ForrestPerkins, a distinct studio of Perkins Eastman
The Westin Dallas Downtown is the crown of a massive adaptive reuse project that ForrestPerkins undertook with KFK Group to transform a midcentury office tower at One Main Place into a mixed-use retail, office, and hotel development, where The Westin occupies the top ten floors of the thirty-three-story building. The design team started with a deep dive into the building’s history as it assisted the developer with a successful application to list it on the National Registry of Historic Places. Internationally acclaimed architect Gordon Bunshaft, who designed the famous, International-Style Lever House in New York City, developed One Main Place in a similar vein, but instead of a purely lightweight skin of steel and glass, Bunshaft incorporated a textured-concrete frame and deep-set windows in response to the hot Southwestern climate. The project was central to Downtown Dallas’ urban renewal in the 1960s.

Fifty years after the office building opened in 1965, ForrestPerkins’ hotel renovation encompasses a wedding and reception area within a lower-level Plaza, a driveway and passenger drop-off at the building’s ground-level setback, and public amenities in the soaring, open second floor with 24-foot windows on every side: Guest Reception, Lobby, Hotel Bar and Lounge, Ballroom, and pre-function spaces. To comply with the National Registry requirements that nothing be structurally attached to the original building, ForrestPerkins designed a free-standing porte cochere at the hotel entrance, and inside, used the original exposed-concrete aggregate columns and molded stainless-steel-clad escalators as major design features.

In all, the Westin Dallas features 326 guest rooms, including a 3,000 sf Presidential Suite with spectacular panoramic views of the city, and the highest rooftop pool in Dallas. The hotel also boasts 32,000 square feet of meeting space and the new 5,000 sf Willow Pavilion in the formerly open-air Plaza level—a glass-enclosed wedding, event, and meeting venue surrounded with lush garden plantings and topped with a massive pyramid-shaped skylight. The hotel has renewed a key feature of the downtown Dallas skyline and offers a unique luxury hotel experience. “A high-quality hotel like Westin will add even more momentum to the incredible revitalization of our downtown and to the economic growth of our entire city,” Mayor Mike Rawlings told D magazine when it opened in 2015.