Landowners Subdivide a Lot but Keep an Easement to Preserve Their View — Then the Court Denies an Injunction Despite Evidence the Easement Was Encroached

Photo credit: AI-generated image created using ChatGPT. Illustrative only

In a quiet stretch of Houston’s Shadyside neighborhood, the kind of place where people pay for trees, setbacks, and sightlines, two neighbors ended up in a fight over something that’s both ordinary and explosive: a “don’t build tall stuff here” promise that came with the land.

The dispute shows how a view can be treated like property, and how a security wall can turn into a full-blown court battle. The details come out in the court’s opinion, which reads like a checklist of every homeowner’s nightmare: recorded restrictions, real-estate misunderstandings, contractors mobilized, and then a wall going up anyway.

A view was the whole point of buying the place

Andrew and Annette Schatte bought a 2.55-acre lot in 1998. One of the big selling points wasn’t the house itself—it was the view out toward Hermann Park and Mecom Fountain.

Two years later, they subdivided their land and sold off part of it. But they didn’t just split and walk away. When they sold, they recorded a deed restriction: within a 100-foot setback from Montrose Boulevard and Main Street, no fencing or landscaping could exceed 40 inches in height.

That’s the kind of language that seems boring until you’re the person staring at the wrong side of a tall barrier. For the Schattes, it was the whole reason they felt safe letting the parcel go—because the paper said their line of sight would stay open.

Then a new buyer showed up with very different priorities

Years later, the neighboring parcel ended up with the Trapp Trust. The Trust bought it in 2019 for the benefit of an internationally famous musician, and the Trust’s story from the start was security and privacy.

According to the case record, the sellers apparently didn’t know about the restriction and told the Trust’s side a wall could be built. But the title search did flag the deed restriction. The trustee also signed a Deed Restriction Notice acknowledging the property was subject to restrictions, and the title policy specifically excluded that recorded restriction.

Still, the Trust’s agents didn’t pull the underlying document before closing. That detail matters later, because it’s the difference between “we missed it” and “we knew enough to know we should read it.”

The warnings came before the first block was laid

This didn’t turn into a surprise “gotcha” after construction. The Schattes say they repeatedly told the Trust and its people about the restriction before anything was built.

Annette Schatte emailed real-estate agents about it in January 2020. Later, the parties and their lawyers held a meeting specifically about the wall. The Trust’s lawyer even floated a compromise: let the musician keep the wall while he lived there, then remove it when he eventually sold.

The Schattes rejected that and warned they’d sue if construction went forward. That’s the moment most neighbor disputes either cool down—or go completely off the rails. Here, it escalated.

A crew of roughly 25 to 30 workers built an eight-foot-tall cinderblock security wall inside the protected 100-foot setback. The Schattes said it blocked their view.

The courtroom split: restriction violated, but the wall still stayed

The Schattes sued for a permanent injunction to make the wall come down. Notably, they didn’t ask for compensatory damages. They wanted enforcement and their view back.

The Trust pushed back with a handful of arguments homeowners will recognize from any “technically…” dispute. One was a literal reading: the restriction said “fence,” not “wall,” so an eight-foot cinderblock wall supposedly didn’t count. The Trust also argued the view had already been impacted by trees, and that the Schattes had failed to enforce the restriction against earlier owners, or that conditions had changed enough that strict enforcement no longer made sense.

The jury didn’t buy those defenses. It found the Trust violated the deed restriction, that the Schattes did not waive their right to enforce it, and that the violation wasn’t excused by changed conditions.

But then came the factor that tends to blow up tidy property-rights arguments: fear. The musician testified about serious security concerns, including a home-invasion killing connected to someone associated with him. The Trust said the wall was necessary so the children could safely play outside and so the musician could feel safe living there. A security expert compared his needs to other high-profile people, including former presidents.

There had also already been a breach where someone got inside the wall and was stopped by security and police. On the balancing question, the jury found the hardship of forcing the Trust to comply would substantially outweigh the benefit to the Schattes.

The trial judge leaned heavily on that hardship finding and denied the injunction. In plain terms: yes, the restriction was violated, but the wall could remain because the security burden of tearing it down was too great compared to the value of restoring a view.

The appeals court didn’t order demolition—but it didn’t bless the wall either

The Schattes appealed, arguing that if someone knowingly violates a properly recorded restriction, courts should essentially have to enforce it. The Texas Court of Appeals, First District, didn’t go that far. It said Texas law allows courts to balance the equities even when a restriction is valid and violated.

Security concerns can be part of that balancing. But the appeals court said the trial judge balanced the equities using the wrong weight in the wrong places—especially on notice.

Because the restriction was properly recorded, Texas law treated the Trust as having constructive notice when it bought the property. More importantly, the record wasn’t murky about what happened before the wall went up: there was no dispute that the Trust’s agents had actual knowledge of the restriction before construction. The appeals court said the trial court couldn’t treat the Trust like an innocent party who built first and learned later.

The court also faulted the trial judge’s reliance on the Schattes not objecting to trees, because the jury had already rejected waiver and changed-conditions defenses. Those findings meant the trial court wasn’t free to re-litigate that point through the back door while “balancing” equities.

So the appeals court reversed and sent it back. But it did not itself order the wall torn down. The trial court has to redo the balancing correctly, factoring in the recorded notice, the pre-construction warnings, and the jury’s findings that the restriction still provides a substantial benefit and wasn’t waived.

Homeowner reactions: “Recorded means recorded,” but safety is real

If you’ve ever sat through a closing and signed a stack of papers you didn’t draft, this one hits a nerve. The case has the classic ingredients people fixate on: the restriction was recorded, it was identified in the title work, and there were direct warnings before any construction started. In the homeowner world, that usually translates to, “You don’t get to build it and dare someone to stop you.”

At the same time, this isn’t a petty six-inch fence-height squabble. The testimony described life-and-death security fears and even a breach that required security and police response. A lot of homeowners read that and think, “I get why someone would want a real barrier.”

That’s why the remand matters. The appeals court basically told the trial judge: you can consider security, but you can’t do it as though the builder didn’t know what they were violating. And you can’t minimize the neighbor’s rights after a jury already said those rights still mean something.

For now, the wall is still standing, and the neighborhood is still living with the same awkward reality: one property’s safety plan was built right through another property’s recorded promise. The next round will decide whether “we need this” outweighs “you were told not to do this,” and that’s the kind of question that keeps neighbors staring out their windows long after the contractors are gone.