General Contractor in Garland, TX: Downtown to Firewheel

Garland is a postwar city, and you can read it in the buildings. It had 10,571 residents in 1950 and 138,857 by 1980, according to the Handbook of Texas, and that thirty-year boom put up a big share of its houses and commercial buildings in one stretch. Today the Census Bureau puts the city at about 249,600 people, and the boom-era buildings are between 45 and 75 years old.

Now the money is coming back. The rebuilt downtown square reopened in October 2023, TxDOT wrapped up the I-635 rebuild through town in September 2026, and the city has a long-range plan for its Lake Ray Hubbard shoreline.

We’re MASACO, a general contractor based on Legacy Drive in Plano, about 30 minutes from Garland, mostly on the George Bush Turnpike. We haven’t finished a Garland project yet, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Our nearest work is in Allen, where Fade & Style Barber Shop went from shell to open in six weeks. In Irving, Pizza Twist got a full kitchen while the restaurant kept serving.

Nearby in Allen: Fade & Style Barber Shop, a 1,500-square-foot suite MASACO took from shell condition to opening day in six weeks.

Garland’s commercial map, from the square to the lake

A commercial contractor in Garland works in five very different settings. Here’s what each one is like.

Downtown and the rebuilt square

Downtown is where Garland started, and it’s on the National Register. The Garland Downtown Historic District was listed on April 10, 2017, and runs roughly from West State Street south to West Avenue A, between Glenbrook Drive and the Santa Fe rail line. Its nomination counts 53 buildings around the square, 41 of them contributing, built between 1897 and 1967. Nearly all are one or two stories. Mostly brick.

The square itself was rebuilt with 2019 bond money, starting in November 2021, and reopened in 2023 with an event lawn, a shade pavilion, concert staging, and a kids’ play area. The city’s downtown update from June 2026 lists who moved in after: Fortunate Son, Deadwax Records, Taco y Vino, For the South, and Lockwood Distilling Company, with The Owl Icehouse and Lola’s Tapas on the way.

Notice the pattern. Food and drink, in old buildings. That means hoods, grease traps, and new restrooms fitted into brick shells that have held everything from car dealerships to a feed store.

Downtown has its own rulebook, too. The Downtown (DT) district in the Garland Development Code is a form-based code with standards for building design, streetscape, and signs, and plans go through an administrative review. Read it before you design a storefront or order a blade sign.

Fifth Street in downtown Garland in 2015, where 5th Street Crossing’s ground-floor storefronts sit a short walk from the DART station.

A few blocks from the square, 5th Street Crossing went up in 2009 as transit-oriented housing near the downtown DART station, which opened in 2002. Its ground-floor retail is newer, simpler space than the historic blocks around the square.

Firewheel Town Center and the Bush Turnpike

Firewheel Town Center opened in 2005 near Firewheel Golf Park, which dates to 1983. It’s Simon’s open-air center at the George Bush Turnpike and State Highway 78, laid out as a street of storefronts instead of an enclosed mall.

Twenty years after opening, most suites there have likely had a tenant before you. One public example of a rebuild: the state’s accessibility registry shows a 14,158-square-foot renovation for Boot Barn at Firewheel Town Center, scheduled from December 2023 to March 2024.

In a center like that, the landlord’s tenant criteria come before the city’s. Storefront design, signage, work hours, even where crews park. Get the work letter before you price anything.

Firewheel Town Center, Simon’s open-air center at the George Bush Turnpike and State Highway 78, looking west.

I-635, I-30, and Lake Ray Hubbard

TxDOT marked the ceremonial end of the I-635 East project in September 2026: $1.7 billion spent on about 11 miles between US 75 and I-30, through Dallas, Garland, and Mesquite, with new continuous frontage roads. If your site is on that corridor, ask about overlays: Garland’s CO application tracks overlay districts for SH 190 (the Bush Turnpike), IH 30, IH 635, and downtown.

Out east, I-30 meets Lake Ray Hubbard. TxDOT’s I-30 fact sheet covers widening from Bass Pro Drive to the Hunt County line, with continuous frontage roads across the lake. The city is eyeing its shoreline as well: Garland’s economic development partnership describes a plan to redevelop about 820 acres along Lake Ray Hubbard over three to five decades, tied to a future extension of the Bush Turnpike.

Plants, flex space, and industrial offices

Garland’s economic development partnership says the city is home to more than 300 manufacturers. The roots run deep. After World War II, Kraft bought the Continental Motors plant and retooled it, and the Handbook of Texas lists makers from Hatco hats and DAP caulk to Daisy sour cream, Garrett Metal Detectors, Plastipak, and Micropac.

The big recent reuse is the Jupiter Miller Business Center, a former Raytheon building redeveloped into about 750,000 square feet of new industrial space.

