Inside a Texas Socialite’s Party Palace, Where She Entertained Tom Brady and George H.W. Bush

In some ways, their elaborate Texas home, slated to come up for auction next month with a guide price of $19.5 million, is the physical manifestation of those differences. When Mr. Thrash, 68, built the home in the late 1990s, he was inspired by his love of the work of both Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. He envisioned doing some entertaining, but he didn’t count on the property becoming Houston’s party central. 

In the intervening years, the bubbly Ms. Thrash, 71, whom he married around the time of the home’s completion, made the estate into the social nexus for Houston’s elite, putting on elaborate bashes and fundraisers with guests including Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush., Tom Brady, George Clooney and Anna Wintour. Known for her elaborate outfits, she’s hosted innumerable parties and raised millions for charity, she said.

“While he’s saving the world, I’ve been having parties,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

Mr. Thrash describes the home, located in a secluded section of Houston’s Memorial neighborhood on Buffalo Bayou, as an amalgamation of different styles. It’s a midcentury Mexican Hacienda-style home with a Miesian-inspired addition and a few Wrightean touches thrown in, he said. It sits on about 4 acres of forested land, with views over the Houston Country Club golf course.

Mr. Thrash assembled the site by piecing together four separate lots in the early 1990s, he said, estimating that he spent “in the low seven figures” on at least three of them. The first lot had a roughly 5,000-square-foot home built by the prominent local architect Preston Bolton, who was known for designing midcentury Mexican Hacienda-style homes, Mr. Thrash said. While the house was smaller than he wanted, he fell in love with certain elements of the design, namely the repetitive arcades of arches, the soft Mexican brick and a central courtyard with a pool. Instead of tearing it down, he decided to absorb the house into his plans, “extending it in all directions,” he said.

The resulting more than 18,000-square-foot, three-bedroom main house incorporates the Mexican brick, melding it with newer brick. It uses only a small number of materials, Mr. Thrash said, with elements of granite, steel and glass and just two types of wood: hard white maple and white rift sawed oak. The scale of the home appears to build as you move through the three distinct sections. In the front, there are a series of low rise rooms, including bedrooms, bathrooms and a study. In the middle, the common rooms—the library, dining room, a grand foyer and large Zen-inspired pool space, which are the principal entertaining rooms. In the back, there is a large two-story primary suite. 

The sprawling kitchen, designed with entertaining in mind, includes numerous stations for plating and different isles in which servers can easily maneuver. The Thrashes have served dinner for more than 200 people and had cocktail parties for more than 500, Ms. Thrash said. The property also has a guesthouse called “the treehouse,” which could be configured with one or two bedrooms, the couple said.

In addition to having a hand in the design, Mr. Thrash said he served as the project’s general contractor, having had some experience in construction through his professional life. The build took about five years, with much of the wood milled on site. In all, the house required “something like over 100,000 cubic feet of custom woodwork,” he said. 

The costs, he said, became impossible to track. “I couldn’t rationally justify it,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to recoup all of it. It was obsessive compulsive.”

The Memorial area is “decidedly different from River Oaks,” which is Houston’s most affluent neighborhood. Memorial—leafy and suburban—is known for its smaller midcentury homes and community parks. Though the neighborhood has become more upscale over the past decade, Mr. Thrash said he originally chose it because he’s “a little more bohemian” than the typical River Oaks resident. “I wanted something that projected a little more of an egalitarian view, if you will. I’m not a communist, but you know, that appealed to me more.”

Mr. and Ms. Thrash met in Houston 27 years ago. As she was leaving a friend’s barbecue at around 10 p.m., she noticed a man pulling up to the event in a black Ferrari. “I thought it was like a drug dealer or something,” she said with a laugh. It was rude, she told this stranger, to turn up to a party so late after most of the guests had already left. He explained that he was late because he’d been helping his 11-year-old daughter from a previous relationship with her science project, and she believed him. He asked her to sit with him while he ate some leftovers. Three months later, they were married. (Mr. Thrash said he is now “deeply ashamed” of the Ferrari, which he called “silly.”)

Ms. Thrash said she came from a world far outside the one Mr. Thrash was living in. She’s originally from “a little Podunk town” in the south of Texas called Harlingen, near the Mexican border, she says in her southern drawl. The city isn’t really known for its upper crust social scene, museums or benefits, she said. Rather, after attending the Fashion Institute of America in Atlanta and two years of living in London, she moved to Houston in the early 70s and worked in an Yves Saint Laurent boutique. She made her way into Texas’ top social circles later in life as a founder of a public relations and events management agency.

