Famed Criminal Defense Attorney Puts His Beyond Chic Houston Townhouse Up for Sale

These are walls that we would really, really like to hear talk. Famed criminal attorney Kent Schaffer is putting his veddy chic London-style townhouse on the market. And what the walls won’t tell you, Schaffer’s record will.

In brief, he has represented author Clifford Irving and Oscar Wyatt and was one of a trio of lawyers recently tapped to prosecute Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. But those are stories for another day. For the moment, we are talking about his townhouse, a grand residence on Sunset Boulevard befitting one of the city’s leading white collar criminal attorneys.

The nuts and bolts: Three bedrooms, three full baths, one half bath, two fireplaces, four stories, an elevator, three-car garage, 4,658 square feet, asking price $1.8 million, listed with Cathy Cagle of John Daugherty, Realtors. But there is so much more to this story.

Do not call it a bachelor pad. “People ask me that all the time,” says Schaffer, who though not married has a resident girlfriend, a 4-year-old son and two Labradoodles. He is moving to River Oaks to have more space, a pool and a yard.

While his new home will somewhat reflect Schaffer’s unorthodox yet applaudable taste, the Cheyne Walk townhouse, which was built in 2006, remains unique.

“I wanted a place that reminded me of a European hotel,” he tells PaperCity. “So I started with the bedroom. It’s like a little hotel in Paris and hotels I’ve been to in London and Rome and they’re very cozy. When you’re there you just want to curl up in bed and it’s dark and romantic. It transports you instead of just being a place to sleep at night.”

Schaffer’s third floor master bedroom, overlooking the front courtyard, is a plush jewel box entirely paneled in black with burnished gold ceiling, built-in bookcases, a fireplace and opening to the master bath that leads to the master closet. The entire third floor functions as a master suite with a paneled, precisely organized closet (the fourth bedroom transformed into a vast closet) that would give M. Penner cause for redecorating.

Schaffer is quite the dandy and this closet reflects such. Consider the floor-to-ceiling display of silk ties, 260 in all. No spinning through tie racks and no more buying the same tie more than once, Schaffer explains. With a penchant for fancy timepieces, he installed a winding cabinet in his closet. Every minute one of the self-winding watches takes a brief twirl.

The townhouse, decorated by Brian Beatty, is completely monochromatic — white sheetrock and black paneling. While a new owner could change it all, there was method to Schaffer’s decorative madness.

“If I had a place where all the sheetrock is white and all the wood is black, it creates a frame and you paint a picture within the frame,” he says. “It allows you to create different feelings in different rooms without a lot of confusion of color. It’s a very monochromatic home with color provided by rugs, paintings and upholstery.”

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