RIP to Highland Park’s Iconic Mushroom House

Wednesday was demo day at the corner of Armstrong and Preston, and with one perilous swing of a mighty Caterpillar excavator, Highland Park’s Mushroom House is nothing more than a pile of jagged wooden beams and the shattered memories of custom sage green shingles. 

The home, known for its distinct slopes and rounded curves, didn’t match much else on the streets of Neoclassical mansions propped up by Doric columns, and the neighborhood’s wealthy denizens agreed. The home, fit for a hobbit, was designed by architect Tom Workman, who considered the supersized cottage his masterpiece. Workman left the home in 2021, and local car dealership mogul Clay Cooley purchased it and surrounding properties with the intention of demolition. 

And so it goes, the home was destroyed. As eclectic as it was on the outside, the home was just as Shire-inspired on the inside with an unconventional layout and purple and green tiles sprinkled throughout. Little to say, the home did not appeal to Cooley’s tastes, and the home was scheduled to have a one-time fling with a wrecking ball. 

Wile E. Coyote-ing anything, even without a metric ton of dynamite, in Dallas sounds like an unfathomable offense to any residents who are well acquainted with the city’s impassioned preservationists. However, Highland Park, which has no architectural standards other than opulence and is hole-punched in the middle of Dallas, lacks preservation laws.

Neighbors in the 2.2 square-mile area, occupied almost exclusively by millionaires, are sure to relish in the pile of debris at 4200 Armstrong Parkway. But it remains a tragedy for the architecturally inclined. 

“It is easy to understand that property owners in the adjoining blocks may feel affronted by the appearance of a new house in the neighborhood,” Stanley Marcus, founder of Neiman Marcus, wrote in a 1997 Dallas Morning News op-ed shortly after the home in his neighborhood was constructed. “But in a country that thrives on contemporary design in automobiles, clothes, public buildings and spaceships, homes can stand a little competitive shake-up.”

Now that the Mushroom House is gone, what can they take next? Surely not a historically notorious building designed by a world-renowned architect that houses a city’s governing body and requires hundreds of millions in refurbishment after city neglect. That would never happen here.