McKinney General Contractor, From the Square to SH 121

McKinney is two job sites sharing one city name. Downtown, a courthouse dedicated in 1876 and rebuilt in 1927 anchors a square of brick storefronts listed on the National Register. Out west and north, master-planned communities are still pouring slabs. The Census Bureau counted 195,308 people here in 2020 and estimates 236,001 by July 2025, a 20.8% jump in five years (Census QuickFacts).

For an owner, that split decides almost everything about a project: which review sits in front of the permit, what’s hiding behind the walls, and which inspections stand between you and opening day.

We’re MASACO Construction, a woman- and minority-owned general contractor based at 7950 Legacy Drive in Plano, about 25 minutes from the McKinney square. We’re commercial first, with a full residential remodeling practice. Our closest finished projects sit just outside the city line: Fade & Style Barber Shop in Allen, a 1,500 SF shell we took to open in six weeks, and Cielo Beauty Bar in Celina, a 2,600 SF luxury salon delivered in eight.

Fade & Style in Allen, one city south of McKinney: our 1,500 SF shell-to-open build-out, finished in six weeks.

Where McKinney’s commercial space is, and what’s in it

The square. The historic core is small and dense. The City’s latest historic resources survey found commercial buildings concentrated around the courthouse square and along Tennessee Street, McDonald Street (SH 5), and US 75, mostly one-part and two-part commercial blocks with a few Italianate, Classical, and Art Deco touches (2023 Historic McKinney Survey Report). Shops and restaurants fill the ground floors. Every one of those buildings is old enough that a new tenant inherits somebody else’s decisions.

SH 121 and Craig Ranch. Along the Sam Rayburn Tollway, Craig Ranch covers 2,200 acres between Custer Road and Stacy Road and helped shape the whole corridor (Community Impact). The buildings are newer here. You’re more likely to be choosing between a cold shell and a suite someone else already built out than worrying about clay drain pipe.

US 380. The north side’s growth runs along 380. Painted Tree’s 1,100 acres sit north of it near Lake Forest, with about 3,400 homes planned. The variable is TxDOT’s proposed US 380 bypass, an eight-lane freeway with frontage roads; a 2023 hearing even showed a shift in the alignment east of Tucker Hill. If you’re signing a long lease on that corridor, read the City’s US 380 bypass page first.

The east side. McKinney National Airport opens a 46,000-square-foot passenger terminal on FM 546, with Avelo’s first flights scheduled for November 11, 2026 (City of McKinney). For restaurant and service operators, that’s a new reason to look east of US 75.

First generation or second, the City treats the difference precisely. A simple certificate of occupancy covers a new tenant moving into existing space with no alterations, and the inspector checks that your layout matches the last approved plan. Move one wall and it becomes a building permit. That’s the line between a quick move-in and a real tenant improvement project, and we’ll tell you which side of it you’re on before you sign. Salons and barber shops live or die on plumbing and lighting, which is where both of our nearby projects put most of their effort, and why our retail and salon build-outs plan those trades first. Medical suites add their own wrinkle: the City’s CO checklist calls out NEC 517 wiring in treatment spaces.

Three McKinney landmarks and what they teach a builder

The courthouse square

One block face on the square shows the survey’s building types in a single frame: brick commercial blocks and a temple-front bank.

The courthouse at the center of the square isn’t quite the one dedicated in 1876. In 1927 it was rebuilt from the inside out: new floor levels, a basement and a third floor, buff brick over the entire exterior, and steel and concrete in place of the wood framing (City of McKinney). The county moved out in 1979. The City reopened it in March 2006 as the McKinney Performing Arts Center after working with the Texas Historical Commission on the rehabilitation.

That’s a fair preview of any downtown job. Old buildings here have usually been rebuilt at least once, and you don’t always get the drawings from the last round.

The Cotton Mill on Elm Street

The McKinney Cotton Mill opened in 1910 with three floors and lost its top level to a 1948 tornado.

The mill ran from 1910 until it closed in 1969 after 59 years. New owners bought it in 1996 and began restoring it, and today it holds offices and event space (McKinney Cotton Mill). The Texas Historical Commission lists the McKinney Cotton Mill Historic District on the National Register as of October 8, 1987 (THC Atlas). It’s the template for a lot of McKinney commercial work. Keep the brick. Replace the systems.

Adriatica Village

Adriatica from the air, with the bell tower at center and the chapel on its island at left.

Adriatica is the opposite problem. It’s a 45-acre Croatian-inspired village on a private lake in the Stonebridge Ranch area, with a bell tower modeled on one in Supetar, Croatia (Visit McKinney). New stone buildings, built to look old. A suite here follows the same permit and CO path as any other, but the finishes inside have to hold their own against the stone outside.

