Village Flowery and Wagner Hardware (Houston, Texas)

I couldn't get a good shot of Wagner Hardware. (2013 Street View). I titled this post the way as it was these two businesses on the 6100 block of Kirby that imprinted on me and those two businesses kept those names between 1989 and 2010. The first one, the current River Oaks Plant House which I best remember as Village Flowery (after all, it had that name for about 25 years) goes back to the mid-1960s when Tom Payne Typewriter Co. moved to 6125 Kirby from 6103 Kirby as by 1966 a new restaurant out of California that had begun fast expanding in California and the Southwest was built...Jack in the Box. Sometime around the mid-1980s the restaurant closed (relocating to 5114 Kirby Drive) and by 1989, Village Flowery was operating out of the space. It had common ownership with River Oaks Plant House, a garden center operating at 3401 Westheimer Road. For over the next twenty years the two garden centers operated in their respective parts of town. However, in late 2013, River Oaks Plant House got kicked out of its old location at 3401 Westheimer Road, and as a result, they simply rebranded Village Flowery to River Oaks Plant House (despite not being near River Oaks anymore).

The other building was Wagner Hardware. When it began construction of a building fronting Kirby in May 1948, it already had been a known name moving from the Rice Village area, and after completing the building, continued to operate for the next 60 years. That all started to change in 2009, when it introduced a store-within-a-store for eco-friendly products called "New Living". Not too long after, the store changed hands and the store was remerchandised and rebranded to the "New Living" concept.Most of the hardware lines were dropped for furniture and mattresses in addition to paint, and in 2014, New Living dismantled the old Wagner Hardware sign above the store. Between 2015 and 2017, New Living refocused from "sustainable design and furniture" to simply "organic mattresses". I'm not sure how the transition between New Living and Houston Natural Mattress (the similar replacement tenant) occurred, but it happened between October 2019 and March 2020. They seem to have different phone numbers. (This post is adopted from something on Carbon-izer.com, but removed in a later update. Street View here).