Our part of that world is the inside: the front office in a warehouse, a break room, a training room, the restrooms a new tenant actually needs. That’s an office build-out, and it’s work we take on.

A medical district on Shiloh Road

Valoris HealthPark sits on the former Baylor Medical Center-Garland campus near Shiloh Road and Walnut Street. The VA Medical Center Garland opened there in April 2020, and DART’s account of the redevelopment describes five medical office buildings around it, three of them, more than 150,000 square feet together, bought by a private development team. Clinic suites bring exam-room plumbing, accessibility, and finish requirements of their own; see medical and wellness build-outs. We built a 4,250-square-foot wellness studio in Frisco in five weeks, so this is familiar ground.

What Garland’s older buildings hide

Most Garland projects start inside something old. That’s not a complaint. It just changes the order of operations.

Downtown, the nomination explains why few buildings match their original photos. Through the 1950s, owners stripped off corbelled brick and fancy parapets, stuccoed or painted the brick, and swapped wood storefronts for clear, then dark, anodized aluminum. So expect layers when you open a wall downtown: the storefront you see may not be the first one in that opening. And the oldest walls are older than they look. A fire in 1899 destroyed 28 of the town’s 30 businesses, downtown was rebuilt around the square, and the three oldest survivors date from 1897.

Downtown’s postwar additions were plainer from the start: one-story commercial blocks like 107 South Sixth Street, built in 1946 with no stylistic ornament at all. Garland’s code has a rule that matters for simple buildings like these. Section 30.05 bans unpainted wood, tin, or plain concrete block as an exterior wall covering on homes or commercial buildings. Turning an old block building into something new? The block outside gets painted or clad.

Illustrative: an older concrete block commercial building converted into a fitness studio, with the block painted and the roof structure left exposed.

Change of use is the other trap. A gym moving into a former warehouse bay is usually a different kind of occupancy. Garland’s CO application asks whether the space is sprinklered, and the city’s review notes whether the occupancy is changing. Exits, restroom counts, and fire protection all get a fresh look. Price that before you sign the lease, not after.

Permits, plan review, and the CO in Garland

Garland’s Building Inspection Department works from 800 Main Street, first floor, and takes permit submissions weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Here’s a detail worth flagging if you’ve built in neighboring cities. Garland still enforces the 2015 International codes, effective September 19, 2016, with the 2014 National Electrical Code. Several nearby cities have moved to newer editions, so drawings prepared for a job elsewhere may need adjusting here.

The city’s building permit page says permits are required for all new construction, remodels, additions, interior completions, and demolition. Fees follow project valuation. A non-refundable plan review fee of 40% of the permit fee is due at submittal, plus a 4.5% technology surcharge. A commercial submittal needs four full architectural sets, energy calculations, a site plan approved by Engineering, and TDLR confirmation for accessibility review on work over $50,000. Building plans can’t be approved until Engineering approves the civil plans.

Contractors register first. Under Section 30.07 of the city code, it’s unlawful for anyone not registered as a general contractor to secure building permits, and the registration runs one year. Homeowners can pull permits for a house they own.

The certificate of occupancy comes after the green tag

In Garland, you apply for the CO after the building final is approved. The tenant must be the applicant. The city’s CO procedures sheet lists the packet: the CO application, an emergency contact sheet kept by the Fire Department, and a utility release with a commercial utility service application. It also sets expectations about the fire inspection:

“They DO NOT make appointments. They perform random inspections.”

From the City of Garland’s certificate of occupancy procedures, describing the Fire Marshal’s Office.

The same sheet says the CO application process takes about six to eight weeks. The CO submittal requirements add scaled site and floor plans showing exits, exit and emergency lighting, and door hardware. If you’re in a shopping center, you also submit a site plan of the entire property with every business, its square footage, and its hours. And utilities won’t be released until all inspection items are complete.

We draw the plans and assemble the packet. You sign as the tenant.

Restaurants: the Garland Health Department

Food service has a sequence of its own. The city’s annual food service permit page starts with building plans to Building Inspection. Then comes a pre-construction health inspection, where the inspector meets your general contractor to confirm materials, equipment, and placement match the plans. After that: a pre-opening checklist, a pre-opening inspection, and a final inspection that issues the permit. Heavy food preparation runs $500 a year.

The food service construction standards are specific:

• Quarry or ceramic tile floors for heavy food prep, vinyl for light prep
• No acoustic ceiling tiles
• A three-compartment sink wherever food is prepared
• A grease trap at every new food establishment (unless you sell only prepackaged food), outside the building footprint and never shared

That last one shapes site selection. An interior suite with no route to an outside trap is a hard place to open a kitchen. Our restaurant construction page covers the rest.

MASACO’s project in Irving: Pizza Twist, a 2,000-square-foot franchise restaurant built in six to eight weeks while it stayed open.

