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"I'M PROBABLY ONE OF THE HARDEST WORKING PEOPLE YOU'LL EVER MEET, AND I MEAN THAT IN A SELF-DEPRECATING WAY. YOU HAVE TO LIVE AND BREATHE THIS BUSINESS." — BRIAN BOLKE labels, high-end jewels and chic home goods — seems very un-Big D. Bolke tossed out some preliminary ideas about how to capitalize on the spectacular view: an elegant rooftop terrace and lounge, perhaps, with its own after-hours entry? Droese took in the panoramic skyline view to the north with its glimpse of Thanksgiving Tower, and looming like some fantastical Salvador Dalí creation next door to the west was Chicago artist Tony Tasset's massive three-story sculpture, Eye, a fiberglass replica of Tasset's own eyeball. The veined and eerily realistic orb — acquired a year ago by Tim Headington of Dallas-based Headington Companies, which owns The Joule hotel — has since become a worldwide Instagram and Twitter sensation. An oil-and-gas billionaire, Headington is a trained architect and philanthropist with diverse interests, including real estate development (he also owns Hotel Lumen) and film production (The Tourist, starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie reportedly grossed $278,346,189, and he bankrolled movies such as Jersey Boys, Argo and The Young Victoria). Last year, Headington lured longtime Neiman Marcus retailer Shelle Sills out of early retirement to lead his new retail division, including The Joule's spa, restaurants and boutiques. (It was Bolke who reached out to Sills in late 2013 with the idea of relocating downtown to the 45,000-square- foot space. The two met almost daily for more than six months, discretely planning a financial partnership with Headington — sometimes over wine at the Mansion — and strategizing the store's design and relocation.) Back on the roof, Bolke and Droese were brainstorming a slew of possibilities that a store five times its current size might present. Chief among them was the chance to buy more deeply into existing fashion collections (Alaïa, Comme des Garçons and Valentino, among them), and significantly beef up other areas, such as home design. It would be the time to dream big — an opportunity to create an exciting destination shopping experience that pushes the envelope, not just in Dallas, but globally. At some point, their eyes fell on the flagship Neiman Marcus building, just a few doors down from The Joule. At the corner of Main and Ervay streets, the 1914 dowager has been a retail island almost to itself since the '70s and '80s, when department stores such as Sanger-Harris and Joske's abandoned the city core for the suburbs. Now, with Forty Five Ten and Headington Companies leading the way, all that is about to change. B rian Bolke is sometimes mistaken as aloof. But to understand his roots is to understand the reserved makeup of his creative genius. Despite growing up in southern California in what he describes as a "Leave it to Beaver family" with an older brother and stay-at- home mom, his father's job at a paper company required the family to move constantly. By 11th grade, Bolke had attended eight different schools. "That's something that's very telling about my personality. In those years, it was very hard to make friends. That's why I was very shy," he remembers. Instead of hanging out with peers, he hung out with his mom, a stylish woman who loved to shop. "I was obsessed with stores as a child. I wasn't really connecting with people my own age." Even at a young age, Bolke tried to stay on the cutting edge of fashion. In the early '80s Willi Wear had just come out, and Bolke was 9. "I remember begging my mother for a pair of peach-colored Willi Wear pants. She succumbed and bought them for me. I thought I was the coolest person in the world," he says. But when he got home with the pants, his brother and father were unimpressed. "They were like, 'What are you doing? If you wear those to school, you'll get beaten up." Bolke returned them, but he never forgot the high that purchase brought. "I felt like I'd found a treasure. There's a fantasy that goes with shopping and clothes — you can be feeling bad about yourself, buy something new, and everything turns around. It's therapy." W hen Bolke was 16, the family moved to San Francisco, and his father was promptly transferred to Dallas. "He promised we'd never have to move again," Bolke remembers, so the family stayed in San Francisco, and his father commuted back and forth each week for a year. Stability at school allowed Bolke newfound social traction. "I was finally kind of cool," he says. Coolness translated to clothes, naturally: His first after-school retail job was at Miller's Outpost, where "my favorite thing was the 50 percent discount. For years, I only wore Genera. It was like Garanimals — you could coordinate the separates. If there was a moment I understood the power of clothes, it was then." A good student but a bad athlete, Bolke saw himself as a creative whose strengths lay in his amazing eye. He bought a white Mustang with a baby-blue velour interior and a white vinyl top, which attracted the attention of one of the most popular girls in school. The two began dating. If clothes were a passion, cars became an obsession. "My dream was to be a car designer. All I did was draw cars," he says. But in college at University of California Davis, he realized that becoming a design engineer in the auto industry meant being good at math and science, which he was not. He opted for a degree in environmental design instead. Meanwhile, he'd married the popular girl from high school, and a stint as a junior designer at I Magnin in San Francisco ignited a new passion for store planning and design. "I was the most junior person there, so I was in the file room all the time, where the blueprints to all the stores were. I was obsessed with stores from the '40s and '50s — they were jewel boxes. The drawings were beautiful." At I Magnin, he designed the Donna Karan and Romeo Gigli in-store boutiques. "I loved figuring out how to take their looks and design them into a physical presence," he says. After five years of marriage, Bolke divorced and, in 1994, moved to Dallas, where his father was now living full-time. Hired as a store designer for Neiman Marcus Downtown, he created Prada boutiques for multiple locations. The experience working for a big company like Neiman Marcus taught him "a lot about working with buyers, vendors and outside architects," he says. But, the biggest takeaway was the idea that "Neiman's wasn't about a store; it was about a person. From the moment you walk in, you feel the presence of Stanley Marcus in every aspect. It taught me that you had to be true to yourself." That lesson would prove to be one of the most important in Bolke's future retail career. A fter Neiman Marcus, he partnered with "some incredibly talented florists" to open Avant Garden in Highland Park Village, touted as the first truly stylish floral boutique in Texas, whose small and tidy bouquets of monochromatic flowers made a big impact. "To me, the chicest thing was fitting as many sweet peas into the smallest vase you could, because that was on your nightstand, not something that looked like it belonged in a funeral home," he says. But thanks to Bolke's experience in store design, Avant Garden's retail shop became a stylish destination in its own right. "Its claim to fame was that it was a really pretty retail environment at a time when most floral shops were not," he says. Avant Garden also gave Bolke entree into some of the city's wealthiest homes (one of his first big events was Lela Rose's wedding), showing him how Dallas' upper crust lived and entertained. Many of the clients who shopped at Avant Garden became some of his first customers at Forty Five Ten, which he opened in 2000 with former Neiman Marcus home decor buyer Bill Mackin. The store operated as a Fred Segal-type co-op with leased spaces, including the French scents line Diptyque and Dallas designer Jan Barboglio's wrought-iron tabletop accessories (both are still carried at Forty Five Ten). "It turned out to be much bigger than what Bill and I could tackle ourselves," recalls Bolke, who brought Shelly Musselman, a former Kim Dawson model and Todd Oldham muse, on as a partner soon after the store opened. "We were all learning how to do this together," he says. "Shelly and I went to Paris on buying trips, and we learned how to navigate the fashion world — we didn't know what the hell we were doing yet." But the timing was brilliant. "In Paris, we found all these designers that no one had ever heard of that had absolutely no distribution here," he says. Forty Five Ten became known for exclusively carrying many top designers in Dallas, including Tunisian-born Azzedine Alaïa, the Italian fashion label Marni, American designer Rick Owens and the French ready-to-wear luxury brand Céline, designed by Phoebe Philo. "We grew with them, and that's what creates long- lasting relationships," Bolke says. "We were there when their brands really hit." Later, they added established brands such as Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Valentino men's and Dior. The store's unexpected and cutting-edge collections have drawn the attention of Vogue and The New York Times, along with celebrities such as Oprah, Steven Tyler, Janet Jackson, Martha Continued page 47 Shelle Sills