Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists
P u b l i s h e d W e e k l y, N e w s, A r t s, & S t o r i e s F r o m T e x a s .... U s u a l l y
Vol. 2, No. 8, p. 1
July 8, 2026
Sam Gianukos, Artist With A Pencil.
D. M. Allison, The Mission News, June 30, 2026, (word count 3,592 / images 37 online)
“D-a-n — A-l-l-i-s-o-n,” Sam drew the name out over the phone with enthusiasm and old familiarity. “How the hell are you? What are you doing?”
“I might be talking to a gray-haired old man,” I said, laughing.
“Maybe,” he answered, then without missing a beat, “what I got left of it.”
I had never known Sam Gianukos to have much use for insecurity. Self-made men and women rarely do. They are aware of their own circumstances, their inadequacies, their good luck, their bad luck, and the road they are travelling on. Satisfied may be too soft a word for it. Maybe it is more like settled, and always good to go.
So we got that part out of the way first. We are older now, and it would probably be a hoot to see one another after all these years. More than twenty years had passed, though not much distance. Sam was still only a few miles up the road. Proximity had made no difference one way or the other. But as so often happens, friends lose touch, and the good ones pick up right where they left off, as if they had dinner last week.
That was my original idea for the story: two old friends meeting again after too much time had gone by. What would we look like to one another? How had we aged? What would we remember? What would we forget? And maybe the larger question: Why had we become friends in the first place?
People become friends for all kinds of reasons, not all of them noble. Somebody has better presents under the tree and maybe you will get invited to that party. Somebody has a circle of friends with useful business advantages. Or, somebody has a pool, keeps good Scotch around, and lets you hang out in his pool in July.
In Sam’s case, some of that last part may have had a ring of truth regarding me. But the real answer was going to be more interesting than nostalgia, and I did not know it yet. We were not friends simply because I was an artist. We were friends because Sam was one, though unbelievably, I had not been aware of it at that moment.
This story ended up the story of a man who had made his way in the world not through higher education, inheritance, or social position, but because he could use a pencil. Plain and simple.
Sam came out to meet me at his front gate, and we walked around back into his office, the old garage apartment now folded into the life of the house. We sat down only briefly before he got back up again.
“You want to see ‘Big Corn?” he asked. Grinning like the fun guy I remembered from days past. Of course I did. It was the first thing that came to mind when I contemplated a visit. That was the beginning of the tour.
His golden retriever, Elvis, took the lead as we moved from the office into the rest of the house, stepping down a few stairs into the main living room, where the piece, Big Corn, I had done years ago was still on the mantle. It was a small thing, maybe, but not to me. More than twenty years had passed, and there it was, still holding its place.
From there the house seemed to wind around, the bones of the house had not changed from what I remembered after years of being lived in, and loved. Art was everywhere, not displayed like a showroom, but lived with. There were pieces by Kelly Divine, Donald Roller Wilson, Julian Schnabel, Tra Slaughter, Dan M. Allison, and works I attributed to either John Peters or Mark Flood in the moment. A collection of small statuary and objects that meant something, smartly picked up along Sam's journey.
This was not a house decorated by someone trying to prove taste. It was the house of a man who had spent his life looking, drawing, building, collecting, and recognizing things that had personality. Even the collectibles had character, including the old Williams baseball arcade machine. Who doesn't need one of those?
It was funny how much had changed, and how much had not. Elvis was new to me. The years were not. But standing there again, walking room to room through Sam’s collection, I had the feeling I was not just being shown art. I was being shown the evidence of a life built by eye, hand, memory, appetite, and instinct.
Then we sat down, and the interview began.
TMN: We’re beginning with Sam Gianukos of Creole Design. I’m talking with Sam, an old friend. What I really remember about your story is how you started out. You were still young, in school, working downtown. Was it Sakowitz or Foley’s?
GIANUKOS: I worked at Foley’s. Initially I worked there because I was going to HSPVA and I wanted to buy a darkroom to develop and process film. I didn’t have any money, so I got a job at the Foley’s department store downtown changing light bulbs. It was an odd job, but I was making money.
