Walk the corner of Douglas and Mockingbird on a Saturday morning and you will notice two things that do not seem to belong together. There is fresh paperwork behind the storefronts that points to millions of dollars in new construction. And there are empty spots where brands that spent a decade or more at Highland Park Village used to be. Both are true right now, at the same address, and neither one explains the other on its own.
That is the actual story here. Highland Park Village is not simply adding square footage or simply losing tenants. It is doing both, on purpose, because it is placing two different bets about who belongs in the Village and who belongs a mile north on Knox Street.
The Paperwork Behind the Fencing
The filing that set this in motion landed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation this spring. 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, according to reporting from The Real Deal.
That kind of swing in a preliminary state filing is not unusual on its own, but it tells you something about where this project sits in its life cycle: early. As of the filing, there was no announced construction start date, no confirmed phasing, and no public word on which brands might land the new space. TDLR paperwork like this typically shows up in the state's records before a single wall comes down, which is worth knowing if you are expecting to see cranes tomorrow. You are more likely to see a slow build than a sudden one.
The ownership behind the filing matters too. Gillon Property Group was formed in 2025 to consolidate the real estate holdings of the Washburne and Hunt-Hill families, two of the more established names in Texas real estate. 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. In other words, this is not outside capital chasing a quick flip. It is a family that has owned this block for 17 years, deciding to keep investing in it rather than harvest it.
The New Names Getting the Best Corners
While the state filing works through the pipeline, the tenant roster has already been moving. Carolina Herrera relocated to a new corner location at 70 Highland Park Village, and the brand marked the move with a launch event built around a capsule collaboration with Dallas-based bootmaker Miron Crosby, according to coverage from Modern Luxury. It is the kind of local-meets-global pairing that only makes sense in a shopping center that can pull both audiences into the same storefront on the same afternoon.
Hermès, meanwhile, is expanding into the footprints vacated by both Carolina Herrera's old spot and Ralph Lauren's former space, according to Dallas Morning News reporting. That is two adjacent, high-value footprints going to a single house, not split among several smaller tenants. A few years earlier, Van Cleef & Arpels had already made a similar move, leaving its space inside Neiman Marcus at NorthPark Center for a standalone two-level store in the Village, according to Dallas Morning News.
The pattern across all three moves is the same. Each brand is getting more space, not less, and each is getting it in a location built for a slower, more private kind of shopping trip. That is not how a shopping center behaves when it is trying to fill vacancies. It is how a shopping center behaves when it is being selective about who gets the best real estate on the property.
Who's Arriving, Who Already Left
| Brand | Move | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Carolina Herrera | Relocated to new corner space at 70 Highland Park Village | Staying, expanded footprint |
| Hermès | Expanding into former Carolina Herrera and Ralph Lauren spaces | Staying, expanded footprint |
| Van Cleef & Arpels | Moved from Neiman Marcus at NorthPark into a standalone two-level store | Staying, expanded footprint |
| Ralph Lauren | Closed its Village location after decades | Cole Avenue, Knox-Henderson |
| Roller Rabbit | Closed after about 11 years at the Village | Knox Street |
Ralph Lauren's departure was the one that got the most attention locally, in part because the brand had occupied its two-story building at the Village's Preston Road entrance for decades before moving to Cole Avenue. Roller Rabbit followed a similar path in the fall of 2025, closing its Village storefront after roughly 11 years and reopening on Knox Street, joining what Dallas Morning News described as a broader wave of brands making the same move, including Anthropologie.
Two Different Bets Under One Roof
Here is where the two halves of this story connect. A shopping center that is losing long-tenured tenants while also filing for millions of dollars in new construction is not confused about its direction. It is sorting.
The brands staying and expanding, Carolina Herrera, Hermès, Van Cleef & Arpels, all sit at the upper end of what retail real estate people call hard luxury: high-margin categories like fine jewelry and couture that depend on a slower, appointment-driven sales floor rather than foot traffic volume. The brands leaving for Knox-Henderson, Ralph Lauren and Roller Rabbit among them, are strong names, but they compete more on volume and visibility, the kind of business that benefits from being part of a growing, walkable district rather than a fixed historic footprint.
Highland Park Village cannot grow outward. It is a seven-building complex on a defined block bordered by Preston Road, Mockingbird Lane, Livingston Avenue and Douglas Avenue, and it has operated inside roughly the same physical footprint since 1931. When a landlord in that position wants to increase revenue per square foot, the options are limited: build modestly where you can, and be more selective about who occupies the space you already have. The $11 million filing and the tenant churn are the same strategy expressed two different ways.
That patience is easier to justify for an ownership group like Gillon Property Group, built on family capital that has held this property for close to two decades already. A landlord chasing quarterly occupancy numbers fills empty storefronts fast. A landlord playing a longer game can afford to let a departing tenant's space sit as "coming soon" while it waits for the right replacement, which is exactly what public listings showed for a couple of spaces in Building C earlier this year.
What You'll Actually Notice on a Walk Through Right Now
None of this means the Village feels different if you are just there for lunch. The Honor Bar is still open in Building D, alongside long-standing tenants like Dior, Beretta and Oscar de la Renta. Café Pacific, Mi Cocina and the rest of the Village's dining lineup are running as usual. The TDLR filing was still in a preliminary stage as of this spring, with no confirmed construction start date, so the fencing and scaffolding most residents associate with a project like this have not necessarily gone up yet, and the timeline could shift again the way the cost estimate already did.
What has changed, and what you can see just by walking the block, is which storefronts carry new signage and which ones sit quiet with a "coming soon" placard in the window. If you have wondered why a familiar name is missing from its old corner, or why a jewelry house suddenly has twice the space it used to, the answer isn't a single grand reopening. It's a shopping center quietly deciding, one lease at a time, what kind of place it wants to be for its next decade.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values on your own block, or you're simply curious how a neighborhood commercial corridor like this factors into what a Highland Park home is worth today, JP Findley Group knows this market from the ground up. Request Your Free Home Valuation and we'll walk you through it.