McKinney’s building stock, from 1870s brick to Painted Tree

The City’s survey, completed in 2024, documented 3,338 historic-age resources in and around the Historic Overlay District. The dates matter for your budget. About 147 of the dated buildings go back to roughly 1870 to 1899, 1,333 to 1900 to 1945, and 1,411 to 1946 to 1975. Craftsman and National Folk houses cluster in the center of the overlay. Post-war Ranch and Minimal Traditional houses fill the mid-century blocks along Waddill Street, Graves Street, and Greenwood Road.

The survey also counted what’s already been changed. Wood siding covers 38% of those buildings, brick 28%, and synthetic siding another 28%. Nearly half, 48%, already have replacement windows. One in five has a rear addition.

What’s behind the walls matters more. The City’s own guide for downtown merchants lists the usual suspects in its historic buildings: clay pipe in 1880s construction that tends to collapse, cast iron in 1920s to 1950s construction that flakes and clogs (the City recommends replacing both), electrical panels that need upgrading, rewiring, and no ground wire. Add brick walls that need repointing, cracked foundations, and buildings with no fire sprinklers (Downtown Business Resources).

Downtown, price the drain line before you price the tile. The City itself tells merchants to plan on replacing clay and cast iron.

A pre-war brick storefront opened up for new drains, power, and a code-compliant restroom.

West of US 75, the story changes. Building in Stonebridge Ranch began in the mid-1980s, and the association now counts more than 9,400 homes in 70-plus villages across over 5,000 acres (Stonebridge Ranch Community Association). The Village of Eldorado, between Eldorado Parkway and Virginia Parkway, is mostly brick homes from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s. Tucker Hill broke ground in 2007 as a traditional neighborhood design. On the north side, Trinity Falls (2,000 acres along the East Fork of the Trinity River) and Painted Tree are the most recent of the big master plans.

Those houses rarely need new drain lines. They need what most 20- to 40-year-old houses need: a kitchen and baths past their original finishes, and mechanical systems near the end of their service life.

Permits, COs, and historic review in McKinney, in order

The permit. The City of McKinney Building Inspections Department issues building permits for residential and commercial work, and everything runs through the City’s Citizen Self-Service portal. McKinney adopted the 2024 International Codes on October 1, 2025. Inspections on a permitted job are requested by the general contractor, which on our projects means us. Weather counts too: on a rainy inspection day the City expects foundation, ground plumbing, and flatwork inspections to be canceled, and a site the inspector finds too wet gets red-tagged with a re-inspection fee.

Commercial plan review. A commercial alteration or finish-out is reviewed by Building Inspections, Planning, Fire, and, for food service, Health (Commercial Alteration and Finish-Out Guide). Planning checks parking, zoning, and the dumpster enclosure, and in the Historic District it verifies architectural approvals. Drawings must be sealed by a Texas registered architect or engineer where state law requires it. Projects costing more than $50,000 need proof of TDLR accessibility registration. An addition that disturbs an existing commercial interior needs an asbestos survey on file. Signs are permitted separately, and the City’s new business guide is blunt about it: every sign, even a reface, needs its own permit.

The CO. Opening day hangs on the certificate of occupancy, and Building, Fire, and (for food) Health all sign off. Need to open while punch items finish? The City can issue a temporary CO, typically for 30 days, once every life-safety item is complete. Permission to Stock lets you move in furniture, fixtures, and merchandise before that. It doesn’t let anyone work in the space, not even for training.

We’ve lived the CO squeeze. On Fade & Style in Allen, the station wall panels needed extra fire-testing documentation before the city would issue the CO. We ran it down with the supplier and city officials, and the opening date didn’t move.

Restaurants. Food service adds a second track. McKinney Health Compliance wants a proposed menu, a HACCP plan, and a layout showing equipment and plumbing fixtures before a food establishment is built or remodeled. It also requires grease interceptors to sit outside the building (Food Service Plan Review). You can’t operate without both the CO and a Food Establishment Permit. On a tight downtown lot, that outside interceptor is a site question before it’s a plumbing question, and it’s one of the first things we look at on a restaurant build-out.

Historic review. In the Historic Overlay District, exterior work visible from the public right of way needs a Certificate of Appropriateness before work starts and before the permit is issued. Windows, siding, doors, trim, masonry, porches, railings, fencing, and signs all count. There’s no fee, and the office doesn’t regulate interiors (City of McKinney COA FAQ). Staff approve work that meets the ordinance. Anything else is approved with conditions or sent to the Historic Preservation Advisory Board, except in the Commercial Historic District, where the Historic Preservation Office decides and appeals go to City Council. The City was named a Certified Local Government by the National Park Service and the Texas Historical Commission in May 2025 (Historic Preservation).

