Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/304023
perception of the area, I cleaned it and I planted trees. It became a case study on how to start a development. The transformation of Uptown and our 18 city blocks has taken 30 years. THE GOOD AND BAD OF DALLAS DEVELOPMENT. Trammel Crow Sr. gave me an urban forestry award, which was the only year that award ever existed. He turned to me and said, "Gabriel, do you know why I'm giving you this award? Because Dallas is a can-do city. More importantly, we're competitive. I built my first high-rise, Bryan Tower, because my friend Ben Carpenter built the Southland Life Building. If I give you an award for planting, the next guy is going to want to do it, too." It described Dallas development, good and bad, pretty well. INSPIRATION. I went to a show called "The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks" at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and I bought a bunch of books. One was about Disney and how it created its own architecture and design firm because they knew what people wanted, and they collaborated with external famous architects. And that became the recipe from which we started developing. The architect who designed the Winstead wanted to build a big plaza of granite in front, because that's what architects do — like Dallas City Hall, which is a beautiful building, but not a whole lot can happen on that big plaza … I decided to connect the Rolex building to the Winstead building with the Marie Gabrielle gardens and restaurant. All of which is over the roof of a parking garage. It served to fill a need because Dallas didn't have parks. People didn't sit outside. There were all these antiquated beliefs that it was too hot. Any time of year — winter, summer — people sit outside in Marie Gabrielle eating. We try to not cover a block of land with concrete. We like to keep about 30 to 40 percent of the land for gardens and patios. If you can't bring Switzerland here, just create vignettes of it. CURRENT/FUTURE PROJECTS. For a long time, we've owned the Oak Lawn Design Plaza, about 11 little buildings between Dragon, Slocum and Oak Lawn. We are designing a 15-story building and have four restaurants signed. It will be about 300 apartments and a ground-floor town center for that area. We want it to be like in Europe, where you can walk around. We expect to start in October. Now we are finishing Frost Tower in April of next year. It will have an Italian restaurant, a European bakery and some gardens on Wolf Street. Then, to the north of that, we'll have our next condominium tower, which will have our own grocery store modeled after a takeout/neighborhood-grocery concept in Switzerland and Paris. And thereafter, we have another 5 million square feet of building rights. I think Dallas is finally ready for an affordable rental apartment building in this area. Half of our employees would love to live here; they can't afford to. We have some ideas of how to crack that nut. RESEARCHING HOTELS. I'm studying hotels because we'd like to do our own throughout Harwood. The established hotels are Le Meurice in Paris, the Baur au Lac in Zurich, Claridge's in London, the Four Seasons in New York. Then you have the fun, hip stuff — the Nomad in New York, the Bowery, the Firmdale small hotels in London — from which we get a lot of ideas. FAVORITE RESTAURANTS. Mercat Bistro — when I sit in it, I feel like I'm in Europe. I love Saint Ann because it's buzzing. I take people visiting from Japan to Yutaka Sushi Bistro, and they love it. In Zurich, I love Kronenhalle; the original owners were art collectors, and on the walls, you have fantastic Impressionist paintings collected over 100 years ago. WHERE TO SHOP. Everywhere. I have a friend in Paris who will make bespoke trousers for me in Brioni and Loro Piana textiles. I also shop Zegna. I like window-shopping a ton. I do that all over the world. I was on the way to Singapore, and I read about Uniqlo and how they sell fast fashion. So I bought a whole bunch of clothes, and everybody imagines that those linen jackets are Zegna or whatever, and they are Uniqlo, and they are very cool. His parents, Monique Barbier-Mueller and Jean Paul Barbier, owned one of the greatest private collections of African, Indonesian, pre-Columbian and ancient Egyptian art. Barbier-Mueller's own métier is wildly intricate Japanese samurai armor — permanently displayed in The Ann & Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Museum: The Samurai Collection, which resides above Saint Ann Restaurant & Bar and within lobbies of buildings that he's developed. But many artifacts from the collection are now on display at the Kimbell Art Museum through August 31, in the debut exhibition at the Renzo Piano Pavilion: "Samurai: Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection." His Texan wife, Ann, is a fellow collector, while sons Alexis and Oliver work in his business, Harwood International, and their daughter, Niña Barbier-Mueller Tollett, oversees the art collection. WHY SAMURAI ARMOR? I really like sculptures, so I was interested in something that was art but had a shape to it. We retrofitted an old building in Paris, and I had some money and wanted to celebrate. I had seen this dealer in the Louvre des Antiquaries that had Japanese samurai, so I walked into the shop and bought my first armor. And once I bought the first one (the dealers in France are quite passionate about their specialty), I learned more about it. On a following trip to Paris, I bought three more, and that started the whole thing because they were all different. You look at armor, and you always see something new. There are so many tiny details. It was a bit like Christmas for the children every time the next shipment of armor or helmets arrived. One of my favorite photographs is my children wearing three of our first four armor suits. I've actually never worn one. HOW THE EXHIBIT GERMINATED. Stéphane Martin, a family friend and director of the Quai Branly Museum of primal arts in Paris, saw some photographs of our samurai, and he asked me if I would be interested in an exhibit. I was flattered. It was a big undertaking. Niña volunteered to help organize it. The first show was at the Quai Branly, and it was the third most successful show in the past eight years. People would wait over two hours to see it. That surprised me. Then it went to Quebec, Boston, Portland and to the Kimbell. Alexis and Niña each had a bus bring childhood friends to the Kimbell opening. They all said, "We tried to touch them, and the guard told us we couldn't. We've touched them all our lives!" The children used to get in trouble because they would have sleepovers and wear the helmets, which they were not supposed to do. WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT COLLECTING. When you see something, it may not be the right price or a good time for you, but it's the time. The only things I miss are the things I didn't buy, because it's not like you can buy another one just like it. WHO LEAVES SWITZERLAND? I was a bit of a black sheep of the family. I have two brothers, and they took over the family business. I didn't want to follow the map — to study law and get a job in the family business. I moved to Indonesia for a while. I wanted to be a collector and explorer. THE CHALLENGES OF MOVING TO DALLAS. I came to Dallas in 1979, and we didn't have patios where you could have a drink outside. I was complaining. There were pockets of beauty but a lot of ugly strip centers and no walking. One of my associates said,"I'm a little tired of hearing you complain about it. You live here, why don't you do something about it?" So I started changing my way of thinking. CREATING HARWOOD DISTRICT. When I built the Rolex building in 1984, there was nothing around it. The Crescent was just beginning as a big hole across the street. Thank God the Crescent came, because otherwise I might be sitting in the middle of a no-man's land. It was a little scary. My father-in-law said I was crazy. To change the G abriel Barbier-Mueller is well on his way to establishing European charm to the heart of Dallas, transforming the Harwood District in Uptown into a walkable area with sidewalk cafes, lush parks and airy spaces for living and working. An avid art buyer, this Swiss developer has art in his DNA. His grandfather, Josef Mueller — who manufactured precision parts for the Swiss watch industry — coveted African sculptures and paintings by Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Kandinsky and Picasso, along with Swiss artists Ferdinand Hodler and Félix Vallotton. INSIDE the Head of abriel BARBIER MUELLER "I'M STUDYING HOTELS Gabriel Barbier-Mueller BY HOLLY HABER PORTRAIT SHAYNA FONTANA