The most expensive house in Texas is nearing its 90th birthday.
Designed for an Italian count by Swiss-American architect Maurice Fatio, whose other clients included the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, the Crespi Estate at 5619 Walnut Hill Lane in Dallas is asking $64 million, about $2,300 per square foot. The Coxes, family of Edwin Cox, primary benefactor of Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, are the sellers.
Unlike its closest rival at the top of the Texas residential market, a Houston castle built by the seller in 2005 and listed for $60 million, the Crespi Estate has proved its mettle before. It was the state’s most expensive sale of 2016 according to Dallas real estate titan Allie Beth Allman, when Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks sold it to billionaire banker Andy Beal. It topped the list again a year later, when developer Mehrdad Moayedi bought it at auction for $36.2 million. He sold it to the Cox family two years later with an asking price of $38 million.
The Jazz Age mansion, on a 16-acre lot in one of Dallas’ most prestigious neighborhoods, has more than 27,000 square feet of living space, including a ballroom. It shares the lot with gardens, greenhouses, tennis courts, a guest room, a heliport and, of course, a pool.
The Texas luxury market is steadying after a pendulous five years, and sellers could use a sure thing. If the home sells for anywhere close to asking, it could settle the score on an open question about the value of being old in a land known for building new: Is it good or bad that Crespi hails from 1938?
Concrete crumbles, stone holds
As the Texas luxury market slows, many agents say the right buyer will pay a premium for a well-preserved masterwork.
“Historic homes tend to perform better long-term,” said Emily Waldmann, a Douglas Elliman agent who specializes in architecturally significant properties. “If [a] home that’s really special, that’s been around for a hundred years, finally hits the market — and this is your one chance before it switches ownership for another 30 years — you’re more likely going to swing the bat.”
Local data illustrates her point. Since 2000, the Swedish Hill Historic District in 78702 has appreciated more than any other ZIP code in the Austin area, with average home sale prices nearly nine times higher now than at the turn of the century, according to Team Price Real Estate. It was one of a minority of neighborhoods where values continued to go up between 2024 and 2025, a period when luxury inventory grew and sales declined in every major Texas metro.
Meanwhile, the average home sale price in Tarrytown, the prestigious neighborhood where actress Emma Stone recently sold her home, appreciated at a far slower rate: barely quadrupling in the last 25 years. The area’s homes depreciated more than any other ZIP code in the city between 2024 and 2025, with home sale prices declining by 10.5 percent.
“That’s where I hope that they engage a great architect.”
Studies throughout the country have found that designated historic homes appreciate faster than other properties in most cycles and generally track the rate of the market in the worst case, according to an analysis of research conducted in several states, including Texas.
Agents in other areas of the state agree that a properly maintained piece of history can motivate a buyer in a way that contemporary homes can’t. Pogir, the Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty agent who’s co-listing the Crespi Estate with Diane DuVall, saw such enchantment firsthand with the Grady Vaughn house at 5350 South Dentwood Drive, a 9,500-square-foot Mid-Century Modern designed by Robert Goodwin in 1951, one of the largest of its kind. In 2020, a New York businessman bought the property sight unseen.
That buyer tapped an architect from Austin who specialized in renovating these older homes, a crucial move.
A good restoration matters. If a house hasn’t been “flipperized with gray everything,” its history — and therefore its scarcity — will carry it through the stormiest markets, according to Houston agent Robert Searcy, who specializes in architecturally significant properties and formerly owned the oldest documented privately owned home in Houston.
“The houses that retain their historical character and have not been — the term I use is ‘remuddled’ — I think that the demand will always outstrip the supply,” Searcy said. “Good times, bad times.”
Dirt-rich
For historic homes in the luxury class, the good times can prove more challenging than the bad. Even if the invisible hand passes over the state’s Georgian manors, Victorian gingerbreads and Mid-Century Modern pads during downturns, it threatens them during upswings.
That’s the case in Dallas, one of the fastest-appreciating areas in the country in the last 25 years. The state’s ultra-luxury hub is also notably flashier than the other metros; while Austin’s top sales tend to spread along the more remote stretches of the Colorado River, far west of the city, Dallas’ top neighborhoods are nestled in the center of town, often right on the sidewalk. An Austin mansion is a hideaway; a Dallas mansion is a statement. (In the Park Cities, shallow lots reportedly sell better than deep, tree-hidden parcels.)
Texas historic homes can weather recession; growth is another matter.
Although data shows that historic districts remain buoyant during downturns, few historic homes qualify as luxury. Conversely, even to luxury buyers who are in the market for a historic home, craftsmanship and character matter more than official recognition, according to agents. That’s why it’s difficult to gauge the market performance of luxury homes considered historic — there’s no way to comprehensively measure the value of a home with a respected architect and rare materials against another property that’s simply old.
