Grange Hall, the darkly glamorous restaurant and boutique in Knox-Henderson, will soon pack up its location on leafy Travis Street and move to a storefront on busy Fitzhugh Avenue near North Central Expressway.
The Travis location will close by January 31, owner Rajan Patel says, and he and co-owner Jeffrey Lee hope to open the new Grange immediately after that, though it seems likely that there will be a gap. It will take a lot to transform what is now an empty shell in a strip center — shared with Beverley’s bistro and the House of Preservation spa — into a restaurant and shop with the beautifully offbeat aesthetic of the original Grange.
“We spent a substantial amount” creating Grange Hall, Patel says, “not ever thinking we would eventually be moving.”
Patel says they learned they lost the space about six months ago, when the Retail Connection, a real estate brokerage and development firm, would not renew their lease. The building is owned by billionaire Michael Dell’s investment company, MSD Capital, which is now the largest landlord in the Knox-Henderson neighborhood. PaperCity first reported the move.
“They didn’t want to give us the space,” Patel says. “Since then we’ve been looking and having a very hard time finding something that fits all our needs.”
Eventually Patel and Lee decided to stay in Knox-Henderson, where they first opened Grange Hall in 2004, when it shared the single-story building with a spa. Ten years later, they took over the entire building and added dramatic architectural details and a restaurant to the boutique and floral shop. The restaurant was covered in Architectural Digest and Travel and Leisure for both its witty food and its design.
Though the new space is smaller – 4,000 square feet compared with 6,000 square feet – not to mention brighter, it will still have a restaurant and the chef will still be Chad Martin. (All of the staff will make the move to the new location, Patel says.)
The menu will still serve imaginative versions of ladies-who-lunch staples, such as the $29 Snob Sandwich, made with Petrossian caviar and smoked salmon on buttered brioche (“accessorized” with more caviar for $19), and a $17 Couture Croque with a smear of pear.
As far as what’s next for the building on Travis Street, “It is still a little early for us to make any comment,” Alan Shor, the president of Retail Connection, said in an email.
But it is just the latest change in a neighborhood that is been in transformation mode for some time. Now a CB2 furniture store occupies the original location of another Dallas retail gem, Forty-Five Ten, and the original location of On the Border has been transformed into a Yeti store. On Monday, celebrity chef Curtis Stone will open his first restaurant outside of Los Angeles near Grange Hall on Travis Street.
Weir’s Furniture has been knocked down to make way for a tower that will house an international law firm and a WeWork coworking space. All that remains of the adjoining Highland Park Soda Fountain, a neighborhood fixture for 106 years, is the facade.
And much more is likely ahead. In April, Dell became the biggest landlord in the neighborhood after purchasing more than a dozen buildings and land in what was estimated to be a $250 million deal.
“We are,” Patel says, “kind of in the way of their master plan.”