Even before she had money, she said, she loved to entertain. “Even when I was a very poor working girl, I would keep my pinking shears in the car. If I would pass an empty lot that had fabulous shrubbery, or beautiful flowers, and nobody was living there, I’d whip out my shears, cut them and do giant vases all over my apartment.” Once, she said, she was stopped by a police officer, who asked if she had permission to cut a branch from a tree. “And I said, ‘Really? Is it a felony or a misdemeanor? Because it’s going to grow back.”

Mr. Thrash, who moved to Houston at age 9—his parents operated a natural gas company—went to Baylor College of Medicine. A licensed doctor, he practiced medicine in Houston until the early 1990s. In the late 1990s, after years helping with the family business, he founded eCorp International, a green energy business that developed CO2 sequestration systems using shale rock.

After the Thrashes married, she gave up her business and barreled headfirst into the world of high society and fundraising. The first party they hosted when the home was completed around 1997 was a reception for Monaco’s Prince Albert II, she said. 

“The last 25 years. I haven’t made a penny but I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds, probably millions dollars, giving parties and entertaining people,” she said, noting that she now sits on the boards of about 10 nonprofits, has raised millions for Houston charities like the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Ballet and works with the American Friends of the Louvre, for which she has thrown multiple stateside and international fundraisers.

 In 2011, she received the Legion of Honor—France’s highest civilian decoration—from then French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Shortly after, when she and her husband were rushing through the airport in Paris to make a plane to get to Las Vegas business magnate Steve Wynn’s wedding, she draped the medal around her neck in hope of preferential treatment at security. She said it worked and they were hurried through. “They took us through like I was Queen Elizabeth or something,” she said with a laugh.

Her parties are legendary and often have a distinctive theme. Once, when Tom Brady was coming to a fundraising dinner for one of his favorite charities, she covered over the pool and turned it into a mini football field. The table centerpieces were footballs made from moss. For a party thrown in partnership with the fashion brand Valentino, she had 5,000 red roses floating on the pool in a V-shape. When the Super Bowl came to Houston in 2004, she had Willie Nelson come to entertain guests. “What’s more Texas than Willie Nelson?” she said.

“It is so fortunate that this structure fell into her hands because she has done so much with it,” Mr. Thrash said.

Occasionally though, it appeared Ms. Thrash might have gone too far. Once, for a runway show exhibiting an haute couture collection by designer Christian Lacroix, she completely removed a glass wall on the side of the house.

“As John was leaving to go to the office that day, he said, ‘What are you doing?’ Ms. Thrash recalled. “And I said, ‘Oh, sorry, but we’re removing a wall of the house.’ He said, ‘OK, I guess I better go to the office so I can pay for that.’”

There have been mishaps, too. Three people have fallen into the pool at parties over the years. The Thrashes’ butler is well prepared and rushes them upstairs to Mr. Thrash’s closet, where he dries off their clothes or gives them some of Mr. Thrash’s, the couple said. “We get them back downstairs in between 20 and 30 minutes every time,” Ms. Thrash said. 

The property has been redecorated several times over the years, most recently by local designer Dennis Brackeen, Ms. Thrash said.

The Thrashes said they are putting the home on the auction block because they’re ready to downsize. They’re spending a lot more time in Europe and the Middle East because of Mr. Thrash’s business, which is focused on new techniques for limiting Co2 emissions. The pair have an apartment in Paris and have been spending more time there, they said. They own a smaller, roughly 5,500-square-foot home on the Houston site and will hold on to it.

Mr. Thrash said they decided to go the auction route because of its more definitive timeline. The property hasn’t previously been listed for sale. “Part of our urgency is to be free to pursue these objectives out of the country,” he said. “I think [the auction process] can spare sellers of high-end homes long waiting periods to complete a transaction.”

The couple’s agent, Jay Monroe of Martha Turner Sotheby’s International Realty, who is working with Sotheby’s Concierge Auctions on the sale, said it can be tough to price such an unusual home and that the auction process will help them more quickly determine the property’s value.

“The kiss of death is coming on the market too high and then losing momentum,” he said. “I’ve seen houses come on the market for $26 million in Houston and sell for $16 million.”

Mr. Monroe said the luxury market in Houston has remained relatively strong, even as the national market has dipped.” Lately, most of my luxury listings have sold fairly quickly,” he said. 

As for Ms. Thrash, she said she has plans to entertain plenty overseas. But she’s finally ready to hand off her favorite venue.

“I think it’s time for me to pass the baton to the next Becca,” she said.

Write to Katherine Clarke at [email protected]