Fire plan review and state accessibility review

The Fire Marshal’s Office at 1500 State Highway 66 reviews sprinkler, alarm, and hood systems. Its plan submittal requirements treat each sprinkler riser as its own system with its own permit, ask for plans without digital signatures or file protection because those delay approval, and require the stamped plans and signed permit on site while work happens.

The state adds one more layer. TDLR requires projects of $50,000 or more to be registered with a full set of construction documents for accessibility review, and smaller projects still have to meet the Texas Accessibility Standards.

Remodeling Garland’s postwar houses

Garland’s neighborhoods tell you their age. The city describes the Axe neighborhood, between Kingsley Road and Carroll Drive, as about 1,000 properties that took shape during the city’s mid-20th-century growth, home to an elementary school that opened in 1955. Freeman Heights, south of Travis Street, has about 600 single-family homes. The Williams Estates area off Miller Road has more than 1,300.

Kitchens come first in houses like these. In a house from Axe’s era, the kitchen is usually closed off and short on counter space, with wiring that predates the dishwasher. Kitchen remodeling here often means opening a wall, which needs a structural check first, and adding circuits for modern appliances under the 2014 electrical code Garland enforces.

One direction that suits these houses: lean into the era instead of fighting it.

Illustrative: a 1950s ranch kitchen remodeled in a mid-century direction, with walnut slab doors and a terrazzo-look counter.

If the panel or meter base needs replacing, Garland treats that as its own permit, and depending on your address the power may come from Garland Power & Light, the city-owned utility formed in 1923. Hall baths in these houses are small, so bathroom remodeling usually works inside the footprint. Even a water heater swap is on Garland’s permit list.

Garage conversions, additions, and foundation repair each have their own permit type in Garland. When the kitchen, baths, and flooring all need work at once, a whole-home remodel under one schedule usually beats three separate jobs.

A 1958 house can take a 2026 kitchen. It just can’t take one that ignores what’s behind the drywall.

Don’t plan around a city rebate this year, though. Garland’s Home Improvement Incentive Rebate Program is closed, and the city’s home improvement page says it wasn’t funded in the 2026 budget.

Three Garland landmarks worth knowing

The theater at the top of this page is the Plaza, at 521 West State Street. The downtown district’s National Register nomination says it was built in 1941 and remodeled in 1950 in the Moderne style by theater architect Jack Corgan. Today the city runs it as a 350-seat theater with a domed lobby. Here are two more.

The 1901 Santa Fe depot

The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad built Garland’s depot in 1901, replacing an earlier one. The Texas Historical Commission records that the city moved it about 150 yards in 1972 to become a landmark museum, and it was moved again in 2013. It’s now the Garland Landmark Museum at 393 North Sixth Street.

The 1901 Santa Fe depot, now the Garland Landmark Museum on North Sixth Street.

Travis College Hill on South 11th Street

The Travis College Hill Historic District covers the 300 and 400 blocks of South 11th Street. Its nomination says the Interurban Land Company platted the addition in 1913, and that the district holds twelve homes, mostly Craftsman bungalows, including an 1895 Queen Anne moved there in 2014.

Craftsman bungalows and a later brick ranch side by side in the Travis College Hill Historic District.

How a Garland project runs with MASACO

Our six steps are on the process page. In Garland they look like this.

1. Understand. We walk the suite or the house and read the lease, the work letter, or the plat.
2. Visualize. You see 3D renderings before we price anything.
3. Plan. A fixed-scope proposal organized by trade, with allowances spelled out, checked against Garland’s 2015 codes.
4. Execute. One project manager and a written photo update every week. We register with the city before pulling permits, and we book the health and fire reviews.
5. Deliver. A close-out package with as-builts, permits, inspection records, the CO, and warranties.
6. Support. We stay reachable after handover.

Whether it’s a suite near the square, a second-generation space at Firewheel, or a 1950s house in Axe, book a consultation. We’ll walk it with you and come back with a plan you can hold us to.

Building in Garland: what to know.

Garland grew from 10,571 residents in 1950 to 138,857 in 1980, so a large share of its homes date from that postwar boom, in neighborhoods like Axe, which took shape in the mid-20th century near Lon Wynne Park. Commercial space runs from the brick blocks of the Garland Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2017, to Firewheel Town Center on the George Bush Turnpike and an industrial base the city's economic development partnership puts at more than 300 manufacturers. The Building Inspection Department at 800 Main Street issues permits and certificates of occupancy under the 2015 International codes, which Garland adopted in 2016.

Garland neighborhoods and districts.

• Downtown Garland
• Travis College Hill
• Freeman Heights
• Axe Neighborhood
• Williams Estates
• Western Heights
• Quail Creek
• Firewheel Estates
• 5th Street Crossing
• Firewheel Town Center
• Valoris HealthPark
• Jupiter Miller Business Center

Garland on the map.

Open Garland, TX in Google Maps