The Dean Of Dallas Design

Billionaire Tim Headington is trying to breathe more life into downtown Dallas by giving it a hipper aesthetic.

- Sheila Marikar

DESIGN WHEN TIM HEADINGTON was 13 years old, his father proposed that he skip school and accompany him on a business trip to Dallas, a four-hour drive from their Oklahoma City home. Like many other teenagers, Tim didn’t need much convincing.

Approaching the city, on Interstate 35, they saw a sign that read, “Welcome President and Mrs. Kennedy.” They diverted downtown to see the parade. “At that time, the city was just vibrant,” Headington recalls on a recent morning, standing on the same block of Main Street where he had watched John F. Kennedy’s motorcade pass by 55 years ago. “It was 10 people deep on all sides.”

Of course, that day ended in tragedy. But watching the parade and observing the street life it fomented gave Headington an indelible impression of what a city could be. By the time he settled in Dallas, in 1984, the crowds he once saw were gone. The city’s well-heeled denizens had relocated to the suburbs and deigned to come downtown only to shop at the flagship Neiman Marcus department store, with its swift valet parking service.

Headington wondered if he could revive downtown’s grandeur. In 2004, the Dallas National Bank building, a neo-Gothic tower on the National Register of Historic Places, came on the market. It stood across the street from where Headington had watched the 1963 parade. As with playing hooky, he didn’t need to be talked into it.

“I thought, How cool would it be to just have this building,” Headington says, “to create something that gives people a reason to come downtown and stay?”