The dining room of Straits, the swank new Malaysian restaurant at City Centre, looks chaste and serene in its Web site photos. New westside restaurant doesn’t face onto a parking lot. Alabama, continue on to Thompson and Hansen, The Gray Door, Chateau Domingue, Indulge on Saint Street, and 2620 on Joanel. Stop at Jane Moore’s, then at Ferndale, go to Brown, Bill Gardner, Made in France, and Objects Lost and Found. If you haven’t passed out from exhaustion yet, turn around and head back to Brian Stringer’s and go the other way on W. Alabama to Antiques and Interiors on Dunlavy, Boxwood and The Country Gentleman, then hit up Foxglove and Alcon Lighting. Further up the street is Tara Shaw and Heather Bowen Antiques. But lucky us, they’ll stick around Houston long enough to sell the majority of their stock of European antiques, reproductions, and fabrics at 40 percent off, Joni Webb reports: “The French house is so charming – you really feel like you’re in the South of France, except for Houston’s traffic out the front window!” When you’re done shopping there, Webb commands:īe sure to also stop in at Ginger Barber’s Sitting Room which is next door. Stringer and his wife will retire to their turreted 14th century chateau - a former fortified hospital built by monks for victims of a mysterious skin disease - in the French countryside between Bordeaux and Gers.

Open Only for One Last Big Sale: Brian Stringer Antiques, strung along West Alabama just east of Shepherd in a few separate buildings for the last 40 or so years.

24 following liquidation sales, according to store employees.” Other local Triple Bs didn’t get the grand-opening treatment before going dark: “The Galleria and Willowbrook Mall locations are in liquidation, while The Woodlands Mall store and the new Cit圜entre location are expected to go dark on Dec. The new owners of the former Zales mall mainstay declared bankruptcy in August, but went ahead with the store’s planned move from its old location across the street at Town & Country Village anyway. prototype Bailey Banks & Biddle store in Cit圜entre.

Closed, Just a Month After Opening: The new 7,000-sq.-ft.

Second-generation owner Stephanie Foster reports the property has been sold to new owners who “plan to build something new on the site, perhaps a service station or shopping center.” Fans of the Outpost Tavern’s many good ol’ days will drown their sorrows on-site in a 3-day-long goodbye-party bash, January 8-10.

Memorialized in the appropriately named Clint Eastwood “one last time for the has-been astronauts” flick Space Cowboys, the bar and burger joint had to be partially rebuilt in early 2005 after a short in a neon sign caused a small fire. 1 from the Johnson Space Center at 18113 Kings Lynn St.

Closing in January: NASA hangout the Outpost Tavern, an army barracks building turned spacesuit-and- bikini-festooned party site, down NASA Rd.

Restaurant town and country