Irving had 2,615 residents in 1950. Ten years later it had 45,895, according to the Handbook of Texas, and by 1970 it had passed 100,000. The Census Bureau’s July 2025 estimate puts it at 257,076.
That growth came in layers, and every layer left a different kind of building behind. Postwar houses and storefronts around the old downtown. Office towers and gated villages in Las Colinas. Business parks pressed up against DFW Airport. A 1950s house off Irving Boulevard and a suite in a Las Colinas tower share a city and almost nothing else, so we read the building before we price it.
We’re MASACO, a woman- and minority-owned general contractor at 7950 Legacy Drive in Plano, about 30 minutes from Las Colinas. Commercial build-outs lead our work, with a full residential remodeling practice beside them. And Irving is where we built Pizza Twist: a 2,000 SF franchise restaurant with full kitchen installation and utility connections, delivered in 6 to 8 weeks while the restaurant stayed open. We phased the work around service hours so the owner never stopped selling pizza.
Las Colinas, SH 183, and the airport edge
Irving’s commercial map has four centers of gravity. They don’t look alike, and they don’t lease alike.
Las Colinas. John W. Carpenter established a ranch on Irving’s north side in 1928. His son Ben co-managed it, and on September 14, 1973, it was announced as a planned community. The Handbook’s Las Colinas entry says it reached about 12,000 acres by 1980. Its core is the Urban Center, built around 125-acre Lake Carolyn and the Mandalay Canal, where about twenty shops lined the water by the early 1980s. Today Water Street puts restaurants on the lake’s shore, and you can still take a gondola through the canals.
The Irving-Las Colinas Chamber calls the Urban Center the largest concentration of office space in North Texas. Next to it sits what the city’s visitors bureau calls the Las Colinas Entertainment District: the Irving Convention Center, the Westin, and the Toyota Music Factory, all within a five-minute walk. So one district needs two very different products. Quiet office floors in the towers. Restaurants and bars built to absorb a concert crowd.
The bronze herd in the photo at the top of this page is the Mustangs of Las Colinas, nine horses by wildlife artist Robert Glen, installed at Williams Square in 1984. The plaza at 5217 N. O’Connor Blvd. reopened in May 2022 after a $7.8 million renovation, with Glen helping restore his own horses.
Las Colinas also has its own layer of review. The Las Colinas Association requires an Architectural Request Form and committee approval before new construction or exterior work, and its examples include temporary and permanent signage and rooftop screening. Committees meet every two weeks, alternating commercial and residential, and a decision takes one to six weeks. An office build-out on the twelfth floor may never touch that process. A restaurant with a new sign and a new rooftop unit will.
SH 183 and central Irving. SH 183, the Airport Freeway, crosses the middle of the city east to west. Irving Mall opened at SH 183 and Belt Line Road in 1971, and the Chamber describes North Irving there as a 10-mile commercial corridor. Older corridors mean second-generation space: somebody else’s hood, somebody else’s grease trap, somebody else’s ceiling grid.
The airport edge. DFW Airport was developed along Irving’s western edge in the 1970s. Between I-635 on the north and SH 114 on the south, DFW Freeport is a 550-acre business park inside Foreign Trade Zone 39, according to its developer. North of I-635, Valley Ranch covers 2,400 acres with 4,000 single-family homes, 22 multifamily properties, and more than 120 businesses, governed by separate residential, commercial, and master boards, per the Irving-Las Colinas Chamber. The airport even shows up in Irving’s building code. More on that below.
The Heritage District. Irving’s original downtown sits around Main Street and Heritage Park, and the City is putting money into it. Its enhancement incentive programs offer up to $50,000 as an 80% reimbursable grant for exterior building and site work on existing downtown buildings, and up to $150,000 at 50% for properties inside Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone No. 2. The application process asks for contractor quotes, cost estimates, and designs or renderings that tell the story of the project, and the City says to plan on at least two months from a complete application to approval. Our 3D renderings and trade-by-trade proposals drop straight into that packet.
Three building eras, three kinds of surprises
Irving began with a lot auction on December 19, 1903, after Rock Island railway surveyors bought 80 acres for a town site. It incorporated in 1914 and stayed a farm town for 40 years. Then the farmland turned into subdivisions, and the population grew more than seventeenfold in the 1950s.
Each era hands a contractor a different problem.
- Downtown and the postwar city. The City’s Heritage District plan counts 285 commercial properties, 1,614 single-family homes and duplexes, and 1,283 apartment or townhome units on about 1,036 acres, with a form-based code governing development in the Heritage Crossing District. Older buildings mean more surprises behind the walls, aging electrical service, and floors that were never meant to be a restaurant kitchen.
- Mall-era corridors. Retail suites that may have turned over several times since the 1970s. Ask what’s still in the walls before you sign.
