Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1195866
30 N ow there's a place — and a very chic and sublime one, at that — to lay your travel-weary head in the Dallas Arts District. The towering Hall Arts Hotel, with its sleek glass facade and commanding views of the Dallas skyline, is the only hotel in the country's largest contiguous arts district. And its arrival has been a long time coming. Clocking in at 11 stories high and with 183 guest rooms and 19 suites, it's a light-filled oasis amidst downtown's urban sprawl — part of a compound that includes the Hall Arts Residences. The hotel was designed by HKS Architects and decorated by Bentel & Bentel. Refreshingly, it takes its place serenely near architectural masterpieces such as I.M. Pei's classically modern Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, the Foster + Partners-designed Winspear Opera House and Rem BY BILLY FONG HALL OF FAME founder of Dallas-based Hall Group, and his wife, Kathryn Hall, lead vintner for Napa Valley's Hall Wines, Walt Wines, and owner of Napa Valley's Senza Hotel. Craig's real estate developments include Hall Arts, the five-acre, mixed-use development in the Dallas Arts District that includes KPMG Plaza at Hall Arts, Hall Arts Hotel, and Hall Arts Residences, as well as a sprawling development in Frisco. Kathryn's backstory reads like a fascinating novel, from her upbringing in California where her father owned a vineyard to attending boarding school in Switzerland, earning a law degree, her candidacy as a potential Dallas mayor, and her time as the U.S. Ambassador to Austria during the Clinton administration. W ith neighbors that include the Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, and Crow Collection of Asian Art, it was imperative that the hotel display a notable art collection as well. The Halls own the Hall Collection, an outsized trove of international and local artworks dissembled throughout Hall Group's properties, but to curate a collection of specially commissioned works, they enlisted Virginia Shore, an expert in modern and contemporary art in all media, based in Washington D.C., as their consultant on the project. Like Kathryn, Shore has a state department background: She established and supervised the art acquisitions program for the U.S. Department of State's Office of Art in Embassies. This is where the two women first met, during Kathryn's tenure in Austria. In assembling the hotel's collection, Shore worked alongside Patricia Koolhaas-designed Wyly Theatre. We're reminded of the words of the great Piet Mondrian: "I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture." The Hall Arts Hotel was developed by the very definition of powerhouse couple: Craig Hall, chairman and ROBERT TSAI THE MUCH ANTICIPATED HALL ARTS HOTEL MAKES A BLOCKBUSTER SHOWING IN THE DALLAS ARTS DISTRICT, WHERE ART IS KEY. ROBERT TSAI Lava Thomas' Resistance Reverb: Movements 1, 2018, floating above a lobby seating area Photographer James Welling and mosaicist Stephen Miotto's Untitled, 2019, on the terrace