on Friday and the Suburban is running," Carol, an interior designer who co-owns a Houston architectural firm, tells me. "We like to be on our porch at 5:30 p.m. watching the sunset. That's our therapy."

The sun sets tonight on scores of Houston folks who escape here for weekends into what many simply call the "Brenham area," or the "Round Top area." That's their definition for this spot lifted 200 to 600 feet above sea level. "The Hamptons of Houston" I call this place in wryer moments.

But since this area stands on the shoulders of the river, perhaps "Brazos Hills" is a better name. It feels Texan and Southern and German here to me. Houstonians have imported a few citified ways, but the Brazos Hills remain quiet and rural, quaint as a country store and as oldfashioned as sweet peas.

Along Farm Road 1457 between Round Top and Industry, the land stretches and yawns, rolls and turns, rises and falls back again like someone reveling in the leisure of a Saturday morning in bed.

It reminds me of the toss of the Piedmont back in the Atlantic Coast states. Some of the settlers left those hills behind in the 1820s when they joined Stephen E Austin's first Anglo colony in Texas, which he planted in what is now these hills. Surely they loved the wildflowers in their new home. Today flowers in roadside fields look like colored confetti from the passing parade of spring.

City people spend much of the day slowing to the pace of old pickups to admire the flowers. They meander Farm Road 390, part of La Bahia Trail, an old Spanish trace. It rides high ridges through loping pastures, with small bowls of stock ponds scattered like coins across the countryside, shiny as dimes in the overhead sun.

At Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historical Park, visitors peek into the reconstructed building where the delegates signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. Then they drive Farm Road 1155 down to Chappell Hill, an antebellum town, and walk its Main Street of antiques shops.

They mosey along State 159, listening to the consonant murmur of German and Czech names on mailboxes and angle around the town square of Round Top, population 81.

"Einwanderers. The immigrants," Jim Arnold, managing director of the Texas Pioneer Arts Foundation in Round Top, says. He speaks an appropriate language to describe the weekenders in the Brazos Hills where German settlers arrived in the mid-1800s.

Einwanderers have restored some of the log-and-frame heritage of Texas left by German, Anglo, and African builders. And they change the areas in other ways, says Jim, who is concerned about Houston loving this place to death. "It's like smoke in the bottle," he says. "I'm afraid we'll capture it, and if we do, we'll change it irrevocably and it won't be the same."

Houston has softened the edges of this country life. New residents as well as natives have opened fine inns, garden shops, and antiques stores. The Winedale Historical Center near Round Top stages seminars and Shakespeare. Professional directors and actors star at Unity Theatre in downtown Brenham.

Houston has also imported its food. Some of the best is at Royers' Round Top Cafe, where city and country tastes blend. Diners select entrees such as snapper that's stuffed with shrimp and crabmeat, and homemade pies a grandmother would envy, served with a scoop of ice cream from Brenham-based Blue Bell Creameries.

In Burton, Andre Delacroix, a chef at the Four Seasons in Houston, and his wife, Sandy, run The Brazos Belle Restaurant in an old general store. On Friday afternoons, many wait outside to buy Andre's fabulous French bread, warm from the oven.

Some weekenders come only for classical music at The International Festival-Institute at Round Top. It's a special place with a magnificent performance hall, Victorian houses, an herb garden, and stoneworks built by a local mason. Some of the world's best musicians perform here in a complex that could keep itself cloistered in classical solitude from its rural neighbors.

But it isn't like that. Local school groups perform in the concert hall. Area kids swim in the institute's pool, and track teams run cross country meets on the grounds. Local 4-H and FFA students bale hay and auction it off for their projects.

One feels safe and sheltered in these hills, a place where Betsy Arriola of New Ulm, Texas, who grows a magnificent garden, can sell her flowers even when no one's at home.