Walk the brick paths between Preston Road and Mockingbird Lane most afternoons and Highland Park Village still reads the way it always has. Valets stand outside Hermès. The Mediterranean stucco catches the late light the same way it has since 1931. But turn down Douglas Avenue this year and you hit a construction fence wrapped around Building C, the one that houses Oscar de la Renta and Ceron Highland Park. A block away, Building D, tucked at the corner of Douglas and Mockingbird, has its own version of the same story.
Neither fence means what most people assume. The Village isn't expanding into new territory. It's running out of ways to grow anywhere except inward, and the paperwork behind those fences explains exactly why.
The Filing That Explains the Fence
On April 13, 2026, Highland Park Village LP filed plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to add roughly 3,500 square feet to Building C and 7,000 square feet to Building D. Architecture firm OMNIPLAN, which has handled Village projects for years, is designing the work. The filing initially put the cost at $25 million before revising it down to $11 million within the same week, according to reporting from The Real Deal and Hoodline. State records list a start date of June 1, 2026, with completion targeted for June 1, 2027.
Building C fronts Douglas Avenue. Building D sits at the corner of Douglas and Mockingbird, a corner longtime shoppers would recognize as one of the Village's main entry points. Both are the kind of buildings you walk past without registering as buildings, until a fence goes up and you realize you never actually looked at them.
When People Newspapers asked Village management for detail on what the added square footage would eventually hold, Kate Kutilek, the shopping center's Senior Director of Public Relations and Special Events, kept it brief.
"We have no details to share at this time, but are excited about the upcoming plans."
That is the entire public statement on record as of this year's filings. No confirmed tenant, no announced concept, just a fence and a completion date that's still about eight months away.
A Ceiling Set in 1931
The modesty of the number is the real story. Highland Park Village was built in 1931 and is widely credited as one of the country's earliest open-air shopping centers, a distinction formalized when it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2000. The property spans seven buildings and roughly 250,000 square feet. Adding 10,500 square feet against that base is a growth rate of about four percent, and even that has to happen inside a Spanish Mediterranean shell that can't be altered without answering to landmark status.
That is why the estimate dropped from $25 million to $11 million in a matter of days rather than getting bigger through negotiation. There was never a version of this project that meant knocking down a wall and building outward. The only lever available is renovating what already exists, more efficiently, inside the same footprint the Village has occupied for nearly a century.
Who Already Holds the Space
Building C's current lineup, Oscar de la Renta and Ceron Highland Park, sits alongside two storefronts the Village's own online directory lists as "Coming Soon." Those two spaces have carried that label since before the April filing, and nothing in the reporting since has named a tenant for either one. Building D houses Balmain, Veronica Beard, Brunello Cucinelli, Loro Piana and Vacheron Constantin, along with the Village's own management offices, which is part of what's being renovated.
The practical read: this expansion isn't clearing ground for a splashy new flagship. It's adding square footage behind storefronts that are already occupied, which means the businesses residents already walk past every week are the ones this construction is actually built around.
The Family Behind the Fence
Highland Park Village LP is managed by Gillon Property Group, a Dallas-based commercial real estate company formed last year that consolidated the portfolios of two prominent Texas families, the Washburnes and the Hunt-Hills. Ray Washburne, who founded the Mi Cocina restaurant chain, bought the Village in 2009 for $170 million alongside his wife, Heather Hill Washburne, and her sister Elisa Hill Summers and Elisa's husband. Heather Hill Washburne is the granddaughter of Margaret Hunt Hill and the great-granddaughter of H.L. Hunt, founder of Hunt Oil.
That lineage matters for reading the pace of change here. This isn't a REIT optimizing a spreadsheet. It's a family that has owned this specific block for going on two decades, working with an architecture firm that has handled Village projects for years, making a small, deliberate bet on where the next four percent of space should go.
The Reshuffle That Already Happened
The construction fences are the visible part. The quieter version of the same story has been playing out at street level for the past year. The corner that used to hold a Starbucks, long a default meeting spot for people running errands between shops, is now occupied by Khaite, the New York ready-to-wear label. That's not new square footage. That's an existing storefront changing hands, the same growth-without-expansion logic showing up in retail leasing instead of construction permits.
Inside the Dior boutique, which was rebuilt into a two-level space referencing the brand's flagship at 30 Montaigne in Paris, Café Dior by Dominique Crenn opened on February 22, 2025. Crenn is the first American woman to earn three Michelin stars, and the café is now well past a year of daytime service, giving the Village a full lunch concept rather than the pastry-counter version most Café Dior locations run elsewhere.
Carolina Herrera used its Village storefront this year for a different kind of local pairing, a capsule collection developed with Miron Crosby, the Dallas bootmaker whose own storefront sits elsewhere in the Village. Three designs, merging both brands' aesthetics, sold through a single storefront. It's a small collaboration on paper, but it's the kind of pairing that only happens when a global house wants this specific address rather than any Texas location that would do.
Reading the Next Fence
None of this changes what the Village looks like from the street today. The same brands, the same brick paths, the same valet stand outside Hermès. What's changed is what a construction fence there now signals. It isn't a preview of something bigger. It's confirmation that ownership has decided the remaining four percent of buildable space is worth pursuing carefully, on a timeline measured in months, inside a shell that answers to federal landmark rules before it answers to any tenant's wish list.
The two "Coming Soon" placeholders in Building C are still the detail worth watching. As of the most recent reporting this year, they remain unannounced, which means the next real news out of the Village probably won't be a new building. It'll be two storefronts finally getting names, sometime after a fence on Douglas Avenue comes down.
If you're the kind of Park Cities resident who already tracks which storefront changed hands before it makes the local paper, that's the same habit of paying attention that Scout RE brings to this neighborhood every day, whether the news is a construction filing on Douglas Avenue or a home a few blocks over.
