Francois de Menil, whose mother personified art and high culture here for decades, has picked a rustic north Houston neighborhood where horses and chickens are common and Starbucks has yet to plant a stake for his first foray into real estate development.

Less than half an hour from the Montrose museum that bears his family's name, he hopes to remake a sliver of the semirural, traditionally African-American Acres Homes neighborhood into an enclave of 14 sleekly designed homes with sunlit studios that will be marketed to local artists who seek a community of like-minded neighbors.

"I think what is nice about it is the trees, the vegetation, particularly those tall pine trees that exist in Texas," de Menil said on the phone last week from his office in New York. "The idea is to keep as many trees as possible and keep that rural wooded feel that you get when you drive around there."

But with new for-sale signs on recently cleared lots in the area, and other developments in the works, Acres Homes increasingly looks like a community caught between its rural past and urban future. De Menil's project - to be called NoLo Studios, for "North of the Loop" - will occupy about 3 acres on Mansfield Road, at Midgeley, where on a recent steamy morning the only sounds were occasional whooshing car, a horse's whinny and the continuous chirping of cicadas.

NoLo Studios drawings by Houston Chronicle on Scribd

In Houston, "it's probably one of the first kinds of communities like this," said Star Massing, a real estate agent working with de Menil on the project and selling the homes, which will be priced from the low $300,000s to $450,000.

De Menil, a New York architect who designed Houston's Byzantine Fresco Chapel, is building on a movement that's already taken hold in the area.

Prefers space to density

Acres Homes for years has attracted local painters and sculptors who have been lured by the relative seclusion and open space.

Yet as construction creeps north from already-gentrified neighborhoods like Garden Oaks and Oak Forest, residents nervously anticipate change.

"I hope that our little area doesn't change too much," said Carter Earnst, a sculptor who lives nearby with her artist husband Paul Kittleson.

The couple established their own compound of artist residences and studios along Martin Street between Yale and North Shepherd. It became known as Itchy Acres for all the poison ivy that had to be cleared out when they first found the property in 1989.

The land for NoLo Studios is being prepared for development.

The intention is to sell the homes to "established career artists" who embrace diversity and prefer space to density, Massing said on a recent tour of the property where a breeze beneath a canopy of skyscraping pine trees belied the near-triple-digit temperature.

The homes will be staggered, rather than built in a row, allowing for many of the trees to remain and the views from the homes and studios to be green.

The streets that will make up the community will be named "Gris" and "Blanc" - gray and white in French and the same colors of the Menil Collection founded by Dominque de Menil and the cottages around it. The developer intended to call the third street "Untitled," but the city wouldn't allow it.

The homes will have 20-foot ceilings, wide plank siding and metal roofs. All but one will be two stories.

The de Menil property is typical of the greater Acres Homes area.

On one side of it is a large brick home behind a tall fence. A house on the other side is more modest, its age showing by the paint peeling from its old wood boards. The owner keeps a dove inside a decorative cage in the front yard.

Land here originally was sold by the acre and many of the first residents had animals and small farms. Some still do.

"I see horses every other day because there's a horse stable literally next door," said Trenton Doyle Hancock, a painter who bought a warehouse there and turned it into an art studio about 10 years ago. "People ride their horses up and down the block."

"Help lift the community"

Many of the residents grew up in the neighborhood and returned as adults to raise their own families there.

Tim White, president of Acres Homes Super Neighborhood, a citizens advisory council, said longtime residents have expressed concern about the direction of the neighborhood.

He said they don't want to see developers come in and change the character and historical value of Acres Homes.

"A lot of people are scared the taxes and property values are going to go up that they can't even afford to stay in the area they were actually raised in," White said.

They wonder if development will happen without concern for those who live there.

"Will they bring in parks? Green space? Things everyone can benefit from? What's going to come along with it to help lift the community?" White said.

The average price of a home in the greater northwest Houston area between Loop 610 and Beltway 8, which includes Acres Homes, was $140,000 in June, up 46 percent from the same month in 2012, data from the Texas A&M Real Estate Center shows.

So far, residents haven't noticed much change in the way of new development, but there are signs it is coming.

More than a year ago, a local builder purchased 2 acres also on Mansfield for a community of new homes to be sold for close to $400,000 each.

The builder called the project a "pocket neighborhood" and she described it as a community where people own their own homes but share a common space. She moved a historic house from the Heights onto the land to serve as that space, but construction hasn't started yet on any of the new houses.

Over the past two years, Hancock, the painter, said he's seen more lots cleared, "but nothing like Starbucks."

"It's not like it's just gentrification overnight," he said. "I think that may be on the docket in 10 years."

"Different sense of space"

Massing said interest in NoLo Studios has been strong among artists who appreciate the area for its open space and diversity.

"They don't want it to become overrun with developers," she said.

Unlike more urban communities, the homes won't be surrounded by typical green lawns, cement streets and driveways.

"Even though it's a development of 14 houses, it should have kind of a rural feel to it," de Menil said.

Hancock moved his studio to Acres Homes because he wanted to be away from businesses and many homes close together.

He said he's thinking of buying the lots next to his, but he expects the prices will be higher.

Another reason he likes Acres Homes is because it reminds him of where he grew up: Paris, Texas.

"My parents moved to a part of town where they had 2 acres of land between us and our nearest neighbors. And on that land there were horses and cows," he said. "There's a different sense of space."