My heart beat a bit faster this week when I found out this Volk Estates mansion had just come on the market. Talk about a rare opportunity to live in one of the most coveted neighborhoods in Dallas! If you don’t know Volk Estates in University Park, let me take you back a bit. Well, maybe a lot.
Leonard William Volk developed the neighborhood. If you’ve in the Dallas-Fort Worth area all your life, you might remember the Volk family from their department stores, Volk Brothers. Leonard and George opened their first store on Elm Street in 1890 to sell shoes and became one of the largest shoe retailers in America. The broadened their concept to the department store. One of their claims to fame was opening the first air-conditioned department store in America in 1930. Their Lakewood store had tropical birds in a large cage while the Wynnewood Village store was known for having a tropical aquarium and a large, beautifully tiled enclosure that was home to three monkeys. I think they were marketing geniuses. They were undoubtedly incredibly smart businessmen
When Leonard saw a real estate opportunity, he segued seamlessly into that field.
You know, by now, one of our go-to resources is the fantastic book, Great American Suburbs: Homes of the Park Cities by Virginia Savage McAlester, Willis Cecil Winters, and Prudence Mackintosh. It’s chock full of the best stories about the Park Cities. So, I immediately turned to it to give you more insight into Volk Estates and why it’s such n exclusive neighborhood. It was initially named Brookside Estates, but of course, the Volk name became the reference point, and now it’s called Volk Estates.
Volk’s goal, in line with that of the remainder of University Park Estates, was to create a neighborhood in which the wealthy could build their homes on very large and scenic lots. The land was perfect, located where Turtle Creek forked into its north and main branches. Brookside and its adjacent subdivisions had been designed to create private creeks, running through people’s backyards, rather than using a large creek-oriented public park system as in Highland Park.
The Ideal Luxury Location
What do we look for in a home? We want privacy, the location must be tremendous, and we want room to roam both inside and outside. This Volk Estates mansion checks every box and a few more. It sits on over an acre, it’s minutes from downtown and Love Field, and it has 11,794-square-feet of gorgeous living space. It does check every box!
One of the expectations of any home in Volk Estates is that exceptional quality, meticulous craftsmanship, and superb attention to detail are a given. These things are, of course, evident throughout this home. The provenance could not be better with Earl Hart Miller as the designer and Riseman Brothers as contractors. You might think with this sort of square footage, you’d never find your kids, but hey, that could be a perk. Allie Beth Allman listing agent Mark Storer assured me it would not be that hard to find them.
“It does not feel like an enormous house,” Mark said. “As you walk through, you feel like you are in a home, not a palatial estate even though frankly, it is a palatial estate!”
Nothing was left out when this Volk Estates mansion was designed. You name it, and it’s there. There is a billard’s room, a media room, an exercise room, a coffee bar in the master bathroom, along with heated limestone floors (double swoon), a pool cabana, and a pool house which is full-on another guest house in addition to the actual guest house. What more could you ask for? Yes, there’s a huge wine cellar, because I knew you’d wonder and Candy always makes me check!
I cannot imagine a better place to raise a family, which is precisely what the present owners did. They’ve been here for 25 years. This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime homes.
