What Opens on Knox Street Near Highland Park This Fall

If you live here, you have been reading about Knox Street for three years. Sant Ambroeus. A 140-room Auberge hotel. DÔEN, STAUD, TOTEME. Every announcement arrives written in the present tense, and every one of them describes a block you still drive past behind a construction fence.

Here is the part that matters between now and Christmas: most of what has been announced does not open this fall. What does open, in order, is a series of small storefronts, and the order they arrive in tells you something more useful than any of the renderings have.

The tenants are being selected by the same people who select the tenants at Highland Park Village.

The tell is who signs the leases

Retail leasing at Knox Street is led by Stephen Summers and Kaitlin Travis of Highland Park Village Associates. The Village's ownership sits inside the Knox joint venture alongside BDT & MSD Partners, Trammell Crow Company, and The Retail Connection. That is not a footnote in a press release. It is the reason the incoming tenant list reads the way it does.

Watch how it works in practice. Cult Gaia spent time in Dallas first as a residency inside Market at Highland Park Village. It signed a permanent 2,757-square-foot store on Knox, opening in November with an on-site matcha experience. TWP, the American sportswear label, ran a pop-up in Highland Park before committing to a permanent Knox space this fall. Simkhai followed the same path years earlier, testing through the Village's Market before taking its own storefront.

The Village has become the audition stage. Knox Street is where the brands that pass get a lease. For a Highland Park resident, that means the two ends of your errand route are being curated by one team with one taste, roughly a mile apart.

That has a practical consequence. Do not expect Knox to become a different kind of shopping district from the one you already use. Expect a second one, tuned slightly younger, with more than 100,000 square feet of new retail layered onto the 70-plus shops and restaurants Knox already carries, including Kith, Ralph Lauren, Jones Road, Vince, and CB2.

The fall calendar, sorted by what actually has a date

The single most useful thing anyone can do with the Knox news cycle is separate the dated from the undated. Here is that separation.

Sant Ambroeus deserves its own sentence, because it is the name most people in this neighborhood are actually waiting on. The Milanese group, founded in 1936 and opening its first Texas location here, has roughly 7,800 square feet at the base of The Lora with all-day dining, a café, and a patio facing the new park. There is no confirmed opening date beyond late 2026, which is when the development finishes construction. Do not plan a birthday dinner around it. Plan one around it in 2027.

What is already open, and worth a Tuesday

The corridor is not a fence from end to end. Caffe Lucca opened this spring at 4445 Travis Street, in the former Restaurant at Grange Hall, with the Grange Hall shop and its flowers still in place. It is Julian Barsotti's Sicilian project with Jason Garrett, and it is worth understanding what that pairing means. Barsotti also runs Nonna, Barsotti's, Fachini, and Odelay. The dish the whole menu turns on is busiate, a pasta ringlet formed on a thin rod the way it was made a thousand years ago, offered with four sauces. Garrett told the Dallas Morning News that part of his job was picking patio chairs that would feel welcoming to people coming off the Katy Trail, which tells you exactly who they built the room for. D Magazine has a critic's review scheduled for its October issue, so expect the reservation window to tighten after that.

A few blocks away, Mister Charles occupies the landmarked former Highland Park Soda Fountain building at 3219 Knox, façade preserved, interior rebuilt entirely. It remains the clearest existing example of how a Knox rebuild can keep the thing you recognize while replacing everything behind it.

For a normal weekday, the anchors have not moved. Village Baking Co., Knox Bistro, Georgie, Foxtrot, and Berkley's Market are where they were. Berkley's M.K.T. sits right at the Knox crossing of the trail, and the Friends of the Katy Trail asks that trail users who duck in actually buy something on the way out. That is a fair trade for the closest coffee to the crossing.

The park is the change that alters your week

Everything above is retail. The change with the most effect on a Highland Park household is a half-acre of grass.

