Frisco’s Fields West and Plano’s Legacy West will be ‘sisters.’ Here’s what that means
The future of development in Frisco is continuously coming into sharper focus.
The city is on the heels of landmark moments in recent months. It hosted the Academy of Country Music Awards at The Star in early May, creating a new understanding of the venue’s ability to host live music performances. Also in early May, the city celebrated the opening of PGA Frisco, which includes an Omni resort, a retail and restaurant district, outdoor public space, the new home of the PGA of America and two championship golf courses. Later that month, the region and country got a small glimpse at the overall impact of the landmark project as the site hosted its first major championship. Frisco also made national headlines at the beginning of the year with the announcement that Universal Studios had planned a venue for the Dallas suburb.
It would be easy for Frisco to sit and look back on the collection of moments that have landed it on the national stage for the past multiple months. But that just wouldn’t be the Frisco way.
Instead, a short jump from the site of the city’s latest milestone moment, work continues on another project that is slated to change how residents and visitors alike experience Frisco. Schematic design is underway on Fields West, a roughly 2,600-acre mixed-use development tucked between Legacy Drive and the Dallas North Tollway and settled just north of Panther Creek Parkway.
The project is divided into three districts, with a first phase slated to be online as early as fall of 2026, said Julien Meyrat, senior designer with Gensler, an architecture, design and planning firm.
The mixed-use site will have a combination of retail, office and residential spaces, Meyrat said.
“It’s going to be very similar to Legacy West in terms of its massing and scale,” he said.
“It’s impossible to explain the vision for Fields West without mentioning Legacy West in Plano, which opened in 2017. Meyrat describes Fields West as a “younger sister” taking lessons learned from the older sister, Legacy West.
“And so Fields West is going to take those lessons and kind of make it even better,” he said. “So that’s kind of the approach we’re trying to do, is we’re trying to do something that has a more timeless look, that’s going to (…) feel a little bit more elevated, has a sense of elegance and things like that that we think are going to be above and beyond what Legacy West has already.”
Rest assured, the sisters will share both similarities and differences. Both siblings are slated to have familiar tenants, Meyrat said, and both will have similar anchors such as hotels and food halls. Both will bring an urban atmosphere to a more suburban landscape.
“Where it’s going to differ from Legacy West is that it’s going to have its own architectural identity, it’s going to have its own style that’s pretty particular to itself that is going to differentiate itself in terms of the colors, in terms of the materials, in terms of some of the massing and some of the details and things like that are going to be distinct from Legacy West,” Meyrat said.
And there are lessons learned from Legacy West that will be taken into account as the younger sister makes a name for herself. Meyrat notes that while Legacy West consists of a straight street that lends itself to quickly walking past storefronts, Fields West will have deliberate turns and endpoints that encourage meandering and lingering. Design also includes trying to create more variety and distinction in public spaces, he said.
“I think at Legacy West, some people get confused about where they are sometimes, where they entered and how to get back to their car because parts of the street kind of look too similar to each other, and we want to make sure that there’s a lot of variety in Fields West,” he said.
Design on the project has culminated into three “districts,” Meyrat said. On one end, the project has more of a convenient, informal feel while the other end — the end that includes a Ritz-Carlton hotel — will have a more “elegant, more sophisticated feel.”
Overall, the Fields West development is expected to bring a new experiential component to the tapestry of Frisco. Meyrat noted that Legacy West makes visitors feel like they’re in other parts of the country or world.
“So we think Frisco’s going to have a similar effect,” he said, “where it’s going to be a place in Frisco that kind of takes you away from all the rest of Frisco and the rest of that typical environment and provides you a very special kind of experience that is reminiscent of great urban spaces and urban places throughout the world.”