Every suburb in America has tried to build a walkable downtown it never had. Most of them produced a shopping center with a fountain. Southlake produced something people actually hang around in on a Tuesday evening, and I think the reason is one specific decision the city made in the late nineties.
They put city hall inside it.
Farmland. Specifically a 1919 farmhouse built by the McPherson family, later owned by the Fechtel family, who ran a chicken hatchery on the site.
In 1998, with Town Square about to be built, the Southlake Fire Department deliberately burned the farmhouse down as a training exercise — over the Southlake Historical Society’s objection. McPherson Park in the city’s park system carries the family name forward, which is something, though I suspect not what the Society had in mind.
In the mid-1990s the 130-acre tract was bought by the development partnership that became Cooper & Stebbins — the name most associated with Town Square, and Brian Stebbins is the person most associated with the name. Accounts of the early corporate history differ in their details, so I am keeping to what everyone agrees on: a private developer assembled 130 acres of pasture and proposed a downtown to a city that did not have one.
The master architect was David M. Schwarz, and that name matters if you know North Texas buildings. Schwarz also designed Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, the Ballpark in Arlington and the American Airlines Center in Dallas. He is the reason Town Square reads as a small city rather than as a mall — the street grid, the building heights, the way the blocks turn corners.
Mayor Rick Stacy’s framing at the time is still the best short explanation of what they were going for:
“People needed to have a reason to go there. And they needed to like being there, to just hang around.”
Brian Stebbins died on 2 October 2012. He got to see the thing finished, which not every developer does.
This is the part that confuses people, and it is the whole trick.
The retail is private. The retail core is owned by Kite Realty Group Trust, a listed REIT, which acquired it through its $7.5 billion merger with Retail Properties of America in 2021. Kite’s own property sheet puts Southlake Town Square at 646,328 square feet of gross leasable area.
The civic buildings are the city’s, and they sit in the middle. Southlake Town Hall, 1400 Main Street, opened in 1999 at the center of the district, designed to echo a historic Texas courthouse. Free public parking.
More than you would guess, and this is the thing that makes Town Square function as a downtown rather than as a shopping trip:
You can pay your county taxes, apply for a passport, return a library book and buy a coffee without moving your car. Very few American suburbs built that on purpose. Check current hours and which services are offered on which days before you go — county office schedules at satellite locations change.
Worth its own paragraph. It opened on 26 September 2001 inside Town Hall. It holds more than 40,000 physical items and over 250,000 digital resources, and runs more than 450 programs a year.
In 2025 it won the Achievement of Excellence in Libraries Award from the Texas Municipal Library Directors Association. A non-resident card is $40 a year.
Before Town Hall opened, there was no city library of this kind — a point local histories make when they describe the 2001 opening as the city finally getting one.
The city’s event calendar is the most interesting thing about Southlake that nobody mentions in listing descriptions.
| Event | When |
|---|---|
| Southlake Spring Festival — Lunar New Year | Jan–Feb |
| Art in the Square | April |
| MasterWorks concerts | Year-round |
| Stars and Stripes fireworks | 3 July |
| Celebrate Southlake — the city’s birthday | September |
| Hispanic Heritage Celebration | September |
| Oktoberfest Southlake | October |
| Diwali Fest | Fall |
| Home for the Holidays — tree lighting | Saturday before Thanksgiving |
A city of 31,000 in North Texas running an official Lunar New Year festival, a Hispanic Heritage celebration and a Diwali festival is genuinely notable. It also tracks with the Census finding that 15.6 percent of Southlake is Asian alone — this is a more international suburb than its reputation suggests.
The big one, and it is not a small-town craft fair. 2026 was the 26th annual, which puts the first one in the year Town Square’s first phase opened. Produced by the Southlake Women’s Club, free to attend, with over 145 artists. The 2026 dates were Friday 24 April through Sunday 26 April.
The festival is a fundraiser and the Women’s Club has distributed a substantial cumulative total to local charities over those 26 years, but I could not find a current figure published anywhere I would cite, so I am not going to put a number on it. Worth asking them for.
The tree lighting, the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Free, with Santa photos, local school choirs, fireworks after the lighting, and — in North Texas — a three-lane snow tubing hill.
Town Square gets the attention but it is not the only retail here. Citywide, the city’s economic development arm counts 4,642,199 square feet of retail at 95 percent occupancy and 2,600-plus businesses.
| District | Where | Notable |
|---|---|---|
| Southlake Town Square | 1256 Main St | Apple, Trader Joe’s, Crate & Barrel, Anthropologie, Market by Macy’s, Harkins 14-screen theater, Hilton |
| Shops of Southlake | 1445 E. Southlake Blvd | Central Market, Nordstrom Rack |
| Park Village | E. Southlake Blvd at Carroll Ave | REI, Michaels |
| Gateway Plaza | SH 114 & Southlake Blvd | Kohl’s, TJ Maxx, Old Navy |
| Southlake Marketplace | E. Southlake Blvd, east end | Hobby Lobby, Trek Bicycle |
| Jellico Corners | FM 1709 & Davis Blvd | Built 1984, named for the vanished community |
That last one is my favorite thing on the list, and the story behind the name is in how Southlake got its name.
Carillon Parc — a 42-acre mixed-use development at the northeast corner of North White Chapel Boulevard and Highway 114. The developer describes a luxury boutique hotel with a wedding chapel, office space, luxury condominiums, upscale single-family homes, chef-driven dining and retail, and an expansive public park with water features and a central plaza. Construction got under way in 2023–24 and is ongoing; the phasing has shifted more than once, so check what is actually open before you plan around it.
The city also approved a $24 million Town Hall Plaza Park update in 2025.
A $400 million figure for Carillon Parc circulates widely. It comes from local news rather than the developer, so treat it as unconfirmed.
If you are relocating and you have two hours in Southlake, spend the first one at Town Square. Not because of the shopping — you can shop anywhere in DFW — but because it tells you what the city decided to be. A place with its courthouse-looking town hall, its library and its county passport office in the middle of a walkable block, running a Diwali festival and a tree lighting from the same lawn.
That is a specific choice about civic life, and you can feel whether it suits you in about twenty minutes. Which is a lot faster than figuring it out after you have moved.
Relocating and want to understand Southlake fast? Give me two hours and I will start you at Town Square, because it tells you more about whether this city suits you than any set of listings will. Then we go look at what is actually available, which in a built-out market is a shorter list than you are expecting.
Set up a tour with meChecked September 2026. Where local sources disagree on a date or a figure I have said so in the text rather than quietly picking one. Tax rates, school ratings and boundaries all change — verify anything you are relying on with the city, the district or the appraisal district.
REALTOR® · BHHS PenFed Realty Texas
I help buyers and sellers across the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex — Fort Worth, Burleson, Crowley and Keller, and the surrounding Dallas area. I write these because they are the questions I answer on the phone every week, and most people never get a straight answer to them. If you have one I have not covered, ask me — I will probably turn it into the next post.