When the bank took ownership of Gabriel Barbier-Mueller’s original Dallas development late last year, his company, Harwood International, wasn’t just losing a building.
The 105,000-square-foot development with its curved glass facade represented the first stroke that Barbier-Mueller — an artist by birth and disposition — had made on the canvas he planned to fill in as the Harwood District, which he’d begun painting 41 years earlier.
The Dallas real estate community agrees: Barbier-Mueller demonstrated something close to genius in his vision for the walkable slice of Dallas that became part of Uptown, the buzzy submarket that, by landing finance companies from New York, is giving the entire North Texas economy a boost — more than $1 billion of development in the pipeline for the finance heavyweights of “Y’all Street,” like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
At its peak, the Barbier-Mueller family had 19 contiguous city blocks, which they perfected into 3 million square feet of office space, a hotel, two condo buildings and more than 20 restaurants. Yet after decades of building, they were rapidly losing their hold. The foreclosure, in November, marked just one of eight deeds given up in a terrible year for the firm, as management failures, maturing short-term loans and family dysfunction threatened Barbier-Mueller’s masterpiece. Harwood’s focus on aesthetics and taste made for a nice neighborhood but got in the way of effective operations.
Among the many pans of the company on Glassdoor is a one-star review that compares Harwood to the Titanic: “From the outside it all looks pretty,” the reviewer wrote. But, behind the curtain, “massive issues everywhere become apparent and slap you in the face.”
Weathering this economic cycle has been hard for everyone, but former Harwood employees claim that interest rate hikes didn’t cause the company’s problems; it simply revealed them.
The way the year unfolded for Harwood “makes it seem like it was a collapse, very quickly,” said one former employee. “Internally, it was not. It was always something we knew was going to happen and then just happened all at once.”
The Barbier-Mueller family did not agree to be interviewed and did not answer questions about the claims of former employees.
Building Harwood
Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, the patriarch, first came to Dallas as a member of the Modern Museum of Art’s International Committee, the 20-something scion of a prominent Swiss art-collecting family. His parents founded Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva in 1977.
With the audacious belief that North Texas could use some European flair, he moved permanently in 1979 and started working in real estate at Henry S. Miller. He married a Texas girl, Ann Smith, the daughter of Sunnydale ranch owners Gene and Mary Ann Smith.
Barbier-Mueller saw opportunity in an area near downtown that had once been the city’s Little Mexico, a barrio settled by immigrants fleeing the Mexican Revolution that flourished until the mid-1960s when the Dallas North Tollway cut through the community, initiating its decline. He didn’t want to develop individual buildings; he wanted to create a neighborhood. As he worked on Harwood No. 2, he also began the painstaking, decadeslong process of assembling land for Harwood District.
He used funds from his dad to build Harwood No. 1. It opened two years before The Crescent, the nearby 10-acre, mixed-use complex often credited with spurring the development of Uptown.
Thanks to The Crescent, Barbier-Mueller was no longer Uptown’s lone cheerleader. Before long, Dallas Cowboys players-turned-developers Robert Shaw and Roger Staubach teamed up in 1991 to build the Meridian, Uptown’s first modern apartment complex.
The savings and loan crisis decimated Downtown Dallas’ office market, prompting office tenants to flee. Barbier-Mueller opened his second office building, Harwood No. 2, in 1996, and the third in 1999. In the first major expression of his style, he built a 1.5-acre “European garden oasis” atop No. 1’s parking garage to connect his trio. Law firm Jones Day left downtown and found refuge in the district, moving into Harwood No. 3 in the late ’90s.
“The Aristocrat”
Harwood’s mantra was “live, work, play,” and the new millennium marked an increased focus on the “live” and “play” aspects. Harwood developed its first condo project, Azure, in 2007 with an $82.8 million loan from California-based Fremont Investment & Loan.
Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, dubbed “The Aristocrat,” became known for his European taste, which was evident from the jump. He once opened an international book shop to read French and German magazines and would often refer to his 19th century French dictionary.
In a city whose primary design principle is accommodating large trucks, Harwood District was shaping up to be a welcome respite known for its meticulous landscaping and Swiss cow sculptures (a symbol of the Harwood brand).
“It was always something we knew was going to happen and then just happened all at once.”
