If the last time you were at 6500 Cedar Springs Road was to shop for knickknacks or old furniture, you wouldn’t recognize the place now.
The faded warehouse exterior of the one-time Love Field antique mall has been replaced with a modern skin.
And inside the 70,600-square-foot former industrial building, spaces have been carved out for multiple businesses — including an outlet for catalog retailer Wisteria.
The 49-year-old Cedar Springs building and several other creative redos near Love Field are all the efforts of Dallas architect Edwin Smith.
“We rarely do the same thing twice, which is fun from an architect’s standpoint,” said Smith, who in the last 20 years has transformed everything from old shopping malls to a dairy into new commercial space.
“We save the character of some things and some we don’t,” Smith said. “Most of these buildings aren’t architectural gems to start out with — they are warehouses.”
Five years ago, Smith turned a whole row of old warehouses on Mockingbird Lane near Denton Drive into an office showroom and retail complex called Mockingbird Depot.
Blocks away, the 6500 Cedar Springs building was originally constructed as a General Electric light bulb warehouse.
Building owner Steve Rogers said Smith “is about as creative a guy as there is out there for a redevelopment like this.”
Smith encased the old brick and concrete building in a high-tech metal exterior. But inside he left most of the original wooden structure.
“It has all exposed heavy timber inside,” he said. “The interior was gorgeous like old buildings in the West End downtown.”
Smith estimates that reusing the old structure saved as much as 70 percent of the cost of a new building.
“For me, it’s become a real challenge to take something that’s there and make it almost a brand-new building,” he said.
Another recent Smith makeover is at 999 Metromedia Place. The industrial building was constructed in 1958 as a plant for Foremost Dairies.
The building was originally designed by famed Dallas architect George L. Dahl. But over the years it has been remodeled several times.
Dahl, who did Fair Park’s landmark Hall of State, wouldn’t know it these days.
The two-story, 70,000-square-foot building now houses operations for high-tech firm General Datatech LP.
“We ended up enclosing the old loading dock on the north side of the building,” Smith said. “And we tore down an old refrigeration building that was about to fall down.”
Like 6500 Cedar Springs, the General Datatech building got a new metal exterior.
The remodeling job in February won an award from the Stemmons Corridor Business Association for the best adaptive reuse of an existing building.
