Turn onto W Ave H and you'll know the house before you know the address. It sits back from the corner behind a stand of trees old enough to have shaded three generations of Muleshoe kids riding bikes past on their way to school, its circle drive curving up to a brick facade that has anchored this neighborhood since 1972. Neighbors point it out to newcomers. That's the kind of house this is. Step through the iron and glass front door and the home opens up rather than in — down a few steps into a sunken den where a brick fireplace has warmed cold Panhandle evenings for fifty years, and on through to a second living room where a stone hearth sits beneath a vaulted, wood-beamed ceiling built for the kind of gathering that spills out of the kitchen and doesn't stop until midnight. The formal dining room, walled in built-in cabinetry deep enough to hide every serving piece a holiday could require, has hosted its share of Thanksgivings. A sunny breakfast nook looks out over the front yard for the quieter mornings in between, and a third fireplace warms the sunroom for whichever season needs it. Down a wood-paneled stairway, a finished basement with its own sauna waits to be whatever the next family needs it to be — right now it's a home gym, but it has been a playroom, a storm shelter, a teenager's hideout, and it will be something else again. Off the kitchen passed the laundry room is a second, smaller kitchen with its own cooktop, sink, and dishwasher — a canning kitchen, the kind Panhandle families built when putting up a garden's harvest. Few homes left in Muleshoe still have one intact. This one does. The primary suite occupies its own wing, with separate dressing areas, individual vanities, and individual closets for two people who each want their own corner of the morning. The guest bedrooms are a generous size, with closet space that was clearly an afterthought for no one who designed this house. And storage — built-ins line hallways, flank the kitchen, tuck into the primary suite — is everywhere you'd want it and several places you wouldn't have thought to ask. Outside, the fenced backyard is big enough to disappear into: an enclosed, brick-columned patio for early morning coffee and evening dinners, a sprinkler system front and back that keeps the lawn green through August, a detached storage building for everything a garage workroom doesn't hold, and a decorative wood-and-brick fence that turns the whole yard into somewhere private. This is Muleshoe, the seat of Bailey County and the working heart of the Panhandle's farm and dairy country — a town whose Heritage Center grounds hold a restored Santa Fe depot alongside century-old ranch houses and the World's Largest Muleshoe, where the National Mule Memorial stands by the Chamber of Commerce on Highway 84, and where the Fourth of July still means the World Championship Muleshoe Pitching Contest downtown. Twenty miles south, the sandhill cranes winter by the thousands at the oldest wildlife refuge in Texas. Clovis is about a half hour away for what the town doesn't have; Lubbock is a little over an hour for the rest. Houses this size, on lots this size, in this neighborhood, do not come up often — and when they do, everyone in town already knows which one it is.