Knox Street's own site says a new greenspace and garden arrives this fall, with a dedicated Katy Trail entrance along the east side of the neighborhood. OJB Landscape Architecture designed it, and it connects directly to the trail. If your route currently involves walking to Knox, crossing, and finding a way onto the path, that geometry changes this season.

Some Katy Trail context worth holding onto. The trail runs 3.5 miles with 17 access points, operates on City of Dallas park hours from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., and lights run from 5 a.m. to sunrise and again from sunset to midnight. Mile markers are set into the concrete every quarter mile. Separately from the private development, Katy Trail 2024 City Bond projects will bring a new entrance and landscape restoration north of Knox, which is worth watching if the Knox entrance is your regular one. Friends of the Katy Trail keeps the current calendar and construction notices on its site, and that is the place to check before a race weekend rather than relying on a developer timeline.

One small detail that will make you smile the first time someone explains it at a dinner party: The Lora, the 27-story, 186-unit tower now leasing by appointment, takes its name from the monk parakeets that live along the Katy Trail. Its arches reference the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad depot that gave the trail its bed.

What left, and why the list is the real story

Longtime residents measure a block by what it lost, not what it gained. The recent ledger:

• Chuy's relocated to Greenville Avenue in 2025 after 32 years on Knox.
• Anthropologie closed in May 2025 after only three years; Kith took the space.
• Pottery Barn, a Knox mainstay since the 1990s, moved to NorthPark in 2026.
• Weir's closed.
• The Highland Park Soda Fountain is gone, and for most people here that one still stings more than the rest combined.
• Mar Y Sol closed in mid-August, with a sports bar slated to follow in October.
• A Houston-based designer lighting brand just opened its first Dallas store outside Market Center in the former Origin Kitchen + Bar space.

Read that list against the incoming one and the pattern is plain. Thirty-two years of Tex-Mex and a 1990s furniture lease are being replaced by first-to-Texas fashion labels with two to four stores nationally. Whether that is a gain depends entirely on what you used the block for.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the axis

The Village is not standing still while Knox gets the headlines, but its fall reads as continuity rather than reinvention. Highland Park Village's own events calendar lists a Brunello Cucinelli Fall Winter 2026 women's collection presentation at the boutique on Thursday, September 10, beginning at 10 a.m. Miu Miu's roughly 3,800-square-foot store, one of fewer than a dozen in the country, remains one of the newer arrivals, and state filings reported by the Dallas Morning News this spring point to renovation work near the intersection.

The daytime food case is the part most residents underuse. Sadelle's runs the New York deli program with sliced-to-order salmon, sticky buns, breakfast tacos, and a café side built for grab-and-go. Café Dior by Dominique Crenn opened inside the Dior store in 2025. Honor Bar still has the patio under the oak. Bistro 31, Café Pacific, Mi Cocina, and Fachini have not changed. Neither have the local names that give the Village its character: Miron Crosby, La Vie Style House, Lele Sadoughi, Madison, Peeper's, and St. Michael's Woman's Exchange, whose sales support community charities.

How to read the rest of the year

If you want a single sentence to carry into October: this fall you get four or five boutiques and a park, and the things that will actually reorganize the block, the hotel, the office building at 3333 Knox that is fully preleased to ISN, Paul Hastings, and BDT & MSD, and the restaurants, land in the last weeks of the year or in 2027.

That sequencing has a real effect on the eastern streets of Highland Park. Weekday foot traffic and valet demand do not arrive with Addison Bay in September. They arrive when 150,000 square feet of offices fill and a 140-room hotel starts running arrivals, which is a late-2026 event at the earliest. Anyone who has been bracing for a change in the rhythm of their block has a few more quiet months than the announcements suggest.

Use them. Walk the new trail entrance when it opens. Get a Caffe Lucca reservation before the October review lands. Then let the boutiques come to you.

When you are ready to talk about what any of this means for your own house, whether that is timing a sale, planning a renovation, or understanding how the eastern edge of the Park Cities is changing, Marla Sewall is glad to sit down with you. Call or email Marla to schedule a personal consultation about your home.