Stand at the north end of Lexington Avenue, cross Armstrong, and by the time the Katy Trail bends toward Cole, you can see cranes finishing what will be, for practical purposes, a new front porch for Highland Park. The Knox Street project is not a neighborhood in the abstract sense. It is a four-acre building site that shares a property line with the Trail residents already walk before breakfast, and its tenant list has now been announced in enough detail to say something specific about who the developers think will be walking in.
Here is the thesis worth holding while you read the rest: the Knox Street buildout is being underwritten less by tourism than by the roughly one-mile radius of homes around it. Every publicly announced tenant, from the hotel operator to the four fashion labels, already trades in cities where the customer walks to the store from home. That is a design decision, and it changes how a Highland Park resident should think about the corridor.
The Fall 2026 Delivery, In One Paragraph
A joint venture of BDT & MSD Partners, Trammell Crow Company, Highland Park Village Associates, and The Retail Connection topped out the project this year, and the program spans more than one million square feet: 150,000 square feet of office, 100,000 square feet of retail, a 27-story, 186-unit apartment tower, a half-acre park connecting directly to the Katy Trail, and The Knox Hotel and Residences, a 140-room hotel with 47 ultra-luxury condominiums operated by Auberge Collection. The retail and restaurants are scheduled to arrive after The Knox Hotel's opening in Fall 2026. The nine-story office building at 3333 Knox is on the same late-2026 timeline and has been fully preleased since fall 2024 to ISN Software Corporation, Paul Hastings LLP, and BDT & MSD.
That is a lot of numbers. What matters for a resident is that three separate delivery streams, hotel, office, and retail, all land inside a single autumn window rather than trickling in over years.
Read The Tenants As A Signal
The retail lineup is the clearest tell. DÔEN, STAUD, and TOTEME will open their first standalone Texas locations at Knox Street in 2026, joined by TWP. Three of the four have never operated a Texas storefront. What they share, if you know the brands, is a specific customer profile: women who currently order these labels to a Highland Park address and pay for expedited shipping.
| Retailer | Origin | Where they currently trade |
|---|---|---|
| DÔEN | Santa Barbara | Standalone shops in coastal-luxury markets |
| STAUD | Los Angeles | Standalone shops in coastal-luxury markets |
| TOTEME | Stockholm | European fashion houses selectively expanding in the U.S. |
| TWP | New York | Founder-led American sportswear |
These four contemporary brands currently operate storefronts in the buzzy retail hubs you'd imagine, from New York City and Los Angeles to Aspen and Palm Beach. That is the peer set. If you have wondered why a boutique on Lexington in Manhattan or a shop on East Cooper in Aspen feels familiar when you walk into Highland Park Village, this is why. Knox Street is being leased by the same team. Stephen Summers and Kaitlin Travis of Highland Park Village Associates are leading retail leasing.
The Restaurant That Sets The Tone
Sant Ambroeus, the Milanese hospitality group with restaurants in New York, Aspen, Palm Beach, Milan, and Paris, is opening an approximately 7,800-square-foot restaurant with all-day dining and outdoor patio seating as the first announced restaurant tenant in the Knox Street development, which sits adjacent to the Katy Trail. Anchoring the base of The Lora and overlooking Knox Street Park, the restaurant will offer all-day dining, an elegant café, and dedicated outdoor patio seating.
All-day dining is the point. Sant Ambroeus is not a dinner reservation. It is a place you walk to for a Shakerato at 10 a.m., come back to for lunch, and drop into again at 6 p.m. That cadence only works if your customer lives close enough to walk.
The Shakerato, an espresso shaken hard with sugar and ice until it is cold and frothy, is the drink that gets ordered at every table at every hour, and the Principessa cake, a lemon sponge layered with vanilla pastry cream and whipped cream and covered in pink almond marzipan, photographs perfectly and tastes better than it looks. Neither of those is a destination-dining item. They are habit items, ordered by people who have already decided this is their café.
Compare that to the existing Knox anchors residents already use. Knox Street is already home to Georgie by Curtis Stone, Le Bilboquet, RH Gallery and Rooftop Restaurant, Toulouse, and Taverna, among others. Those are reservation restaurants. Sant Ambroeus is meant to fill the gap between them, the daytime hours the corridor has never fully claimed.
The Park Is The Amenity, Not The Hotel
The half-acre park is easy to skim past in a press release. It should not be. OJB Landscape Architecture, the firm behind Klyde Warren Park, is leading the design of the development's green space, and the centrally located park integrates with the Katy Trail while serving as a meeting place and respite for those enjoying the Trail and the Knox Street neighborhood.
Two things follow from that:
- The Trail extension is programmatic, not decorative. OJB's Klyde Warren work turned a highway cap into a civic room. The same team applied to a half-acre parcel with a direct Katy Trail on-ramp will produce something residents use daily, not something they visit.
- The patios face the park. Sant Ambroeus overlooks it. The al fresco spaces are oriented outward. That is a different urban logic than Highland Park Village's inward courtyard, and it turns the Trail itself into the corridor's spine.
For a resident whose morning already includes the Katy Trail, the practical effect is that the walk gains a mid-point. Coffee at seven, back to the Trail, home by eight. That loop did not exist before.
The Hotel And Residences, Briefly
The Knox Hotel and Residences will feature a 140-room hotel and ultra-luxury condominiums ranging from 2,500 square feet to more than 15,000 square feet, with the hotel designed by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio and including restaurants, bars and lounges, expansive event spaces, and a full-floor spa and wellness destination connected to an outdoor pool and bar with expansive views of downtown Dallas, while the residences are designed by Dallas-based interior designer Chad Dorsey. The private residences are already nearly sold out well ahead of completion.
The pre-sale pace matters more than the finish schedule. A residence buyer at Knox is signaling that lock-and-leave living inside walking distance of Highland Park has enough demand to clear the market before the building opens. That has implications for the surrounding single-family stock, particularly for owners who have been quietly considering what a right-size move would look like without leaving the neighborhood's orbit.
What Changes For A Highland Park Saturday
Set aside the square footage and the tenant names for a moment. A resident's actual weekend is the test.
- The Katy Trail loop gains a coffee stop with indoor and outdoor seating that opens early.
- The retail walk that has, for a decade, meant Highland Park Village exclusively now has a second node ten minutes north on foot, with different labels and a different feel.
- The half-acre park gives a place to meet a friend or a client that is neither a restaurant nor a lobby.
- The office building at 3333 Knox brings a weekday lunch crowd that will change reservation patterns at the existing Knox restaurants, most noticeably at the counter-service and café tier.
None of that requires driving. All of it is inside the radius most Highland Park residents already walk on a Saturday.
A Note On What Else Is Nearby
While Knox Street dominates the headlines, one smaller opening deserves a mention because it landed inside the neighborhood proper. Coupes, a French-inspired champagne bar with a touch of Texas, opened at the end of December in The Shops of Highland Park at 4324 Oak Lawn Avenue, with an interior by Dallas-based Coevál Studio, serving sparkling vintage alongside small plates of gougères, wild mushroom tartine, oysters, and caviar. If Sant Ambroeus is the daytime addition, Coupes is the evening one, and it opened first.
Fall will arrive faster than the construction fencing suggests. If you own in Highland Park and have been curious how the Knox delivery affects your block, or you are watching from University Park or Preston Hollow and wondering what a right-size move into a Knox-adjacent residence would actually look like, that is a conversation worth having before the ribbon-cuttings start. Work with us at Wiebe Real Estate and we will walk the corridor with you, block by block.
