Dallas developer opens two new luxury hotels in Texas, California

Developer Craig Hall has been busy this month with the opening of the luxury hotel anchoring his namesake development, Hall Park, in a fast-growing Dallas-area suburb, as well as the Thompson Palm Springs hotel in California.

The two luxury hotels differ quite a bit from each other, with the bungalow-style Thompson Palm Springs hotel sprawling across 2.5 blocks in downtown Palm Springs, California, while the 13-story, 224-room Hall Park Hotel, part of Marriott’s Autograph collection, sits in the fast-growing suburb of Frisco, Texas, about 28 miles north of downtown Dallas. The high-end Hall Park Hotel was built to cater to visitors of the more than 200 companies that call Hall Park home.

Hall got into the hospitality industry when he opened his first hotel in 2019: the Hall Arts Hotel in downtown Dallas.

“Our first hotel was in the Dallas Arts District, and we did a few things differently this time,” Hall, founder and chairman of Hall Group, told CoStar News, in talking about the new Hall Park Hotel in Frisco. “We put the restaurant on the ground floor, and we have 60 suites set up for long-term stays. Texas has so many people moving from California and New York every day. This is a place where you can move your business and a place to stay for three to six months while you look for a home.”

The new hotel’s suites have two- to three-bedrooms, as well as kitchenettes, to cater to relocating families. The Lone Star State has been a mecca for businesses seeking friendly regulations and a lower cost of living compared to the U.S. coastal markets. Texas ranked as the No. 1 state for out-of-state relocations between 2010 and 2019, according to a report the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Hall Park in Frisco has benefited from an influx of company relocations, including the largest manufacturer of hardwood lumber in North America, as CoStar News has previously reported, and Ruiz Foods’ move to Hall Park from California earlier this year. In addition to the new hotel, The Monarch, a luxury residential high-rise tower, recently opened at Hall Park.

“We are setting up Hall Park to be a major player in facilitating good businesses to move into Frisco,” Hall told CoStar News. “We are about a third the way built out at Hall Park with the ability to have about 10 million more square feet of office, retail and residential.”

Hall thinks Texas will see more in-migration in the next 10 to 20 years from states like Florida where there has been “some unfortunate climate issues,” he said. “We are competing with Chicago, New York and Atlanta for companies,” he added.

Hall was the first commercial real estate developer that ventured into Frisco, a municipality far north of Dallas that when he acquired more than 160 acres for Hall Park in 1989, housed only cows and dirt roads. Beyond the cattle, there was a population of about 6,000 residents within the rural North Texas city.

Less than a decade later, the real estate developer began the first office building that later turned into a sprawling 15-building campus known as Hall Park with retail, residential and hotel. The park is home to more than 200 companies and hundreds of pieces of contemporary art.

Along with the new hotel tower at Hall Park, Hall Group opened the adjacent Kaleidoscope Park, modeled after Klyde Warren Park that connects downtown and Uptown Dallas. Kaleidoscope Park is being run by a nonprofit foundation and programmed with activities for residents and visitors. The city owns the park and Hall Group developed the project.

Hall has been investing in North Texas for decades after beginning his real estate career in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The then-teenager acquired a rooming house for $4,000 as a way to show landlords they could offer affordable housing to college students. Like other real estate investors who lived through the Savings and Loan crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hall rode the boom-and-bust waves hitting Texas.

He didn’t give up and ultimately banked on the future of the Dallas-area’s northward growth, buying the acreage in Frisco that later became Hall Park. It hasn’t been an easy path, with Hall Park at one time being on the market about a decade ago.

“Thank goodness we didn’t sell it,” Hall told CoStar News. “We were so close to a deal and I’m so glad we didn’t do it. We were inches apart and sometimes inches matter. We were literally about $10 million apart in value and I’m so happy it worked out the way it did.”

By not parting with Hall Park, Hall has begun the next chapter of the mixed-use development: An ambitious $7 billion plan called Hall Park 2.0 that is expected to take two decades to complete, as previously reported by CoStar News.

Along with developing in Texas, Hall and his wife are also the owners of a Napa Valley vineyard in California that produces award-winning Hall-branded wine.

Even though Hall is busy opening two luxury hotels — the Hall Park Hotel and the Thompson Palm Springs hotel — they are very different from each other. The Dallas-area suburb of Frisco has become quite the boom town in recent years, with it being one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities with a population that has skyrocketed 500% in the past two decades.

Meanwhile, the Thompson Palm Springs hotel on about four acres in downtown Palm Springs has been in the works for more than a decade with Hall only overseeing the last seven years of its development. Hall’s finance arm backed the hotel before later taking ownership of the long-awaited project and developing it in partnership with Hyatt Hotels Corp.

The Palm Springs hotel was challenging to construct because there’s a limited number of contractors and construction labor in the area and it was a “complicated project that was redesigned multiple times,” Hall told CoStar News.

The Thompson Palm Springs hotel, with 168 rooms and 18 suites and views of the San Jacinto mountains, features a mid-century modern design from B2 Architecture + Design and SMS Architecture.

Later this year, the hotel is expected to open an adults-only tower — a hotel-within-a-hotel brand called Upper Stories. This area will have an exclusive swimming pool, a lounge and 42 guest rooms and five suites, the firm said.

Hall declined to disclose the cost of the two hotels. The price tag of the Thompson Palm Springs, which relied in part on EB-5 funding, climbed to $165 million, according to a press release last month. Hall also landed $46 million in clean energy financing for the Palm Springs hotel project.