Le Grand Salon de la Comtesse has been a place out of time for centuries, a Rococo fantasy room with four walls of quarter-sawn English oak paneling, gilded-frame mirrors and dazzling chandeliers.

Built for French royals in the 1730s, the salon is named for the Franco-Belgian princess La Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe, a worldly socialite and arts patron who is immortalized as the Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." She gussied up the ballrom with gray paint - the fashion of her day - when she installed it in her husband's hunting lodge in 1891; her constant entertaining was a deterrent to his mistresses.

Measuring 45x65 feet, the room seems an unlikely vagabond. Yet it has migrated, off and on, for about 300 years - across France, then across the Atlantic Ocean to a warehouse in Galveston County and finally to its current location as the ballroom at La Colombe d'Or, the boutique luxury hotel and restaurant on Montrose Boulevard owned by Houston businessman Steve Zimmerman.

But now Le Grand Salon is about to waltz out of sight again. Starting Monday, it will be dismantled and stored to make way for a new luxury apartment building.

Zimmerman has wanted to add residences to his property for decades. Market forces have finally made it feasible, although it means sacrificing the ballroom, whose Louis XV opulence seems to have no comfortable role in a city filling with sleek, contemporary highrises.

When Zimmerman bought the salon's components in 1995, they had been crated and stacked for 33 years in a blimp hangar in Hitchcock. As legend has it, the owner, oil tycoon John Mecom Sr., labeled his shipment "bric-a-brac" to avoid paying duties on what amounted to a monumental 18th century antique. Mecom was amassing other entire rooms in the 1960s, too - including a vintage Paris Metro station and Marie Antoinette's bathroom - thus the need for the hangar, the former Hitchock Naval Air Station he bought as war surplus.



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Mecom's son, John Mecom Jr., made Zimmerman a deal he couldn't refuse on the beat-up panels. Zimmerman had the wood grain painstakingly restored and built a stucco structure to house the room adjacent to La Colombe d'Or.

His bankers balked at the $2 million project, arguing that he could have built a ballroom from scratch for half the price. Weddings and lavish parties at Le Grand Salon, however, have been the hotel's bread and butter for 20 years, keeping it afloat as lunch and dinner business has ebbed and flowed with the oil economy.

The Zimmerman family is partnering with the global developer Hines and TH Real Estate to build the Residences a La Colombe d'Or, where the ballroom building currently sits. After the dismantling crew catalogues the salon's parts, which have not been appraised, the stucco shell Zimmerman built to house them will be demolished to make way for the 34-story highrise.

Designed by Munoz & Albin, with interiors by Rottet Studio, the sleek tower of brick, limestone and glass will consume 70 percent of Zimmerman's acre-sized plot, bringing 285 multifamily rental units and about 15 more hotel rooms.

Zimmerman will continue to own and operate La Colombe d'Or, which will get a $10 million makover and a restaurant upgrade. His original building will be joined at the hip to the tower, via an arcade and a central courtyard. Residents and hotel guests in both buildings will share a slew of luxury amenities, including the tower's 10th-level swimming pool and the courtyard's sculptures, fountains and an outdoor fireplace.

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La Colombe d'Or already has a less simpatico neighbor, dwarfed on its north side by the 29-story Hanover Montrose tower, which opened in 2016.

Some preservationists are pleased that Hines has found a way to save the historic original building, one of the last vestiges of Montrose Boulevard's first incarnation as a street of gracious mansions. But inevitably, a higher, denser Montrose is coming; and other historical properties in the area could easily disappear.

More than a half-dozen luxury highrises have risen in the Montrose and Museum District areas within recent years. One of the most chic, Hines' Southmore, towers over a beautiful stucco mansion on Caroline Street whose owners refused to sell.

David Crossley, founder of the research institute Houston Tomorrow, doesn't think progress is entirely bad - even if the Montrose Boulevard were to become a canyon of highrises, like Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. But he is concerned that Harold and Yoakum streets, where the Residences' front doors and valets will be, are not built to handle the increased traffic.

"It's sort of tacky to stick it in a neighborhood rather than fronting Montrose," Crossley said. The tower should be near a transit station, he added. "And what's this much density going to mean at Kroger at 5:30?"

Montrose Boulevard has been an open field for property owners since the 1930s, when the second of Houston's five "great zoning wars" took place, said architectural historian Stephen Fox, who teaches at Rice University.

Pro-zoning advocates have always lost, and today the boulevard is a quintessential, eclectic Houston mix with a bohemian spirit but no cohesive character. With a number of other prime properties also ripe for redevelopment, the area will never be a historic district, Fox said. He calls it "an area with a history and some signature houses left."