“The plaque by the front door or the front gate is more novelty than anything. Whether it’s designated historic or not, it’s all about the architecture and the character and the vibe of the house,” Searcy said.
“An appraiser does not have a line item to assign value [to] things [like] architectural interest, character [or] charm,” he said. “But in the real world, they absolutely make an incredible difference in the value and the days on market.”
Because urban historic homes tend to be centrally located, and rural historic homes tend to nest in legacy ranches, their high land value further complicates appraisals of the homes themselves.
An hour west of Austin in the Hill Country, Sotheby’s agent Kris Forks is representing a 417-acre homestead outside of Fredericksburg with a main house built in the 1870s. While the two-bedroom stone house is unlikely to become a millionaire’s party pad, it’s a significant selling point, Forks says. The property’s $7 million asking price amounts to almost $17,000 per acre, a fair stretch above the area’s average sale price of $14,500 per acre for unimproved rural land, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center.
“If this home was in the middle of downtown, versus the contemporary home in the middle of downtown, there’s absolutely a buyer for the historic home,” Forks said.
But that downtown two-bed faces a different economic pressure. For urban historic properties, land can swallow up a greater share of the properties’ total value over time as the cities grow around them, particularly if they’re on large lots or in neighborhoods going through periods of rapid appreciation.
Few cities have appreciated faster than Dallas, which has earned a reputation for demolishing historic mansions.
“There’s a lot of times when the dirt outweighs what the value is worth to redo it, and it makes more sense to tear them down,” according to Michael Humphries, an agent with the hyper-local Dallas brokerage Allie Beth Allman & Associates.
In other words, treasure to historic-homes enthusiasts, blight to contemporary spec builders and their buyers.
And while an original Hal Thomson — he designed grand Beaux-Arts and French Eclectic mansions throughout Dallas in the 1910s and ’20s — might stay buoyed in a low market, a rising tide can easily overwhelm it.
“Nobody can stop anybody from knocking anything down,” Pogir said. “Some incredible homes in Dallas … have been demolished,” he added, mentioning the 105-year-old Trammell Crow estate, torn down in 2017, and the Cox Estate, a Beaux-Arts mansion razed in 2024. A 1918 neoclassical designed by Thomson at 4908 Lakeside Drive was reduced to land three years ago by William and Marilyn Oates, who sold it to an LLC.
New history
A significant architect can preserve the worth of a classic luxury home, but that won’t bulletproof it. The Crespi Estate itself came close to demolition.
Beal reportedly gutted much of the kitchen before he sold it to Moayedi, and Moayedi trimmed away parcels of the property’s valuable dirt to develop the Crespi Estates, a subdivision of spec luxury homes, before he sold it to the Cox family.
Ironically, neoclassical imitations of prewar mansions often replace the doomed originals in Dallas. Newer homes in Preston Hollow and the Park Cities evince the influence of Italian villas and French chateaux, much like the mansions that preceded them under the wrecking ball. The signature of architect Robbie Fusch, a traditionalist who draws his plans by hand, boosts any listing; Fusch is famous for the $7.3 million Theta sorority house at Southern Methodist University, a Georgian design that replaced a smaller 1951 construction. He also designed the second most expensive sale of 2025, a $25.5 million manor at 4000 Euclid Avenue in Dallas with a gilded basilica-style dome and limestone floors, corniced fireplace and bronze hardware imported from France.
Another Fusch design, the “White House of Dallas” at 10777 Strait Lane, was on the market for $40 million for several months last year. The third most expensive home to sell in Texas last year was a neoclassical spec mansion at 1 Dorset Place in Dallas — complete with a pediment, a Diocletian window and an entablature above the front entrance — designed by Richard Drummond Davis Architects, another firm that specializes in classic architecture, which sold after asking $23 million.
Overall, the top sales and listings of the state suggest a significant appetite among ultra-luxury buyers for homes that feel historic — pillars and pediments, quoins and quadrangles. If the Carrera marble floor was laid before World War II, all the better. If not, does it matter?
And in a century, when Fusch, Davis and other neoclassical designers have acquired the patina of history, will it shield their work from the demands of Texas’ elite?
The survival of the Crespi Estate through several record-setting sales and brushes with the bulldozer demonstrates the yin-and-yang relationship between the connoisseur and the developer in Texas. The estate could easily go to a buyer who envisions a bigger, better, bespoke home on 16 acres in Preston Hollow. At the same time, its value depends at least partially on such developers culling the competition for the right buyer’s eye.
“That’s where I hope that they engage a great architect,” Pogir said of buyers who demolish historic homes. “So at least they’ve knocked something down of quality. They’re putting something else up of quality.”