International on Turtle Creek won the award for "Best Adaptive Re-Use of an Existing Building" at the 25th annual luncheon for the Stemmons Corridor Business Association. Jim Lake Jr. accepted the award for Jim Lake Companies at the annual luncheon held at the Hilton Anatole on Friday, November 10th, 2006.
Far more than a piece of commercial property, International on Turtle Creek, is a spacious development that creates a unique business synergy and a lush operating environment for the designer trade. Located in the heart of the Trinity Corridor, Dallas' hotly anticipated urban re-development has become a destination for a collection of showrooms, design firms and restaurants totaling 158,000 s.f.
International on Turtle Creek began as a 200,000 square foot warehouse built in 1950. International Harvester Company owned the property and used it to store tractor parts. International Harvester occupied the building up until 2001. For the next 3 years, the warehouse at Turtle Creek and Irving Blvd. remained vacant. That is until Jim Lake came up with a vision for the declining property which many investors had passed on due to the many challenges inherent in an obsolete older building.
Jim Lake's idea was to remove the center section of the warehouse and make the single tenant building into a multi - tenant design center that would become a destination for the design business. Jim shared his vision with David Farrell of Good Fulton & Farrell who went to work along with Jim's in-house construction firm, Clay Butler Construction, converting the old warehouse into a design center in March of 2005. This team worked together to create this interesting adaptation of an old property and to execute the first major redevelopment out of the core Design District on the other side of the tracks. Both Texans Commercial Capital and E2M Partners had been exploring opportunities to provide debt and equity for a new project with Jim and they committed early in the project as they saw the untapped potential in the newly formed Planned Development District now known as the Trinity and Design District. International opened its doors in October of 2005.