On my days off I didn’t really have anything to do, so I would go back downtown and help in the young men’s department. I knew the kids who worked there, and I didn’t have a car, so I took the bus everywhere. One day a man came up to me while I was helping out and asked, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m Sam. I work in maintenance.” He asked why I was there on my day off, and I said I had just come down to help the guys. Come to find out, he was the buyer for the department. When I got to work Monday, my boss said, “Looks like you’ve got a new job.” That moved me into the clothing business.
TMN: And that connects to the apartment story.
GIANUKOS: When I was 15, I made a deal with two guys in the suit department to get an apartment. I told them I would pay a third of the rent because I had to get out of my house. We got an apartment out on Westheimer, almost to Voss, at Briargrove Apartments. The rent was $210, so I paid $70 and slept on the sofa. I took the bus to school in the morning, then to work at Northwest Mall, and after work somebody had to pick me up because the bus wasn’t running after 9:30.
At 20, while dating a girl in the Heights, I bought the house on Columbia for $32,000, gave the old guy $1,500 down, and paid $176 a month. My friends thought I had lost my mind because this neighborhood was rough then.
TMN: The Heights had a reputation then. Now everybody wants to be here.
GIANUKOS: It was disliked for a long time. I had a client from a River Oaks family years ago. After about our third meeting, the son said we couldn’t finish designing the house because his grandmother told him she would never come to the Heights to visit if he built here. That tells you how much it changed.
TMN: After Columbia came the Courtland house?
GIANUKOS: Yes. I lived at Columbia, loved it, two bedrooms and one bath. Then I got married, and my wife wanted a bigger house. There was a house at 1816 Courtland that was vacant and had a foreclosure notice on it. I called the bank and asked what the deal was. They said someone in the office was buying it for $48,000, but it had termite problems and they were trying to work that out. I said, “I’ll give you $50,000 tomorrow. I don’t even need to go inside. I’ll bring a cashier’s check.” The banker called my banker, and four days later I owned the house for $50,000. That was amazing.
I have just remodeled it again. An architect moved in and added onto the back. The rooms were small before, but now it is almost a new house.
TMN: And then came the Merrill house, the big brick house on three lots.
GIANUKOS: My ex-wife was a dental hygienist, and one day a patient told her he was going to buy a seven-bedroom, three-bath brick house in the Heights on three lots. He would not tell her where it was because he knew I was remodeling houses over here. When he left, she called me and asked, “Where is there a brick house on three lots in the Heights?” I said, “There’s only one, the one on Merrill.” I drove those streets all the time.
I came straight over and knocked on the door. I asked, “Are you selling this house in January?” This was July. She said yes and told me the price. We came by that night, and the next morning I had a contract for her before ten o’clock. All the neighbors were offering her more money, and the patient who had told my wife about it lived across the street. He was furious. My wife told him, “You snooze, you lose.”
TMN: Wasn’t it full of boxes and junk?
GIANUKOS: It was full of junk. The garage apartment, now the office, had about three feet of trash in it. It was horrible.
We closed on a Thursday and had to be out of our house the following weekend. On Friday I came over, knocked on the door, and nothing was packed. We sat in the back room and I said, “Mrs. York, we closed yesterday. I have to be out of my house next week, and I don’t see anything packed.” She said, “If you try to get me out of here, it’s going to take a crane.” Then she said my wife and I could move in with them. I knew that was not going to happen.
I went to the Stop & Go at 11th Street, picked up the Green Sheet, and called three movers. I told them there was a lady at 505 Merrill who needed to move before the next weekend, and to please be respectful. On Monday nothing was packed. Then she told me, “The nicest Christian young man came by. He’s a mover, and we’re going to move on Saturday.” I said, “I’ll be damned.” I helped her pack all day Saturday until the truck was full. Then they waved from the porch and left.
TMN: That story is part of why I’m interested in how people move through houses, neighborhoods, and collections. Where in all of this did Creole Design really begin?
