Highland Park Village Can't Get Bigger. So It's Getting Better.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
In April, the ownership group behind Highland Park Village filed plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for a fresh round of construction. The number that got attention was $25 million. The number that actually mattered was the one that replaced it in the same filing: $11 million, for roughly 10,500 square feet spread across two buildings.
That is not a rounding error. That is the entire story of how Highland Park Village grows in 2026, and it explains something residents already sense but rarely say out loud. The Village can add a room here and a room there. It cannot add a wing. If you have ever wondered why every new tenant announcement at the Village feels bigger than it should, this is why. There is nowhere left to put anything.
The filing calls for Building C, which fronts Douglas Avenue, to grow by about 3,500 square feet. Building D, at the corner of Douglas and Mockingbird Lane, gets roughly 7,000 more, at a gateway corner that anchors one of the Village's main entrances. The architect is OMNIPLAN, a Dallas firm with a long history working inside historic footprints. That detail matters more than it sounds. Highland Park Village sits on the National Register of Historic Places, and any addition has to work around the Mediterranean facades that made the place a landmark in the first place. You cannot bolt a new floor onto a building like this the way you would at a suburban strip center. You carve out inches.
The owner behind the filing is Gillon Property Group, a firm formed in 2025 to consolidate the real estate holdings of the Washburne and Hunt-Hill families, the same families whose predecessor entity bought the Village in 2009 for about $170 million. Gillon has been active elsewhere in North Texas this year too, including a recent deal for Watters Creek. The Village filing is not a firm testing the market. It is a firm that already owns one of its highest-profile assets deciding to keep investing in it, just not in a way that changes its shape.
For a resident, the practical read is simple. Whatever construction fencing shows up near Douglas and Mockingbird this year is not a preview of a bigger Village. It is maintenance on a building that reached its ceiling decades ago and is now optimizing what little space remains.
If the Village can't grow outward, the only place left to make news is inside its existing tenants, and 2026 has given residents two moves worth tracking.
Neither of these would carry a headline in a bigger retail district. Here, where the total square footage barely moves year over year, each one is effectively the whole story for its category. A design collaboration is not one option among a dozen local launches. It is the launch.
Walk east from the Village toward Knox Street and the contrast gets almost comic. A joint venture between Trammell Crow Company, BDT & MSD Partners, Highland Park Village Associates, and The Retail Connection recently topped out a mixed-use project spanning more than one million square feet. That single development includes 150,000 square feet of office space, 100,000 square feet of retail, a 27-story apartment tower with 186 units, and the Knox Hotel and Residences, a 140-room hotel with 47 ultra-luxury condominiums operated by the Auberge Collection. The hotel is designed by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio, the residences by Dallas-based Chad Dorsey Design, and residential sales there are being handled by Allie Beth Allman & Associates.
The office component, a nine-story building called 3333 Knox, is scheduled for delivery in late 2026 and has been fully preleased since the fall of 2024, with ISN Software Corporation and law firm Paul Hastings among the tenants moving in.
Set that next to the Village's 10,500-square-foot filing and the difference is not subtle. One project a few blocks away will deliver more space in a single tower than Highland Park Village has added in more than a decade of incremental renovation. That is not a criticism of the Village. It is a comment on why the two ends of a fifteen-minute walk feel like they belong to different decades of Dallas. One is a preserved artifact quietly upgrading its guest list. The other is quite literally building skyline.
None of this retail or development news touches the part of the year that actually structures most residents' weeks. The Highland Park Swimming Pool at Davis Park, 3801 Lexington Avenue, runs its 2026 season from April 14 through November 25, with this year's regular open-swim window falling between May 22 and August 16. The town's own calendar layered smaller gatherings on top of that earlier this year, including a Memorial Day Cookout at the pool on May 25 and a Foam Party at Prather Park on May 30.
Spring here has its own fixed appointment too. Roughly 8,000 azaleas bloom across town in the final weeks of March and first weeks of April, a stretch locals plan drives and walks around whether or not they've ever set foot inside the Village.
That calendar does not show up in a construction filing or a brand collaboration press release. It is the layer of the year that keeps running at the same pace no matter what happens at Douglas and Mockingbird.
Put the pieces together and the shape of the year becomes clear. Highland Park Village is not shrinking or stagnating. It is doing the only kind of growth its footprint allows, trading square footage for tenant quality, one boutique collaboration at a time. A few blocks away, an entirely different kind of growth is rising in steel and glass, on land that was never going to be constrained by a 1931 Mediterranean facade. Both are part of the same neighborhood's year. Neither one is the whole picture on its own.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks these shifts because you're curious what they mean for your own address, not because you're planning to move, that's exactly the kind of local read Mark Bradford Group builds into every conversation. When you're ready to see what any of this means for your own home's value, Mark Bradford Group offers a free home valuation with no pressure attached.
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