Bionic Alpine House With 50 foot Master Closet Brings Colorado Clean Beams to North Dallas

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11627 Forest Creek Place ext

An “O” House is a home so fabulous you have to drop whatever you are doing (yeah, even that) or holding, including your nail file, to look!

I am sort of on a roll here with doctor’s houses. “O”h my; another physician’s dream castle. The compulsion to building perfection here is almost Freudian.

Well of course it is, this is an “O” home. The Bionic Alpine “O” home.

11627 Forest Creek Place is located in a leafy, cul-de-sac laden neighborhood of circa 1970 homes south of Forest Lane, in-between Preston and Hillcrest. There is a bounty of building going on across the street from this area, and Sharif-Munir has all but sold out Iris Hollow. Centurion American is developing more lots to the west of Iris Hollow. The prices are around $700K for a quarter of an acre of raw land. Come 2020, there will not be a blade of grass in this area to build on: everything will have to be re-developed.

Talk about wildlife: Lee Kleinman and his Wildebeast are your city council reps. And the coyotes roam nightly.

Forest Creek Place foyer

Forest Creek Place greatroom1

11627 Forest Creek replaced an older ’70s spread on a cul de sac where kids can play on their bikes relatively safely. The lots in this area are not huge: about a third of an acre. But they are plenty big to get in a pool and some side yard. Besides, kids never really “play” in those big yards. More often, they are mobile and on bikes or scooters.

Built in 2003, 11627 may be the strongest built home in Dallas. It is a fortress that took two years to build. Perhaps it is the commercial grade standards, steel and soaring structural beams, a quarry or two of West Texas limestone everywhere, and a double kitchen. By that I don’t mean two sinks, two dishwashers, I mean double everything as in fridges, two 36-inch Vikings, ovens and microwaves. Mitered cabinet doors. Think two kitchens built in the same house (and space) for two separate, incredible cooks who happen to live together but do not like being cramped in the kitchen.

“You’ve got the sink, I’ve got the stove, that doesn’t work for us,” explains the home owner, Dr. Connally,  on the couple’s cooking style, who says the kitchen in their old house was so crowded ‘I couldn’t come into the kitchen at all when my wife was cooking’. They fixed all that when they built their dream home. That’s why this kitchen is basically two separate kitchens in one huge space.

I mean, you could almost film a Top Chefs series in here.

Forest Creek Place Great room 2

Forest Creek Place gr 2

Forest Creek Place breakfast

Forest Creek Place kitchen 1

Forest Creek Place kitchen 2

Forest Creek Place kitchen 3

Forest Creek Place kitchen 4

As for the 7662 square foot house, every inch is clean-lined. No carpet, no wall sconces, simplicity, says the owner, who says every inch was designed by experts.

“We had a structural engineer on the site 100% of time, the entire time the house was built.

We spent more money on the design of the home, he says, than you could buy a new house for.

There are 99 piers that are embedded 12 feet into the blue shale. The house is composed of steel and wood beams, much like a church. In fact, the structural engineer designed and cut all the floor beams in Canada. Even the basement does not bear any weight of the home. Exterior walls are 1 foot thick concrete — the only other house I know built like this is Scott Ginsburg’s on Beverly Drive.

There are eight air conditioning units suspended from the floor joists in a sub basement and vented to the exterior through large vents. The owner did not want to see mechanical equipment in the yard: no A/C acne.

In case those eight don’t work, there is also a 70 kw generator.

“We used to live in Colorado,” says the owner, ” and we wanted our home to look like an Alpine house. We have also spent a lot of time in German resort towns — all of which influenced this home.”

Walk across the floor in this home, nothing moves.

“There is no other house in Dallas built like this house,” he says.

There are five bedrooms, five full baths, two powders and a basement. The house is equipped with an AMX Smart Home (Mensa level smarts), motorized window shades everywhere, Lutron Lighting, the works.

The basement  has a full walk-in commercial cooler where thousands of bottles of wine are stored currently. There are monitoring systems for every fixture and then multiple back up monitoring systems. And yes, there is a control room where everything is labelled. In fact, the owner has an electrician on call to come install light bulbs.

Physicians like systems. So they tend to go overboard a bit on back ups to the back-up system. That’s why I say, try to buy a house from a physician.

You enter into a massive foyer, all glass doors and windows, wood, glass, metal and stone. There is a tall wrought iron balcony at the top of the stairs.

Forest Creek Place study

Forest Creek Place study 2

Forest Creek Place powder

Everything is open, rooms delineated by built-ins, stone wrapped columns, or texture. There is the 23 by 26 foot Great Room, the huge kitchen(s), breakfast room and dining room wth fireplace. To the left of the foyer is the large study: bury yourself in here with some books (hundreds of bookshelves) because there is plenty of light to read from tall clerestory windows. The room is so Crested Butte I swear you will soon actually feel snow flakes.

Forest Creek Place master 1

Forest Creek Place master 2

Forest Creek Place master closet 1

Forest Creek Placemaster closet 2

Forest Creek Place master bath

Forest Creek Place master tub

The master is on the first floor, a soaring  16 by 34 foot long giant room with more bookcases, a fireplace, space for one sitting area or three. Off the master is a large, lovely spa bath with separate tub and shower, loads of space around the tub, and that girnormous closet.

Yes, it is really 50 feet long.

Forest Creek Place porch 1

Forest Creek Place porch 2

There is a screened in porch off the kitchen/laundry area — the huge laundry room, by the way, is to freaking die for. Perfect for dinners, or just chilling while overlooking the pool. The porch has a fireplace and full kitchen complete with deep sink, sprays, grill, venta-hood, warming drawers and fridge. Right off here is the pool, of course, a saltwater number that is Herculean.

“We dug up an old oval in-ground pool,” says the owner, “then we added nine piers. The pool is solid concrete lined with gunnite with 12 inch thick walls and the deck is actually part of the swimming pool.”

Which means, hell can freeze over, and there will be no cracks.

Upstairs are four bedrooms, all ensuite, more storage and stone. The rooms are beautifully simple: wood, glass, granite, overlooking the well treed lot.

The home is listed with Daylon Pereira of Allie Beth Allman & Associates for $3,495,000.

Forest Creek Place upstairs bedroom

Forest Creek Place stairs down

Forest Creek Place wine cellar 1

Forest Creek Place wine cellar 2

Forest Creek Place pool

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Candy Evans, founder and publisher of CandysDirt.com, is one of the nation’s leading real estate reporters.

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