- Las Colinas from the 1980s on. Caltex House went up in the Urban Center starting in 1981, and the towers kept coming. These suites tend to be cleaner, but landlord work letters and association review set the pace.
Second-generation restaurant space deserves its own warning. Irving’s food establishment guidelines tell anyone buying an existing food business to call the City before purchase, because the structure and equipment may not meet current code and must be updated before the certificate of occupancy is approved. Painted or bare concrete floors are prohibited in food areas. So is resurfaced or painted equipment. A cheap lease on an old pizzeria can carry a new floor, new wall finishes, and a new hood.
In Irving, the cheapest suite to lease is rarely the cheapest suite to open.
The ground matters too. The Irving Convention Center sits on 264 drilled piers, 80 to 110 feet deep, and the center’s fact sheet says its structure was designed for 3 1/8 inches of movement where a typical building allows 1 inch. Your build-out won’t drill piers. But in any older slab, we check for movement and cracking before anyone orders tile.
Irving permits: six-day reviews and no fast track
The Inspections Department works from the second floor of City Hall at 825 W. Irving Blvd. You apply, pay, upload plans, and request inspections in the MGO Connect portal, and an inspection requested by 6 a.m. can happen that same business day. Pre-construction meetings aren’t mandatory here, but staff will set up a virtual one on request. We usually request one.
What to know before you sign anything:
- The codes changed on May 1, 2026. Irving’s 2024 code ordinance adopted the 2024 building, residential, energy, plumbing, mechanical, fuel gas, existing building, and pool codes, and the Fire Department now works under the 2024 International Fire Code. Some City handouts still cite the 2021 energy code for COMcheck, so we confirm the edition with the reviewer before running the numbers.
- Registration is the City’s check. Texas doesn’t license general contractors. Irving’s FAQ says to confirm your general contractor is registered with the City, and electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and irrigation contractors need state licenses. If a contractor asks you to pull the permit yourself, the City treats that as a warning sign.
- Review takes six business days a round. Irving’s commercial checklist says there’s no early start or fast track. Complete plans are the only shortcut.
- The CO rides with the permit. On the commercial remodel checklist, the certificate of occupancy is included with the building permit. The same page requires an asbestos survey where work happens (the one exception is a first-time finish-out of a new shell), a TDLR accessibility registration for projects of $50,000 or more, and kitchen and equipment plans for any business that sells or prepares food.
In Irving, a new tenant or a change in suite size means a new certificate of occupancy. Plan your opening around it.
Restaurants: what Irving’s health review asks for
Restaurant construction in Irving runs through building, health, fire, and water utilities, and the health piece starts early. On a project with a building permit, you upload kitchen plans to that permit, and the plan review fee is $125, per the City’s health inspections FAQ. Irving’s guidelines for new or remodeled food establishments want the menu, the floor layout, manufacturer spec sheets for equipment, and finishes for walls, floors, baseboards, ceilings, countertops, and cabinets. Then they get specific:
- Two restrooms once you have more than 12 customer seats.
- Quarry tile, commercial ceramic tile, commercial epoxy, or a commercial kitchen sealer where grease is used; anything but quarry tile needs approval and a spec sheet first.
- Stainless steel from the vent hood down to the baseboard behind cooking equipment.
- A Type 1 hood with grease filters over griddles, fryers, ovens, ranges, and wok stations.
- Hand sinks in restrooms and every 25 unimpeded feet of prep, service, and dish area.
Grease gets its own math. Irving’s interceptor sizing example sizes a gravity interceptor for 2.5 hours of detention and pumping at least every 90 days, which works out to a 4,000 gallon unit for a 120-seat restaurant open 16 hours a day. After you open, Water Utilities expects every pump-out manifest kept on site for five years. And the fire extinguishing system in your hood is a separate permit, issued by the Fire Department, not Inspections.
Pizza Twist was built under those rules with one extra constraint: staff and guests were in the space every day. The kitchen installation and utility connections went in on a phased plan, the daily schedule bent around service hours, and the project closed with a successful final inspection. Our restaurant construction page covers food-service scope, and our restaurant build-out guide for Dallas-Fort Worth walks through the sequence from lease to opening.
Remodeling Irving homes, postwar to Valley Ranch
Irving’s residential guidelines require a permit to erect, enlarge, alter, move, demolish, or repair a structure. Painting, carpet, and cabinetry don’t need one, and neither does replacing fixtures or appliances at existing connections, except water heaters. Homeowners can pull their own permits only with a homestead exemption on file with the Dallas Central Appraisal District. The City’s advice is blunt: never take out a permit for your contractor, because whoever signs it answers for the work.
The houses themselves split three ways.
Postwar Irving. The homes that went up during the 1950s boom, across central and south Irving, are now about 70 years old. Kitchens are often closed off from the living room. There may be one small bath for the whole house. Plumbing and wiring may be original. A kitchen remodel here usually means opening a wall, and a bathroom remodel usually means finding out what’s behind the old tile before promising a date.
