Dallas, Block by Block

Highland Park is the kind of neighborhood that people move to once and never leave. The boulevards are wide and tree-lined, the houses are set back behind deep lawns, and the village — with its independent shops and restaurants clustered around a central square — has the unhurried quality of a place that has never needed to reinvent itself.

The architecture here is a survey of early twentieth-century American residential styles at their most accomplished: Tudor revivals with steeply pitched rooflines, Colonial revivals with wide front porches, Mediterranean villas with red tile roofs and arched loggias. The houses are large, but they wear their size with a certain modesty — set behind mature oaks and magnolias that have been growing since the houses were new.

What makes Highland Park genuinely special, beyond the architecture and the landscaping, is the sense of continuity. Families stay for generations. Houses pass from parents to children. The woman who has lived on the same block for forty years knows the history of every house on it, and she will tell you, if you ask.

The best streets: Beverly Drive for the grandest estates, Miramar Avenue for the most beautiful Tudors, and the blocks around Flippen Park for the kind of quiet, tree-shaded afternoon that reminds you why people choose to live in neighborhoods rather than just houses.

Lakewood is where Dallas keeps its soul. The neighborhood sits east of downtown, along the wooded shores of White Rock Lake, and it has a character that is entirely its own — unpretentious, creative, deeply rooted, and quietly beautiful.

The housing stock is a mix of Craftsman bungalows, Tudor cottages, and Spanish eclectic houses built mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, when the neighborhood was developed as a streetcar suburb. The lots are modest by Dallas standards, but the trees are extraordinary — live oaks and pecans that have been growing for a century, their canopies meeting over the streets to create a green tunnel effect that is genuinely magical in the late afternoon light.

The people who live in Lakewood tend to be the kind of people who chose it specifically. Artists, architects, teachers, writers — people who value character over square footage and walkability over convenience. The neighborhood has a farmers market, several excellent independent restaurants, and a community garden that has been tended by volunteers for thirty years.

White Rock Lake is the neighborhood's great amenity — a 1,000-acre urban lake with a nine-mile trail, a sailing club, and a bathhouse that has been converted into a community center. On weekend mornings, the trail is full of runners and cyclists and people walking dogs, and the whole scene has the easy, unhurried quality of a neighborhood that is genuinely happy with itself.

Preston Hollow is where Dallas keeps its grandest houses. The neighborhood sits in the northwest quadrant of the city, on land that was once cotton fields and cattle ranches, and it has been home to presidents, oil men, and the quietly wealthy for the better part of a century.

The houses here are large — genuinely, unapologetically large — but the neighborhood's character is defined less by size than by privacy. The lots are deep, the driveways are long, and the mature trees that line the streets create a sense of enclosure that makes the whole neighborhood feel like a world apart from the city around it.

The architecture ranges from the grand Georgian and Colonial revivals of the 1940s and 1950s to the more recent custom homes that have replaced some of the original stock. The best of the older houses have a quality of permanence — built with the expectation that they would stand for a century, and furnished accordingly.

What Preston Hollow offers that no other Dallas neighborhood can quite match is the combination of genuine privacy and genuine proximity. You are ten minutes from downtown, five minutes from the best restaurants in the city, and yet you can stand in your back garden and hear nothing but birds. For a certain kind of person, that is exactly the point.