PD

There is a rumor going around Dallas real estate and construction circles about a T-Rex. I have heard it from separate sources. Stay with me, because the setup matters. At the corner of Knox and the Katy Trail, a $1B project is rising that will overlook Highland Park. Condos, apartments, an Auberge hotel, retail, and restaurants in one development. Michael Dell's MSD Partners and Trammell Crow are behind it. Dallas has watched the cranes for over a year. It opens this year. The condos sold out before the building topped out. Word is buyers paid around $2,000 per square foot. Several bought two units pre-construction so the architect could combine floorplans and balconies into something bigger. $2,000 per foot raises no eyebrows in New York or Hong Kong. In Dallas? That is 2.5x what Museum Tower fetched, and Museum Tower set the old record. A great sign for our city. Still not the story. Bloomberg reported who bought the top two floors: Todd Graves, founder of Raising Cane's. A single floor had been marketed at $25 million. He took both. Here is the part the reporters missed. The part the construction guys whisper about. Graves needed both floors locked in before the concrete was poured. He worked with the architect and the engineers on one request: cut a hole in the floor plate between his two levels. Why a hole between floors? Natural light? A grand staircase? Some massive chandelier? No. A T-Rex skeleton. Thirty feet of it, standing in his living room, with two stories of glass behind it. Before you dismiss the rumor, know this. Graves already owns a 66-million-year-old triceratops skull. It sits on loan at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum. The man collects fossils the way other billionaires collect Picassos. The closest living relatives of the T-Rex. Chickens, actually. Todd Graves built a $22 billion empire selling chicken fingers. Now he wants the biggest chicken of them all in his penthouse. The more I learn about this guy, the more I like him.