Walk the block along Douglas Avenue past Beretta Gallery and Oscar de la Renta and you'll notice two storefronts in Building C that have carried "Coming Soon" signage for months with nothing behind the glass. Most people assume it's just the usual churn, a lease that fell through, a brand still finalizing its build-out. The real answer is more interesting, and it says something about who runs Highland Park Village now and how they intend to touch a National Historic Landmark without breaking it.
In April 2026, Highland Park Village LP filed plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to renovate two of the property's seven buildings. The filing covers 3,500 square feet in Building C, which fronts Douglas Avenue, and 7,000 square feet in Building D, which sits at the corner of Douglas and Mockingbird Lane. That corner is arguably the single most photographed intersection in Highland Park. It's also the least glamorous building in the whole complex, because Building D currently houses the Village's own management offices, not a luxury storefront.
The Filing Nobody Expected to Read Closely
State construction filings are usually dry enough to skip. This one is worth reading because the details tell you exactly where the work is happening and why it matters to anyone who treats the Village as a regular stop rather than a tourist photo op.
The project timeline, as laid out in the filing:
- Plans filed with TDLR in mid-April 2026, with architecture firm OMNIPLAN listed as designer of record.
- Construction was scheduled to begin June 1, 2026, which means that if the filing held, work has already been underway on Building C and Building D for a couple of months as of this writing.
- Completion targeted for June 1, 2027, a full year of work.
- Two ground-floor spaces in Building C already marked "Coming Soon" on the property's own site before construction even begins.
That last point is the tell. The vacancies aren't a symptom of the renovation. They're evidence the Village had already been holding space in reserve for it.
A Number That Got Cut in Half
Here's the detail that separates this story from a routine remodel. The same filing originally estimated the project at $25 million. By the time it became public, the number had been revised down to $11 million, a cut of more than half before a single wall came down.
That's not a rounding error. A project that shrinks from $25 million to $11 million usually means one of two things: either the scope got trimmed to something closer to tenant fit-out and mechanical work than a structural overhaul, or the new ownership wanted a number on paper that looked more conservative before committing publicly. Given that Building D is landlord space and not a leased storefront, the smaller figure lines up with cosmetic and infrastructure upgrades to the Village's own operations, not a ground-up rebuild of a historic structure. Highland Park Village has carried National Historic Landmark status for decades, and any real structural work triggers a level of review that neither the timeline nor the revised budget suggests is happening here.
The Family Names Behind the Filing
The part most people walking the Village don't know is that the ownership structure changed hands in a way that never made the society pages. Ray Washburne, the Dallas restaurateur behind Mi Cocina, bought Highland Park Village in 2009 for roughly $170 million alongside his wife Heather Hill Washburne, granddaughter of Margaret Hunt Hill and great-granddaughter of Hunt Oil founder H.L. Hunt, plus her sister Elisa Hill Summers and Elisa's husband. That ownership group ran the property for sixteen years under a familiar name.
In 2025, that changed. The Washburne and Hunt-Hill family real estate holdings were consolidated into a new entity called Gillon Property Group. This April's filing, made under Highland Park Village LP and tied back to Gillon, appears to be the first visible construction project under the new corporate name. Gillon has stayed active elsewhere in North Texas since forming, including a deal to acquire Watters Creek, but Highland Park Village remains its highest-profile asset by a wide margin.
Seen that way, the $11 million renovation isn't really a retail story. It's a new ownership group's first move on a building it inherited, choosing to start with its own back office rather than a flashy storefront swap.
What Isn't Moving
For everyone who actually uses the Village on a normal week, the more useful information might be what's staying exactly where it is. Sadelle's, Bistro 31, Café Pacific, Mi Cocina, and Honor Bar all remain at their usual addresses inside the same seven-building, 250,000-square-foot footprint the Village has occupied since expanding well past its original 1931 shape. Dior, Beretta, and Oscar de la Renta, the tenants that flank Building D, aren't part of the renovation scope beyond whatever normal disruption comes from adjacent construction.
That stability matters because it confirms the scale of what's actually happening. A property-wide re-tenanting would touch dozens of leases and generate a very different kind of filing. This one touches two buildings, one of them occupied by the landlord, for a budget that dropped by more than half before ground broke. It reads like a company doing quiet, controlled maintenance on its own house, not a Village reinventing itself.
What This Looked Like in 1931, and What It Still Owes That Version
Highland Park Village was financed by Hugh Prather Sr. and Edgar Flippen and opened in 1931 as one of the country's first shopping centers built around a Mediterranean Spanish design, with architects Marion F. Fooshee and James B. Cheek traveling to Spain, California, and Mexico to land on the look. Bankers at the time doubted anyone would shop outside downtown Dallas. Nearly a century later, the buildings they got wrong about have landmark protection, a $170 million sale in their history, and now a new ownership group testing how much can change behind those same façades without disturbing them.
That's the throughline worth holding onto. Highland Park Village has always grown in small, careful increments rather than dramatic overhauls, a pattern consistent with a property that has to answer to both a historic designation and a very visible corner. The current project, however it turns out, fits that same rhythm. It's not a rebrand. It's a landlord quietly reinvesting in its own operation while the storefronts everyone actually visits stay put.
What to Watch For on Your Next Walk Through
If you're on Douglas Avenue this year, the fencing that's likely already up around Building C and Building D isn't a sign that the Village is becoming something else. It's a much smaller story than that: a newly consolidated ownership group working through its first capital project on a property it's held for less than a year, starting with the building that houses its own staff rather than the ones that house Dior or Oscar de la Renta. The two vacant Building C spaces will likely fill sometime after June 2027, whenever the work wraps.
Highland Park's built environment rewards this kind of attention to detail, whether it's a century-old retail landmark or a private residence a few blocks away. At S&R Development, we spend our days thinking about exactly this kind of restraint: how a project gets scoped, what a budget revision actually signals, and how to make real change to a property without losing what made it worth keeping in the first place. If you're weighing a renovation or a custom build in Highland Park or the Park Cities and want that same level of scrutiny applied to your own address, contact us.