Walk from Preston Road toward Mockingbird this month and the block still looks like itself. Valets stand outside Hermès. There's a line at Sadelle's. Someone's dog is tied to a bench outside Market, waiting out a quick errand. But cut through the middle of the Village, past where the Starbucks used to be, and the storefront that anchored a decade of coffee runs and dog-walk pit stops is gone. In its place: Khaite, the New York ready-to-wear label that shows up in every serious luxury directory in the country.
Nobody sent out a press release when that happened. It's the kind of change you only notice mid-stride, the way you notice a tree got cut down on a street you drive every day. But it's not an isolated swap. Highland Park Village has spent the past year quietly re-sorting itself, tenant by tenant, corner by corner, and the pattern behind it explains a lot about why the block feels different this fall even though it hasn't added a single new door.
What Actually Left, and What Took Its Place
The Khaite move is the most visible change because Starbucks functioned as something closer to a living room than a coffee counter. But it's one piece of a larger reshuffle. Ralph Lauren, which had occupied its own two-story building at the Village's Preston Road entrance for decades, moved out to Cole Avenue. Roller Rabbit, the children's clothing brand, closed its storefront after roughly eleven years in the Village and reopened on Knox Street, part of the same wave of departures that has included Anthropologie.
Into the vacated Ralph Lauren footprint and the previous Carolina Herrera space, Hermès is expanding. That's two adjacent, high-value corners going to a single house rather than getting split among several smaller tenants, a detail that marks a change in the Village's tenant mix.
Carolina Herrera didn't leave. It moved to a new 3,500-square-foot corner location at 70 Highland Park Village, and marked the relocation with a launch party built around a limited-edition collaboration with Miron Crosby, the Dallas bootmaker founded by sisters Lizzie Means Duplantis and Sarah Means. The three-piece capsule, inspired by Carolina Herrera's Fall 2025 runway show, paired the fashion house's floral motifs with Miron Crosby's hand-tooled boots, in a run of just 75 pairs per style. The Houston Chronicle quoted Lizzie Means Duplantis describing the appeal of the pairing as having "credibility that comes along with being able to collaborate with someone as timeless as Carolina Herrera." Wes Gordon, Carolina Herrera's creative director, and company president Emilie Rubinfeld both flew in for the opening.
Café Dior, meanwhile, has quietly crossed its first full year of daytime service inside the reworked Dior boutique. Helmed by Dominique Crenn, the first American woman to hold three Michelin stars, it's now a real second brunch anchor alongside Sadelle's all-day menu of sliced-to-order salmon and sticky buns, not a novelty that opened with fanfare and faded.
How Departures and Arrivals Are Changing the Village
Here's the part that isn't obvious from any single storefront: the brands staying and expanding in the Village, Carolina Herrera, Hermès, and a couple of years back, Van Cleef & Arpels, all sit at the high end of what retail people call hard luxury. Fine jewelry, couture, the kind of category that depends on a slower, appointment-driven sales floor rather than heavy foot traffic. The brands that left, Ralph Lauren, which moved out to Cole Avenue, and Roller Rabbit, which reopened on Knox Street, compete more on volume and visibility, the kind of business that benefits from a growing, walkable district with room to add square footage.
Highland Park Village can't offer that. It's a seven-building complex bordered by Preston Road, Mockingbird Lane, Livingston Avenue and Douglas Avenue, sitting on the National Register of Historic Places since it was recognized as one of the country's first self-contained shopping centers. The footprint has stayed roughly the same since 1931. When a landlord in that position wants to grow revenue, the options are limited: build modestly where the historic preservation rules allow it, and be more selective about who gets the space that already exists.
Taken together, the departures and the filing point to a shift in the Village's tenant mix. The filing concerns additional space, while the departures concern who occupies the existing storefronts.
The Paperwork Behind the Coming Soon Signs
On April 13, 2026, Highland Park Village LP filed plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to add roughly 10,500 square feet across two buildings. Building C, which fronts Douglas Avenue, would grow by about 3,500 square feet. Building D, at the gateway corner of Douglas and Mockingbird, would add roughly 7,000 more. The initial filing estimated the project at $25 million. Days later, according to reporting from The Real Deal, that figure was revised down to $11 million. The architect on record is OMNIPLAN, a Dallas firm with a long history of building inside historic footprints, which matters here since any addition has to work around the Mediterranean-style facades that got the Village landmark status in the first place.
The filing is preliminary. There's no confirmed construction start date, and the cost estimate has already moved once. But two spaces in Building C are marked "Coming Soon" on the Village's own directory right now, alongside standing tenants like Dior, Beretta, Oscar de la Renta and The Honor Bar. Building D currently houses the Village's own management offices. Do the math on 10,500 additional square feet in a center that already runs more than sixty stores and restaurants, with two mystery slots already teed up, and it's clear the reshuffle isn't finished.
The ownership behind all of this traces to Gillon Property Group, a firm formed in 2025 to consolidate the real estate holdings of the Washburne and Hunt-Hill families. Ray Washburne, founder of the Mi Cocina restaurant chain, bought the Village with his wife Heather Hill Washburne in 2009 for about $170 million. She's a granddaughter of Margaret Hunt Hill and great-granddaughter of Hunt Oil founder H.L. Hunt. It's the same family whose retail arm is leasing the new Knox Street development a mile south.
What This Looks Like If You Haven't Walked the Block Since Spring
A few things to expect if your last real pass through the Village was earlier this year:
- The Starbucks storefront is Khaite now
- Carolina Herrera has a new corner address at 70 Highland Park Village, with a Miron Crosby boot collaboration in the windows
- Ralph Lauren's old two-story building near the Preston Road entrance and Carolina Herrera's former space are both being absorbed into an expanding Hermès footprint
- Roller Rabbit is gone, having relocated to Knox Street
- Café Dior is running full daytime service, not a soft-launch trial
- Two spaces in Building C are marked "Coming Soon," with a state filing suggesting more square footage is on the way
None of this changes what a lunch or a Saturday afternoon at the Village actually feels like day to day. Café Pacific, Mi Cocina and the rest of the dining lineup are running as usual. But the tenant roster underneath that familiar surface has moved more in the past year than in most of the previous decade combined, and the shift has a logic to it once you know where to look. The Village's tenant roster has shifted, and 2026 has been the year that change became visible from the sidewalk.
If you've been wondering why a familiar storefront went quiet with a placard in the window, or why a jewelry house suddenly seems to have twice the space it used to, that's the answer. Not a single grand reopening, but a series of changes unfolding one lease at a time.
Highland Park keeps changing in small, specific ways even when the postcard version never seems to move. If you want more of these dispatches as the Village's next chapter plays out, or you're curious what any of this means for a specific address nearby, Ana Candido is always happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.
