Highland Park

Highland Park is its own town. It's incorporated, has its own school district, town code, and architectural review process. You've got to understand both the written rules and the unwritten ones. Respect the architectural fabric. Lots are smaller than Preston Hollow. Review is more rigorous. The design quality bar is higher.

What's specific to Highland Park

Architectural review. The town requires review for any structural addition, which includes pool decks, pavilions, walls, and significant hardscape. The process is meaningful. A wrong package wastes weeks of your time. We've worked enough Highland Park projects since the early 2000s to know what passes.

Lot size. Most Highland Park lots run quarter-acre to half-acre in size. This fundamentally changes pool placement options. The estate pools you'd build in Preston Hollow rarely fit here. A courtyard pool, plunge pool, or thoughtfully scaled main pool works much better. Nothing that overwhelms the lot.

Architecture. Mediterranean, Tudor, English Cotswold, Georgian, French eclectic. The town leans pretty traditional in its tastes. Landscape vocabulary is more constrained because of that. Modern work exists but often doesn't read well with the neighborhood aesthetic.

Trees. This neighborhood has the densest mature canopy in Dallas. The same protection rules apply. We design around the trees that truly matter, not through them.

Setbacks and easements. Highland Park enforces these quite tightly. Pool placement, pavilion siting, and hardscape edges all get checked at survey. We work to setbacks before we even start drawing.