Highland Park Village Is Sorting Itself Into Two Kinds of Luxury

The two-story building at the Village's Preston Road entrance sat with its windows dark for a stretch. Ralph Lauren had occupied that address for decades before relocating to Cole Avenue, and the exit left one of the property's most visible corners without a marquee tenant. A few blocks over, Roller Rabbit's storefront went quiet too, closing after eleven years and reopening on Knox Street last fall.

Read those two departures as a shopping center losing its footing and you'd be reading them wrong. The same ownership group watching those brands leave has also filed paperwork this year to add square footage to two other buildings on the same block, and it has spent the past eighteen months quietly filling the empty spaces with a different kind of tenant entirely.

What Left, and Where It Went

Ralph Lauren's move mattered locally in part because of how long the brand had held that corner. The two-story building at the Preston Road entrance had been a fixture of the Village's approach for years before the label decamped for Cole Avenue. Roller Rabbit followed a similar path months later, closing its Village location after eleven years and setting up on Knox Street instead. Anthropologie made the same move, part of what local reporting described as a broader wave pulling volume retail out of the historic footprint and into the newer district a mile north.

None of these were struggling brands looking for an exit. They were established names trading a fixed, block-sized shopping center for a growing one, where foot traffic and street-level visibility carry more weight than pedigree.

The New Corners

While those storefronts emptied, others filled just as fast. Carolina Herrera relocated within the Village to a new corner location at 70 Highland Park Village, marking the move with a launch event built around a capsule collaboration with Dallas bootmaker Miron Crosby. Khaite, the New York ready-to-wear label, took over the space that had been a Starbucks. And in February 2025, Café Dior by Dominique Crenn opened inside a reimagined two-level Dior boutique that had debuted two months earlier, its architecture referencing Dior's flagship on Paris's Avenue Montaigne. Dallas joined a short list of cities with a Café Dior: Paris, Tokyo, Miami, and now here, and unlike most of those locations, the Dallas cafe runs as a full lunch concept rather than a pastry counter.

Here's a snapshot of notable storefront changes:

The Corner That's About to Look Different

Underneath all of this, paperwork filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation lays out a quieter story. Highland Park Village LP, the entity managed by Gillon Property Group, proposed roughly 10,500 square feet of new construction split between two buildings: about 3,500 square feet added to Building C, which fronts Douglas Avenue, and about 7,000 square feet added to Building D, on the corner of Douglas and Mockingbird, one of the Village's main gateways. The initial cost estimate was $25 million. Days later, the same filing was revised down to $11 million.

Building D currently houses Village management offices and sits near tenants including Beretta and Oscar de la Renta. The architecture firm on the job is OMNIPLAN, which has worked at the property for years and has described its own approach there as designing changes that make it look as though the firm was never there. That preservation instinct explains why this is a modest addition rather than anything resembling a redesign. The Village's own website already lists two spaces in Building C as "Coming Soon," a sign that at least part of the new footprint is destined for a lease rather than back-office use.

It's worth sitting with what this expansion actually is. Highland Park Village has occupied the same seven-building block, bordered by Preston Road, Mockingbird Lane, Livingston Avenue, and Douglas Avenue, since 1931. It cannot grow outward. When a property in that position wants more revenue per square foot, the options narrow to two: build modestly wherever a few thousand square feet can be found, and get more selective about who occupies the space that already exists. The filing and the tenant churn are the same strategy, just expressed in two different documents.

Why the Brands Leaving Aren't the Same as the Brands Staying

The pattern gets clearer once you separate what's leaving from what's arriving. Ralph Lauren, Roller Rabbit, and Anthropologie compete on volume and visibility, categories that benefit from being part of a growing, walkable district with steady street traffic. Carolina Herrera, Khaite, and the brands that have stayed put, Hermès and Van Cleef & Arpels among them, operate in a different register: fine jewelry and couture, categories built around a slower, appointment-driven sales floor rather than foot traffic. A shopping center that's losing long-tenured tenants while filing for millions in new construction isn't confused about its direction. It's sorting.

One Family, Two Shopping Districts

The ownership behind both moves is the same, which is what makes the sorting deliberate rather than coincidental. Gillon Property Group was formed in 2025 to consolidate the real estate holdings of the Washburne and Hunt-Hill families. Ray Washburne, who also founded the Mi Cocina restaurant chain, bought Highland Park Village with his wife Heather Hill Washburne in 2009 for roughly $170 million. Heather Hill Washburne is a granddaughter of Margaret Hunt Hill and a great-granddaughter of Hunt Oil founder H.L. Hunt. This is a family that has held this block for seventeen years, choosing to keep investing in it rather than sell.

That same ownership group's retail arm is leasing the district pulling those departing brands north. Knox Street's mixed-use development, a joint venture between Trammell Crow Company, BDT & MSD Partners, Highland Park Village Associates, and The Retail Connection, spans more than a million square feet and includes 150,000 square feet of office space at 3333 Knox, a nine-story building fully preleased since the fall of 2024 to tenants including ISN Software Corporation and law firm Paul Hastings, with delivery expected late this year. The same development includes the Knox Hotel and Residences, an Auberge-branded hotel and condominium project, and a half-acre park connected to the Katy Trail.

Just this year, the same partners broke ground on Knox & McKinney, a twelve-story, 300,000-square-foot office and retail tower at 4544 McKinney Avenue scheduled to deliver in 2028. Lifestyle tenants including Sant Ambroeus, DÔEN, STAUD, TOTEME, and TWP debuted standalone boutiques on Knox Street this past summer, with more leases expected to be announced in the coming months. Put the two projects side by side and the strategy reads plainly: one block, fixed since 1931, holding the appointment-driven luxury tier, and one corridor, still able to grow, absorbing everything built around volume and visibility.

What to Watch This Fall

If you've walked past Buildings C and D recently, you've likely already noticed some fencing going up near Douglas and Mockingbird. That's the $11 million project working its way through construction, and with two Coming Soon signs already posted in Building C, a tenant announcement before the end of the year seems likely. Given the direction the rest of the property has moved, whatever fills that space probably won't be competing on foot traffic.

The next time you're circling the Village for a parking spot, it's worth glancing at that corner. The building isn't getting bigger by much, but who ends up behind its windows will tell you a lot about which kind of luxury this block is planning to keep.

If you keep half an eye on what's changing around Highland Park Village, The TX Collective Group is doing the same, storefront by storefront.