Design district determining its destiny

Gary Elam says the Dallas Design & Arts District is at a pivotal juncture.


The 200 design-related businesses and showrooms in this area near downtown have a rare opportunity to unite and become a major U.S. destination for the design trade.
If they don’t, many of them will be eaten alive by encroaching prosperity.
The 59-year-old antiques dealer thinks the district has no more than six years before development from Victory Park crosses Stemmons Freeway and pushes rents beyond the means of many tenants.
“The only way for people who rent to survive is to make this area so strong that there’s enough business that they can afford to pay the higher rents that are coming,” says Mr. Elam, sitting in his antiques showroom at the southern end of Slocum Street.
“We want to brand this area so that if you’re doing major design projects – whether it’s residential or commercial – you know you can come to Dallas and get it done.”
Last March, Mr. Elam formed the Dallas Design & Arts District Association to save this eclectic pocket of dealers and showrooms by marketing it holistically.
The group includes businesses in the district encompassed by Levee Street and Stemmons Freeway to the west and east and Turtle Creek Boulevard and Wichita Street to the north and south. It has more than 50 members.
Many of these independent dealers have been through this before – displaced in the 1980s, when trendy development in Uptown and Turtle Creek pushed them out of the areas around Routh Street and Sale Street.
But this time, they aren’t alone. Mr. Elam has support from Trammell Crow Co., Harwood International and Jim Lake Co., owners of the Decorative Center, the Oak Lawn Design Plaza and the International on Turtle Creek, respectively.
Mike Morgan, a partner with Jim Lake, which also owns the neighborhood’s first residential project, the Trinity Lofts, sits on the new organization’s board.
“We want to do advertising on a much broader scale so we can reach people who are not just around the corner but who are around the nation,” Mr. Morgan says.
That would be hunky-dory with Brendan Bass, president of the Slocum Street Antique and Design Association.
He owns a traditional and transitional furnishings showroom that bears his name and has a 10-year lease that’s up in seven. He wants to buy a showroom before then.
“The area may be priced out for selling low-profit items such as furniture as opposed to high-profit items such as jewelry,” he says. “I need to be in a position to buy a building in the next four or five years to operate my business.”
Mr. Elam was a pioneer of Slocum Street who began buying property in 1982 and would benefit from soaring rents.
But he fears it would kill the karma of two streets of former warehouses – Slocum and Dragon – that now form an internationally known strip of art galleries and showrooms for high-end antiques, fine arts, Oriental rugs, and contemporary furniture and accessories.
“We used to have the White Glove Massage Parlor here on Slocum Street, so it’s been quite a transformation,” he says.
Rock to rococo
The man behind the branding movement is an accidental antiques dealer.
In 1973, Mr. Elam, then a 26-year-old rock ‘n’ roll promoter for Concerts West, was on his way home from a Grand Funk Railroad show in Fort Worth when his Mercedes was totaled by a driver going more than 100 miles an hour in a police chase.
While he was recuperating from back and neck injuries, his mother asked him to fix up her gift and gourmet cookware showroom at the Dallas Trade Mart.
In the process, he discovered a knack for design. He bought a big, funky antique gas stove, two washstands and an armoire for display fixtures. People immediately wanted to buy his props.
“I discovered what I was meant to do in life,” says Mr. Elam, who specializes in English and French antiques as well as creating antique paneled rooms.
Mr. Elam helped start the Slocum Street association in 1998 to raise the enclave’s visibility. And it has.
Two years ago, Mr. Elam was in a small town in the south of France on a buying mission. When the proprietor found out he was from Dallas, she said, “You must be from Slocum Street.”
Letting public in
You may not know about it because the strip sells primarily to the trade. But that’s changing as more businesses that sell to the public move into the district.
One of the big sticking points in marketing the district is how to deal with this trend.
Mr. Elam says most merchants realize that change is inevitable. “It’s better to take advantage of it than to pretend you can stop it,” he says, even though he still sells only to the trade.
Five years ago, the antiques street association launched Slocum Street Style. On the first Thursday night in October, all of its showrooms open to the public so people can discover the area.
“It’s a small-scale Sale Street fair,” Mr. Elam says, referring to a popular annual event that brought in high-end antique and art dealers and jewelry makers from around the country.
He wants the districtwide association to hold its first Sale Street-size fair next April or May, bringing in nationally recognized artists and antiques dealers. “That would establish our niche as the predominant place in the Southwest to shop.”