![\"East](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/R7YDJSBHL5C43PHWFGHYSZC2IA.jpg\")
View Gallery<\/p>\nOver the last 25 years, Merriman Anderson Architects has been stitching together the fabric of Dallas\u2019 urban core.<\/p>\n
Standing at the intersection of Commerce and Ervay and looking east, it\u2019s possible to see at least six buildings the architecture firm helped redevelop downtown, including the Allen building, the Statler Hotel and the old Dallas Library \u2014 now home to The Dallas Morning News.<\/p>\n
All told, the firm has spent the better part of the last quarter-century converting more than 20 unused and empty buildings downtown into thriving apartments, hotels, offices and schools.<\/p>\n
Merriman Anderson’s downtown Dallas historic projects<\/p>\n
View Gallery<\/p>\n
D-FW Real Estate News<\/p>\n
The Dallas Morning News sat down with MAA principals Milton Anderson, David Masters, Jennifer Picquet-Reyes and John Carruth to talk about what it means to transform a city from the inside out. <\/p>\n
They reflect on the past while keeping their eyes toward the future. <\/p>\n
Answers have been edited for content and clarity.<\/p>\n
What is it about downtown Dallas that made you want to focus your efforts there?<\/p>\n
Masters: \u201cJerry Merriman actually worked for George Dahl early in his career, so I think there was a real passion there. Kind of a little side story: Before we got deep into this, we already had a downtown office. We were doing tenant work for Trammell Crow in the early \u201990s. But we were based in Preston Center at the time, and we had just started the Interurban project. <\/p>\n
There was this desire to be downtown, to do downtown work, and we realized if you\u2019re going to do downtown work, you need to be downtown. So we decided to put our money where our mouth was and started looking for a building. That was a challenge in itself, because the building we\u2019re in now had several hundred owners, and just trying to put that deal together was a big step. But really, I think it\u2019s as simple as this: Downtown is home. And at that time, downtown needed us.\u201d<\/p>\n
MAA has done so many historic renovations. What typically prompts them? Is it the natural life cycle of a city that buildings will become vacant and repurposed?<\/p>\n
Picquet-Reyes: \u201cI think it\u2019s the natural life cycle of the city. When we moved into downtown Dallas, there were roughly 30 buildings that were completely vacant. Out of those buildings, we converted 20 or 22, I think. Many of these buildings were Class B or Class C offices. You know they weren\u2019t going to attract new tenants, and so they were completely vacant, some of them for decades. So it\u2019s kind of a natural cycle into something else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Were there any properties where it simply wasn\u2019t possible to complete a renovation?<\/p>\n
Carruth: \u201cThese days, a lot of the buildings we\u2019re looking at aren\u2019t historic. They\u2019re buildings most people would look at and say, \u2018You can\u2019t do anything with that.\u2019 And the truth is, we\u2019ve studied a lot of buildings, but not all of them got done, mostly because of financial reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
Picquet-Reyes: \u201cYeah, we\u2019ve definitely had projects that didn\u2019t go forward, mostly for financial reasons. But we do know about many financial incentives that are available. We\u2019ve worked with the city of Dallas on TIF funding, the North Texas Council of Governments, PACE financing \u2014 all kinds of avenues that our previous clients have used. Often, they\u2019ll stack those on top of historic tax credits.<\/p>\n
What is downtown becoming now? Because we call it the central business district \u2014 and there is business that is happening there \u2014 but it\u2019s also becoming something else. When people walk through downtown in 10 or 15 years, what are they going to be experiencing it as?<\/p>\n
Carruth: \u201cI think it\u2019s going to be mixed-use and entertainment. What\u2019s happening with the [Kay Bailey] Convention Center is a big shift. That project is going to allow the Cedars to really be enveloped into downtown. And if \u2014 or when \u2014 the high-speed rail comes, how it connects to our existing light rail system will be a big deal, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anderson: \u201cThere are great places to live now. I\u2019ve got friends who moved from Garland and elsewhere into downtown, partly because of the new schools coming in. There are jobs here, there are corporations here. Now, people can actually live this urban lifestyle that didn\u2019t feel possible before. Everyone used to be heading in the opposite direction. But I think that\u2019s changing, and over the next 10 years, we\u2019ll start seeing new buildings again as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
With 25 years in the rearview mirror, what do the next 25 years for Merriman Anderson look like?<\/p>\n
Masters: \u201cAs far as downtown Dallas, we\u2019ve got a few things cooking right around City Hall, actually, and hopefully over the next few years we\u2019ll see some real movement there. I think we\u2019ll also see more happening south of I-30.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve got an office in Fort Worth, and we\u2019d like to grow it. We just opened an office in Covington, Ky., and there\u2019s a real need up there for the kind of work we\u2019ve been doing here in Dallas.\u201d<\/p>\n
Are you planning even more offices across the country? <\/p>\n
Masters: \u201cGrowth is always important, but it\u2019s just never been what drives us. I can think of so many firms recently, especially in engineering but in architecture too, that have been bought out by companies focused on scaling. And I think sometimes the quality of the work suffers.<\/p>\n
Anderson:<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve never had to grow too big. I think we\u2019re around 70 people now, maybe a little more. But we\u2019ve always stayed in that 55-70 range. And the reason is simple: The quality of what we do and the timeliness we do it in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the last 25 years, Merriman Anderson Architects has been stitching together the fabric of Dallas\u2019 urban core.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61647,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[230,228,226,227,2444,229,45809,88,13353,1170],"class_list":["post-61646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-architecture","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-commercial-real-estate","tag-design","tag-downtown-dallas","tag-entertainment","tag-qa","tag-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61646\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}