Onlookers also appreciated how the district nodded to the neighborhood’s history, epitomized by Harwood’s creation of the restaurant Saint Ann out of a century-old red brick building that once housed Saint Ann School. Upstairs, Harwood opened The Ann & Gabriel Mueller Museum for the Barbier-Muellers’ collection of Japanese samurai armor, including relics from the 5th century.
Gabriel’s sons Alexis and Oliver joined the firm in 2009 and 2013. The Barbier-Muellers opened a second condo tower, Bleu Ciel, in 2018, and continued with office.
As Alexis and Oliver took on leadership roles, Harwood leaned further into hospitality. Alexis’ pet project was developing the district’s flagship hotel, Hotel Swexan, billed as the place “where Swiss Hospitality meets Texan Charm.”
In 2023, Harwood announced plans to develop Harwood No. 15. The company also sat on at least 9 acres of undeveloped land, mostly in Harwood District.
Harwood’s 2025
Before Harwood could make good on its complete vision, management of its portfolio got in the way.
Three former employees, who asked to remain anonymous, said the prosperity since the Great Financial Crisis created a culture at Harwood wherein leadership felt emboldened to approach the business aggressively and talk themselves out of scrapes.
Around 2020, the company “loaded up with short-term, high-octane, high-leverage, adjustable-rate debt,” as one source put it. Rate hikes meant the end of the party came quickly, and not because of distress. Properties were making money, but not enough to cover the rising cost of debt service.
It’s not clear where the loan proceeds went.
The first foreclosure exemplified the company’s bind. Harwood defaulted on the $138 million loan tied to Harwood No. 6, at 2501 North Harwood Street. The 320,000-square-foot office building built in 2009 had been renovated in 2020 and was 89.2 percent full at the time of the foreclosure.
Harwood saved the property with a last-minute recapitalization deal.
A March foreclosure notice showed the first wasn’t a fluke. Harwood defaulted on an $80 million mortgage from Square Mile Capital, which provided the loan in 2019. It was tied to Harwood No. 4, a 221,000-square-foot office building built in 2000. Spear Street Capital bought the property in a $73 million credit bid at the April foreclosure auction after purchasing the mortgage in March.
Harwood No. 4 wasn’t in quite as good shape as No. 6. It was about half-full after losing tenant Dallas-based energy firm HF Sinclair, which occupied 90,000 square feet, in 2023.
The following month, Harwood tapped Newmark to find a recap partner for the unraveling firm.
Harwood’s third office building foreclosure of the year, for Harwood No. 1, came in October, when Barbier-Mueller’s firm defaulted on a $37.5 million loan provided by First United Bank in 2020. The lender secured the deed with a $27.2 million credit bid and Bill Cawley of Dallas-based Cawley Partners, who had a relationship with the bank, bought the property.
Behind the scenes, Harwood had quietly sold off four other buildings, Harwood No. 2, No. 6, No. 7 and No. 10 to San Francisco-based private equity fund TPG. About that time, TPG also provided the company a $100 million loan but didn’t specify what it was for.
The company got some good news when it maintained control of Harwood No. 14, its newest asset, by landing a $161 million refinancing deal from New York Life Insurance. It is almost 86 percent occupied, but, although the building opened in 2023, Docent, a promised “high-end Japanese steakhouse,” still hasn’t launched.
TPG picked up one more Harwood office property before announcing it was the firm’s recap partner. It bought Harwood No. 3 in December.
Down the pike
Harwood was shedding its portfolio, but still seemed fixed on its plans for the future: Harwood No. 15.
It announced plans for a 23-story office project in 2023, though these did not include financing. Jones Day, a longtime tenant of Harwood No. 3, was slated to anchor the new tower. But the status became murky when, amid the torrent of foreclosures and sales, Jones Day pulled out and returned to the market in search of new space.
Harwood told the Dallas Business Journal on Feb. 20 that developing Harwood No. 15 “remains a near-term priority,” and that it has secured new investment partners (besides TPG) but declined to name them.
Despite efforts to turn a new leaf, so far 2026 has only revealed new depths to Harwood’s distress.
It was hit with a foreclosure notice in February, its first residential default. TexasBank alleges Harwood defaulted on a $30 million loan that was originally tied to 26 condos at Bleu Ciel, its luxury property at 3130 North Harwood Street.
