Houston’s Custom Home Builders Unveil a New State of the Art Headquarters — Inside Frankel Design’s Dream House Creating Lair

While the national accolades have been numerous over the decades that Frankel Design Build has been delivering custom dream homes to home owners, the new praise being heaped upon the Houston firm’s spanking new best-in-class showroom has brothers and co-presidents Scott and Kevin Frankel particularly pleased.

For introduction of the reimagined showroom, which is tucked inside the Ladco Design Center on Washington Avenue, the Frankel brothers welcomed a savvy contingent of interior designers, builders and architectural designers for an evening of discovery and delight. The journey began in the family-owned company’s headquarters and zigzagged through connecting Ladco spaces with an eventual arrival at the sophisticated showroom.

While sipping on champagne and Aperol spritzes, design enthusiasts perused the curated selections of tile, hardware, plumbing fixtures, millwork and lighting from leading brands such as Ann Sacks and Visual Comfort Co. Among the elements to be discovered were an impressive full-sized vault safe door, a custom quartz hydraulics-lift meeting table that doubles as a standing workspace and a 14-foot sliding glass door system by Mirror Gallery. Then there are the herringbone hardwood floors, a full bar with custom metal fabricated details and Venetian plastered walls.

“Most of this space is Ladco, a to-the-trade showroom, and we look at our space as a to-the-customer showroom,” Scott Frankel tells PaperCity. “And so this is a resource for our clients and interior designers and even outside interior designers to come in and work with our clients.”

Fankel Design Build chairman and founder Jim Frankel joined the brothers in welcoming everyone to the showroom. He founded the company in 1988 as primarily a speculative home building operation, but today Scott Frankel notes that speculative is a mere 20 percent of their business. Now their company is concentrated on custom home design and build.

Through the decades the company has evolved into Houston’s only multidisciplinary custom homebuilder offering architecture, construction, interior design and home care services, the latter through Frankel Home Care. Scott Frankel notes that today the location of its custom homes stretch from River Oaks to The Woodlands and beyond. These include sprawling ranch sites in neighboring counties.

“Clients, after a couple of preliminary meetings, they’ll come in and we’ll have their entire house laid out here,” Scott Frankel says of the process. “That’s kind of how we like to see it. So it’ll start out where the client will show our interiors team: ‘These are the kind of things that we’re into, and this is kind of what we’re looking for.’

“And then our team puts it all together and starts presenting the house as a whole.”