Modern Craftsman Home in Preston Hollow Lists for $3.495M

A custom home on Wildwood Road in Preston Hollow hit the market this spring asking $3.495 million, and the architect-designed Modern Craftsman is drawing comparisons to the resort villages of Seaside, Florida rather than anything you’d expect to find tucked inside Northwest Highway.

Gail Hackney, the owner, walked reporters through the property herself. That kind of personal tour is rare. Most sellers let their listing agents do the talking, but Hackney wanted buyers to understand how the house actually lives, not just how it photographs.

The result is a home that doesn’t fit neatly into Preston Hollow’s usual vocabulary of traditional brick estates and gated Mediterranean revivals. Wide porches. Natural light engineered into every room. Materials chosen for texture and warmth rather than status signaling. The architect built the kind of calm into the floor plan that most people have to drive to the coast to find.

Good bones. That matters here.

Preston Hollow buyers at this price point have seen everything, and they don’t impress easily. The $3 million-plus segment of the Dallas residential market logged strong activity through early 2026, according to Dallas Central Appraisal District data, with inventory in the 75220 and 75229 zip codes staying tight enough to keep sellers in a favorable position. A home that offers genuine architectural distinction rather than square footage inflation tends to hold its value differently than a builder spec dressed up with quartzite and a butler’s pantry.

What Hackney’s house delivers is coherence. The Craftsman vocabulary, bungalow brackets and natural wood details carried through from exterior to interior, reads as intentional rather than applied. The Seaside comparison isn’t superficial either. That Florida panhandle community, planned under New Urbanist principles by architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, built its reputation on the idea that architecture shapes how people feel in a place, not just how they move through it. Hackney’s home borrows that sensibility without the beach.

The listing, covered in depth by Candy’s Dirt, describes multiple outdoor living areas that extend the interior’s resort-like mood, a layout designed around natural ventilation and garden views, and finish work that rewards a slow look. None of that is accidental in a custom build. Somebody made specific decisions at every turn, and those decisions cost money and time that production builders don’t spend.

“It really does live like a retreat,” Hackney told reporters during the walkthrough, “but you’re ten minutes from everything.”

That location math is what Preston Hollow sells at every price level. You’re close to Preston Center, close to the Park Cities, close to the Tollway, and the neighborhood’s mature tree canopy gives you privacy that newer suburbs simply can’t manufacture. A home that adds architectural credibility on top of that geography is a different conversation than the typical Preston Hollow listing.

The custom-home segment of North Dallas real estate has gotten more competitive as buyers returning from second-home markets in Colorado and Florida started expecting their primary residences to deliver the same sensory experience they were getting on vacation. Developers have responded with more spec product chasing that feeling through high-end appliances and statement pools. Architect-driven custom homes that build the feeling into the structure itself are a different category entirely, and they’re harder to find on Preston Road or Strait Lane than the sheer volume of luxury inventory might suggest.

Whether Hackney’s house sells quickly or sits through the summer depends on factors no listing agent fully controls, including interest rate movement and whether the right buyer is actively looking in the zip code right now. The National Association of Realtors tracks absorption rates by price tier nationally, though the Preston Hollow micro-market follows its own seasonal rhythms. Spring listings timed before school’s out tend to move faster than anything that drifts into August. This one landed in April, which is about as well-positioned on the calendar as a seller can get.