TexasBank provided the loan in December 2024. Since then, Harwood has sold seven units and was relieved of the corresponding debt burden.
However, the fact that Harwood still owns condos at the property indicates that about 10 percent of the property’s 158 units never sold in the eight years since Bleu Ciel opened in 2018. Appraisal records confirm that the units never changed ownership. The property’s website says it’s 85 percent sold and advertises 16 units, including four penthouses.
The Barbier-Mueller family hasn’t really spoken publicly about its swift financial unraveling. Instead, the company provided a statement to D Magazine in February noting that its future lies in its “shovel-ready sites” that are prepared for five million square feet of development.
A closer look at the loans on the property reveals that Harwood’s undeveloped land is more likely to cause problems than solve them. Deed records show that the company owns about 8.6 undeveloped acres in the neighborhood, and the land is highly leveraged.
The $100 million loan provided by TPG in the fall was backed by about 7.5 acres in Harwood District, and it looks like it was a bridge loan, since Harwood took out new debt on the property at the beginning of the year. On Jan. 2, the company borrowed $27 million from Bridge Invest and $107.3 million from LWP Harwood, a lender whose Dallas address is an Uptown dry cleaner in the shade of the Dallas North Tollway.
Behind the curtain
In spite of an almost obsessive focus on legacy, Gabriel didn’t appear to train his kids very well, but you wouldn’t know it based on the company’s succession playbook — which it opened up about in 2017.
The family’s process for handing over control of the company included nicknames for the generations (G1 and G2), rules for young family members to join the company (they have to work elsewhere first and then present a business plan) and consultations with a family business dynamics specialist and an industrial psychologist.
Though they secured work experience outside Harwood before joining the firm, co-presidents Alexis and Oliver didn’t have much real estate experience before taking on positions at Harwood. According to former employees, the sons don’t share their father’s passion and skill for deal-making; they are more interested in “the glamour element of hospitality,” one source said.
The sons’ inexperience points to a fundamental flaw at Harwood. It presents itself like a traditional company but operates like a family office, where “you get people in roles that they ordinarily wouldn’t qualify for,” a source said.
Harwood is seen as a prestigious company with a desirable footprint, sources said, but rumors swirled that it would engage in bad behavior, including incidents where it did not pay brokers and spitting out fresh talent in a quick, reliable churn. It was known to lean on its wealth of resources to get its way.
“They always had the ability to knife-fight and use their balance sheet, use their leverage, to get what was needed from either their banking relationships or their capital partners. So they always figured out how to make it through,” one source said.
For a long time, it worked.
When rate hikes illuminated the writing on the wall, there was a chance for Harwood to take bitter medicine that would give the company more time. Its refusal to do so is “what turned it from a bad situation into a malignant situation,” a source said.
And the G1-G2 philosophy may not have been as seamless as the family imagined.
“This is a family office that told itself it was going to institutionalize but didn’t like the steps to actually do that,” a source said.
The upside
A developer’s collapse in Dallas’ hottest office submarket comes with a big upside. In one year, Harwood District welcomed four new operators: TPG, Spear Street Capital, Cawley Partners and KBC Advisors.
Cawley Partners’ Bill Cawley has been trying to break into Uptown for years, he said: “I probably paid a little more than what the market would say it’s worth, but I just love the optionality and the location.”
In the near term, he’s focused on updating the property, but he also thinks “it’s one of the best redevelopment sites in Uptown.” Zoning at the site allows for up to 300,000 square feet of development.
Two blocks away, Spear Street Capital has papered the lobby of Harwood No. 4 as it revamps the property it’s rebranding as 2828 Harwood. It plans to redo the building’s elevators, lobby, amenities and common areas, CEO John Grassi said.
“It’s a great property, but it sort of needed a lot of work,” he said.
When Spear Street took over the property, it was about 45 percent occupied, he said. The rent is also below market for the area, and the upgrades will allow the landlord to raise prices.
But at Harwood, leadership’s spin on the collapse is to focus on the future. At least that’s what the G2 brothers and co-presidents said in statements to D Magazine for the February piece.
Alexis came off philosophical: “Evolution signals momentum, not retreat,” he said, and Oliver got to the heart of the matter: Maybe Harwood, the place, was built to outlast Harwood the company.
“Our focus remains on building places of lasting relevance — well beyond any single moment in time,” he said.