The Las Colinas villages. University Hills was the first. Quail Run’s condominiums date to the mid-1970s, Country Club Place’s townhomes to the early 1980s, and Hackberry Creek, Cottonwood Valley, and Windsor Ridge were built as gated villages around golf courses. Exterior changes, from paint color to a room addition, go through the Las Colinas Association’s committee before work starts.
Valley Ranch. Canal lots north of I-635. Every exterior change to the front or back of a home, including additions, fencing, and landscaping, needs approval from the Valley Ranch Association’s Architectural Review Committee.
Here’s the airport rule we promised. Irving’s amended residential code designates two aircraft noise zones, 65 to 70 DNL and over 70 DNL, mapped on a document kept by the building official. Inside them, the City won’t issue a building permit unless an acoustical consultant certifies the plans, and homes must achieve a 25 decibel outdoor-to-indoor reduction in the first zone and 30 in the second. Planning a home addition? We check that map first.
When the kitchen, the baths, the floors, and the lighting all need work, a whole-home remodel under one permit beats three separate projects in a postwar house.
Irving landmarks with a construction story
Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas
The copper building at 500 W. Las Colinas Blvd. opened in January 2011. It cost $133 million, covers 275,000 square feet, and wears 123 tons of copper in more than 8,000 panels. Under it are those 264 piers. The center’s fact sheet also calls it the first City facility built under its Minority-Women Business Enterprise policy, with 30% MWBE participation and more than 70 subcontractors. As a woman- and minority-owned contractor, we notice numbers like that.
Toyota Music Factory
Planned as the Irving Music Factory, the complex a short walk from the convention center opened in September 2017. Its Pavilion holds 8,000 people, with a 4,000-seat indoor theater that opens to an open-air amphitheater. In May 2017 it looked like the photo below: a crawler crane, rebar cages on the ground, and concrete decks going up beside the glass towers.
Heritage Park and the depot
At 217 S. Main St., Heritage Park reopened in December 2021 after a redevelopment. Its depot isn’t original to Irving. It’s a relic saved from destruction, standing in for the circa 1904 Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf depot the town grew up around. Nearby are the Caster Cabin, built in 1887 as a dog-run cabin and rebuilt with its original logs after a fire, and the old water tower, the town’s main water source until 1924.
From first walkthrough to CO, working with MASACO
Every Irving job follows the six steps on our process page. First we walk the space with you and read what governs it: the lease exhibit, the Las Colinas or Valley Ranch guidelines, Irving’s food guidelines if you serve food. Then you see 3D renderings before we put a number on anything. The proposal is fixed in scope and organized by trade, with allowances written out. During construction one project manager runs the job and sends you written photo updates every week. At handover you get as-builts, permits, inspection records, the certificate of occupancy, and warranties. After that, we’re still a phone call away.
MASACO is led by Sara Bannat, Founder and CEO, and Mahmoud Abu Saad, COO, and we’re a Goldman Sachs Preferred Vendor. Need a commercial contractor in Irving for a restaurant, a Las Colinas office floor, or a storefront on Irving Boulevard? Or a remodel in a house older than the airport? Book a consultation. Bring the lease or the floor plan, and we’ll come back with a design you can see and a price you can hold us to.
Building in Irving: what to know.
Irving grew from 2,615 residents in 1950 to 45,895 in 1960, so its central and southern streets are largely postwar, while Las Colinas, begun on the north side in the 1970s, added the Urban Center towers and gated villages, and Valley Ranch filled 2,400 acres north of I-635. Commercial space runs from the Las Colinas Entertainment District to the older retail of the SH 183 corridor and the Heritage District downtown. The Inspections Department at City Hall, 825 W. Irving Blvd., issues permits and certificates of occupancy through the MGO Connect portal, under the 2024 codes that took effect in Irving on May 1, 2026.
Irving neighborhoods and districts.
- Las Colinas Urban Center
- Water Street
- Lake Carolyn
- Las Colinas Entertainment District
- University Hills
- Hackberry Creek
- Cottonwood Valley
- Windsor Ridge
- Valley Ranch
- DFW Freeport
- Irving Mall area (SH 183 and Belt Line)
- Heritage District (Downtown Irving)
- South Irving
Irving on the map.
Open Irving, TX in Google Maps
Photo credits
- View of the "Mustangs of Las Colinas" sculpture in the upscale Las Colinas neighborhood of Irving, Texas LCCN2015630710.jpg by Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Las Colinas, Irving Texas (6040356380).jpg by La Citta Vita, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Outside Irving Convention Center.jpg by Irvingtexas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Irving Music Factory May 2017.jpg by Jax 0677, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Irving Heritage Park June 2019 03 (Heritage Park Depot).jpg by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