GIANUKOS: I was remodeling houses, and I had no idea what I was doing. I sold my first one quickly and thought, “Wow, this is an easy way to make money,” though of course nothing is easy. Back then you could buy houses for $25,000 or $30,000 all day long. A lot were still owned by old folks, so I would make a deal: “I’ll give you $5,000 up front, and the balance in twelve months.” We could remodel, sell, close, and pay them off. There was a lot of owner financing then, and that gave a poor guy like me a way into a business that normally takes a lot of banking.
But I got tired of remodeling. I took a trip to New Orleans with Lindley, Mike, and Mike’s girlfriend. They had a friend with a jewelry shop in the French Quarter, and we went to her house for drinks. It was one of those little shotgun houses stuck into the Quarter. From the outside it looked like a small house, but as you walked back it kept getting bigger: rooms, then a courtyard, then more quarters behind the courtyard. I had never been in one, and I was blown away. I told my wife at the time, “When we get back to Houston, I’m going to build a New Orleans-style house.”
At first, I was afraid to call them New Orleans-style houses, so I called them French-style houses. I still have the rendering of the first one, the sign I put up on 18th Street. Two months after I started that house, I sold it. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never taken a drafting class.
The way I got it drawn was simple. I had drawn it by hand, which I still do, and a salesman from Trussway came by to talk about trusses. He looked at my drawing and said, “I can put that on CAD.” I said, “What’s CAD?” He said, “That’s where we put it on the computer.” So I gave him my only hard copy. I didn’t even know the guy. He brought it back rolled up and permit-ready, and told me, “Just go down and pull a permit.” So I did.After that first house sold, four people said, “We love that house. Would you design one for us?” I didn’t even know how I had designed the first one, but I said yes. I had a big photo album from New Orleans and a bunch of books. I gave them to clients, told them to pick out what they liked, and then I sat down and started drawing.
TMN: That is why I keep coming back to the fact that you began as an artist. You were at HSPVA at the beginning of the story. The creative mind doesn’t stop because the medium changes.
GIANUKOS: I just drew it. That has been true all along. A few years ago, I did the Vietnamese Buddhist temple out in Sugar Land. I had done three houses for a doctor, and one day his wife called and said, “We want you to draw our temple.” I didn’t know what that meant. She said they were Buddhist and were going to do a new temple.
So I went out and met with the monk, the master, and the other monks. The master could barely speak English. He spoke
Vietnamese. I told him, “You know, really, I’m kind of the guy drawing houses in the Heights out of my house. I’m not the guy to do this huge building with dorms for the monks. Y’all really need a true architectural firm, not me.”
About ten days later they called and said, “The master wants to see you again.” I went back out there, and the master said, “I want you to draw my temple.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll draw it.”
I ordered every book on Amazon I could find about Buddhist temples. I started looking at what a Buddhist temple is. Then I took the site plan out there with tissue paper, rolled the tissue out, and gave the master a red pencil. I said, “Tell me what you believe your temple looks like.” He started talking in Vietnamese and drawing, and I went behind him and cleaned it up, trying to make it work. They ended up building it.
It is beautiful out there. It is so ornate and so unusual when you go inside. When I go there, I can hardly believe I drew that.
TMN: That should be a strong visual. What road is it on?
GIANUKOS: It is on Synott Road, S-Y-N-O-T-T. I believe the address is 10002 Synott. I have the drawing here, actually. It is an extensive set of drawings.
TMN: So, the builders listed on the front of these blueprints are the actual architects?
GIANUKOS: No. I did the drawings. Someone sealed the drawings for me, but I did the drawings. We did all of these drawings. It was a lot to learn.
TMN: I can’t believe you did that.
GIANUKOS: It was 2015. You can go look at it. It is the largest Vietnamese Buddhist temple in the U.S., or that is what I was told. The foundation is six feet off the ground. It is pretty wild.
TMN: Why six feet? Was that spiritual, or was it about the site?
GIANUKOS: I don’t remember exactly. Probably there is a spiritual reason, but I’m not sure. The master was such a nice man. He would sit right next to me, and I mean right next to me, pressed up against me while we were working. I would say, “No, Master, we can’t do that,” and all the monks would look at me like, “You can’t tell the master no.”