In McKinney’s historic districts, the Certificate of Appropriateness comes first. The building permit waits for it.

Downtown logistics. Two more constraints. Festival weekends close the streets around the square: Arts in Bloom in April, Oktoberfest on the last full weekend of September (about 80,000 people), and Home for the Holidays the weekend after Thanksgiving. And construction debris can’t go in the downtown carts or trash enclosures, so every demo needs its own haul-off plan. The City’s downtown merchant page, linked above, also lists money worth asking about: MCDC infrastructure grants of up to $25,000 with a match for landmark retail buildings in the downtown Cultural District, TIRZ grants for facades, critical maintenance, and fire suppression, and free facade and awning design help through the Texas Main Street program.

Remodeling a McKinney home, historic district or HOA

As far as the Historic Preservation Office is concerned, the interior of a house in the overlay district is yours to change and the exterior isn’t. That makes the kitchen and bathroom the simpler half of a historic remodel. Windows, porches, siding, and additions are the half that goes to the Historic Preservation Office. Rear additions outnumber side additions in the City’s survey, 796 to 458, and the back of the house is where we start an addition design before it goes in for a COA.

Older houses also bring the same surprises as the storefronts on the square. Open a wall in a 1920s kitchen and you’re likely looking at wiring and drain lines that need replacing, so we carry them as named allowances in the proposal instead of letting them surface as change orders after demo.

The 1980s to 2000s houses in Stonebridge Ranch and along Eldorado Parkway are a different job. Strong bones, dated rooms. They’re good candidates for a kitchen opened to the family room around an island, a primary bath rebuilt around a walk-in shower, or a whole-home remodel that resets floors, finishes, and lighting in one pass. Exterior changes in Stonebridge go through the association’s modification application. In Tucker Hill, Trinity Falls, and Painted Tree, the houses are young enough that the work is usually an upgrade rather than a fix, and you’ll want your HOA’s sign-off before changing anything outside.

A kitchen from around 2000 reworked around a long island, with the wall to the family room gone.

How a McKinney project runs with MASACO

Every MASACO job follows the same six steps, laid out on our process page. Here’s how they play out in McKinney.

1. Understand. We walk the property, then check the parcel against the Historic Overlay District and any HOA before we talk scope.
2. Visualize. You see 3D renderings before you see a price. They’re also useful when the Historic Preservation Office or an HOA asks how the work will look from the street.
3. Plan. You get a fixed-scope proposal organized by trade, with allowances spelled out. In McKinney that includes the line items the City’s checklists create: sealed drawings, TDLR registration when the job tops $50,000, an outside grease interceptor for food service, and haul-off for downtown demo.
4. Execute. One project manager runs the job and sends a written update with photos every week. We file the permits, request inspections through Citizen Self-Service, and schedule downtown deliveries around festival weekends.
5. Deliver. You get a close-out package: as-builts, permits, inspection records, the certificate of occupancy, and warranties.
6. Support. After move-in you keep a single point of contact at MASACO, and commercial owners can roll into a facility maintenance program.

Got a McKinney storefront, a suite off SH 121, or a Stonebridge house still wearing its 1990s kitchen? Book a consultation through our contact page. We’ll walk it with you, tell you which reviews your project triggers, and come back with a design and a fixed-scope proposal you can hold us to.

Building in McKinney: what to know.

McKinney builds on two clocks at once: a historic core where the City's latest survey counted 3,338 historic-age buildings and where exterior work needs a Certificate of Appropriateness before a permit, and a west and north side where Stonebridge Ranch, Craig Ranch, Tucker Hill, Trinity Falls, and Painted Tree keep adding homes and storefronts. The City of McKinney Building Inspections Department permits both under the 2024 International Codes, adopted October 1, 2025, and the general contractor schedules every inspection through the City's Citizen Self-Service portal. Downtown jobs also plan deliveries and haul-off around festival weekends that close the streets around the square.

McKinney neighborhoods and districts.

• Historic Downtown McKinney
• Historic Overlay District
• McKinney Cotton Mill Historic District
• Stonebridge Ranch
• Adriatica Village
• Village of Eldorado
• Craig Ranch
• Tucker Hill
• Trinity Falls
• Painted Tree
• SH 121 (Sam Rayburn Tollway) corridor
• US 75 corridor
• US 380 corridor

McKinney on the map.

Open McKinney, TX in Google Maps