A striking Memorial Park-area home, designed for a legendary Texas race car driver by a renowned modern architect is on the market for the first time in decades.
The more-than 7,000-square-foot property at 9314 Sandringham Dr., listed for $6.35 million by Charlie Bingham at Nan and Company Properties, was built in 1971 for driver AJ Foyt, a Houston native who was also the first person to win the Indianapolis 500 four times and is still the only person to win that race, the Daytona 500, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the 24 Hours of Daytona. Foyt, now the 89-year-old owner of an eponymous racing team, also holds the record for United States Auto Club wins (159) and IndyCar wins (67).
To design the five-bedroom, seven-bathroom home more than 50 years ago, Foyt enlisted the skills of Clovis Heimsath, an architect born in New Haven, Conn.—but to Texas parents—who was trained at both Yale and UT-Austin. Heimsath moved to Houston and opened a joint practice with his wife, an interior designer, in 1962, and went on to make significant contributions to modern architecture in Texas and to his field of scholarship. Heimsath designed, among other buildings, Newman Hall at Texas Southern University.
Heimsath’s first book, Pioneer Texas Buildings, the forward to which was written by Louis Kahn, looked at “how simple roof and porch forms can work together to create rich architectural compositions,” according to Texas Architect magazine. And it’s easy to see how those concepts are realized in the geometry of the house on Sandringham; it’s really a collection of shapes.
The interiors of the house vary quite a bit depending on the room, but many have huge windows and built-in paneled shelving. One of the more distinctive areas is a sunken family room, called “the pit” in the listing, which also has built-in benches and huge windows that provide views of the woods around the roomy lot. It’s adjacent to the impressive living room, which has 26-foot ceilings and a pattern of geometric windows and skylights that demonstrate changing natural light throughout the day.
The house sits on more than two acres, cobbled together from two separate lots, and includes a pool house that predates the primary residence. It was built in the 50s and seemingly maintains a number of the original fixtures and design choices.
Foyt isn’t the only notable Houston native for which Heimsath designed a home. The architect, who died in 2021, was also behind an equally geometric house built for sculptor Robert Fowler.