One time he left the room, and the monks said, “You can’t tell the master no, and you’re not supposed to touch him.” When I first met him, he greeted me, and I shook his hand and patted
him on the back. I was Texas to him. Texas style. Everyone else was looking at me like, “You can’t do that to the master.” I said, “Well, somebody has to tell me.”
TMN: You also mentioned Galveston, Memorial, Bali, and other kinds of work. It sounds like you will draw almost anything.
GIANUKOS: I will draw anything. I’ll draw dog houses if someone lets me. We did the Girl Scout camp down in Galveston, a 17,000-square-foot house on Memorial, and a house modeled after Bali. The clients met me there and stayed two weeks while we chose things for it.
(37 images Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen)
People ask why I’m still working as hard as I do. I like it. What else would I do? I went to Bali every year for a month for a while, and about nine years ago I thought I might shut everything down and move there. Then I noticed everybody I was hanging around with was drinking beer by noon. Houston is hard to beat because you can go anywhere in the world from here tomorrow morning.
People ask why I’m still working as hard as I do. I like it. What else would I do? I went to Bali every year for a month for a while, and about nine years ago I thought I might shut everything down and move there. Then I noticed everybody I was hanging around with was drinking beer by noon. Houston is hard to beat because you can go anywhere in the world from here tomorrow morning.
TMN: You have stayed here and left fingerprints everywhere. How many buildings do you think you have done?
GIANUKOS: More than a thousand. When I drive around the neighborhood now, I see my work on every block. Sometimes I take a picture of a house to prove something to the historical commission, then get home and realize it was one I did and had forgotten.
I also have the big project in Galveston called Evia. It began with 255 single-family houses and 160 townhomes, though it has changed toward more single-family houses. It has a town center, and I did all the buildings there. I have been working on that same project for about twenty years.
The Sullivan family in Galveston brought me into that. They had run an ad showing renderings of houses they wanted to build. I sent them a brochure. A couple of days later they came to meet with me. Johnny Sullivan asked, “If you were going to do a Southern-style townhome, what would you do?” I used a purple pencil and sketched it right there in front of them. About twenty minutes after they left, they called and said, “You’ve got the job.”
TMN: I can see why you enjoy it. Everyone enjoys what they do well. Somebody else would be tortured by that much work, but if you are into it, you dig every moment.
GIANUKOS: Exactly. The before-and-after work is still amazing to me. You can stare at an old ranch house for a while and suddenly see what needs to happen. Add a gable, change the roofline, and the whole house becomes something else.
TMN: That gives us the arc: HSPVA, Foley’s, the apartment, the Heights houses, New Orleans, Creole Design, the temple, Evia, and the artist’s hand moving through architecture.
GIANUKOS: That sounds right. From there I started building new houses, then designing them everywhere, generally in the Creole or Southern direction but not limited to that. I still draw because I like the work. I like figuring it out.
By the time Gianukos was talking about the Vietnamese Buddhist temple, the red pencil, the site plan, and the master sitting beside him, the reason we had been friends in the first place finally came into focus for me.
I had gone there thinking the story was about time: twenty-three years, old friends, gray hair, a few miles of Houston road between us that somehow turned into two decades. But the better story was not about distance. It was about recognition.
Sam did not speak about drawing like a technician. He spoke about it the way artists do, as if the hand is trying to catch up with something the mind has already seen. A shotgun house in the French Quarter becomes a New Orleans-style house in the Heights. A rough sketch becomes a subdivision. A doctor’s wife says, “We want you to draw our temple,” and somehow a man who describes himself as “the guy drawing houses in the Heights” ends up sitting with a Vietnamese master, the Venerable Thích Nguyên Hạnh, tissue paper rolled over a site plan, asking him to draw what he believes his temple should be.
That is not just design. That is translation. That is listening with a pencil.
And maybe that was the thing I recognized in Sam all along. Not credentials. Not polish. Not even success, though he has had plenty of that. It was the appetite for making something, the stubborn pleasure of seeing what was not there yet, and the nerve to say yes before you fully know how you are going to do it. Artists understand that about one another, sometimes before they understand it about themselves. Not every artist needs to show in a gallery to be seen.
Maybe you just need to pay attention and have a red pencil.
Mark Flood is represented by Reeves Gallery