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Ben Brewer, executive director of the embattled Montrose Management District, said Montrose offers an opportunity unlike most other Houston neighborhoods "because it really is walkable."

Kevin Batchelor, senior managing director for Hines' southwest region, said "walk scores" - ratings based on the number of desirable things people can potentially access by foot - are everything in the real estate investment world. Montrose Boulevard has one of the highest "walk scores" of any location in the city - 92 points out of 100, he said.

Batchelor said the joint venture's financial backer -an affiliate of Nuveen, the investment arm of an East Coast teachers' retirement fund - also values the diversity of Houston's economy.

The Southmore, across the street from Asia Society Texas Center, is still only 50 percent leased; but Batchelor is bullish on a market recovery by the time the Residences open in 2020.

"We're definitely in the down part of the cycle," he said. "Houston has already corrected."

Zimmerman, 76, has always let his heart rule his business. And Montrose Boulevard is in his heart.

He opened Zim's, the city's first sidewalk cafe and the state's first wine bar, in 1973, just down the street from the Fondren House.

"I'd just come from New Orleans, and it was me wanting to hang out and drink wine and just relax, laid back. I copied a little bit of the Napoleon House and Galatoire's," he said.

That ambiance is exactly what today's affluent highrise residents want.

"Houston was built for automobiles, not people," Zimmerman said. "New Orleans, where I came from, was built for people. Everything I've done - starting with the whole Zim's block and this - has all been people oriented."

He bought the historic property at 3410 Montrose in the early 1980s because he had been head-over-heels in love since the 1960s with the original La Colombe d'Or in Saint-Paul de Vence, France; and he wanted to recreate something similar in Houston.

His hotel building was designed by early Houston architect Alfred C. Finn in 1923 as a home for Humble Oil co-founder Walter W. Fondren and his wife, Ella C. Fondren. She held onto the home her entire life, leasing it during her later years to the Visiting Nurses Association.

Zimmerman acquired it soon after she died in 1982, just shy of her 102nd birthday.

Over the years, just as at the original La Colombe d'Or, he has amassed an art collection of about 300 paintings - mostly acquired as trades with artists and dealers - to fill the hotel's walls. The downstairs parlor hints at the jewels there, with large canvases by some of the giants of Houston's 20th century art scene - Earl Staley, Dorothy Hood and Lucas Johnson.

Zimmerman could have easily sold La Colombe d'Or to another developer who would have scraped it, but he wasn't willing to sell his soul.

"I'd have been a rich Texan, but not Mr. Colombe d'Or," he said. "We would not have sold any of our land for anything less than something like this. I kind of feel like we're taking Charlize Theron to the prom, you know?"

Hines tried to be as sensitive as possible to the property's historical asset, Batchelor said.

"The alternative would be to tear it down and build a bigger, clunkier building. Instead of using every square inch of land, we reduced the footprint and went slightly taller, but left room for parks, which enhances the connectivity."

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The design also puts the new hotel units at the limestone base of the new building.

"Two-story hotel units wrap the entire base of the tower and the courtyard, so it becomes a highly pedestrian-scaled environment around the courtyards," Batchelor said.

Zimmerman would have preferred to move his ballroom to a top floor of the tower, but that didn't fit the program. Its Louis XV style would not jive with the minimal design of the tower's other spaces - a look Batchelor calls clean and contemporary but also "timeless." And residents of the building would not have appreciated having party guests filling their elevators at 2 a.m. on weekends.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, considered taking Le Grand Salon but had no room for such a large period room in its existing spaces, and it's not relevant to the new Kinder Building for Contemporary Art, which is under construction, director Gary Tinterow said.

He hopes it finds a home where everyone can enjoy it.

"It's an impressive, wonderful set of paneling that creates an extraordinary environment unlike anything else in Houston," Tinterow said. "It's evocative of past times in Europe and of John Mecom's love of fine French furniture."

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Mecom was one of the most prolific collectors of French antiques in the U.S. during the 1950s and 60's. He was active near the tail end of a great influx of period rooms driven by industrial barons who built mansions across the U.S. in the late 19th century.

"We think of rooms as being integral to buildings," Tinterow said. But in Europe from the Renaissance on, decorative paneling was often dismantled and reused, and often sent across national borders. The problem for Le Grand Salon is that period rooms are out of fashion now, even in France, where many of them originated.

Zimmerman doesn't know where he will use the salon next, if anywhere. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before Le Grand Salon, too, is just a remembrance of things past.