408 & 416 East College Street — the La Buena Vida / Church of Christ redevelopment

The most instructive live case in your district. One 1.8-acre property — a burned church campus turned winery turned vacant eyesore — carved into four new single-family lots plus a commercial remainder, requiring the full regulatory stack in sequence: HPC demolition CA → zoning change → replat → per-house design CAs. It is the working template for what the Commission and Council will accept on College Street today.

408 and 416 are now sibling lots in the same new subdivision. Post-plat, "416 E College" is Block 1 Lot 3R and "408 E College" is Block 1 Lot 1R, Grapevine College Heritage Addition. Both had design CAs heard April 22, 2026 (CA26-06 and CA26-05) — minutes not yet published; see Open items below.

Property history of record (from the city's own technical report, Z24-08)#

The HPC hearing — CA24-23, April 24, 2024 (verbatim record)#

Present: Shope (Chairman), Telford (Vice-Chair), Anderson, Niewald, Meyer, Garcia, Bunn (alt) — Gilliland had resigned 3/27/2024. Staff: Klempin (HPO), McCallum (CVB Exec. Dir.), Boyle (City Attorney), Vanderpool (secretary). Liaisons: Slechta (Council), Hotelling (P&Z).

Applicant: Lemoine Wright, Wright Construction Company (owner entity Wright 430 Main LLC, 600 W. Wall St.) — filed 3/27/2024.

What was requested: demolish the one-story 2,415 sq ft former Sunday School building, the winery's outdoor pavilion and brick walls, remove the asphalt parking lots; subdivide into four single-family lots facing E College + one commercial lot facing E Hudgins.

Why staff supported demolition (Klempin's report — the reasoning that mattered)#

• The Sunday School building is a gable-fronted rectangle clad in Texas limestone veneer with few windows, sitting in the middle of the site — it "does not lend itself to being adapted to serve as a single-family residential structure"
• It only ever adjoined the 1950 sanctuary that burned in the 1980s
• Pavilion and decorative brick walls were winery-era construction (post-1994), now in disrepair
• Site is 78,972 sq ft → four large residential lots (12,737–15,899 sq ft as presented) + a 21,716 sq ft commercial lot
• The applicant attached photos of historic Grapevine houses "to provide inspiration for new homes" — a deliberate move to pre-answer the compatibility question

What the commissioners actually said#

• Lemoine Wright (applicant): the goal is to "clean up an eye sore on College Street and add value to the neighborhood"; he wants to "do something special," providing future owners plans that are above average and "bring back some of the prominent historic homes from the Grapevine area."
• Vice-Chairman Telford — the Commission's strictest voice — spoke personally, not critically: she knew many who attended the Church of Christ, had visited La Buena Vida on the Candlelight Tour of Homes, and "it breaks her heart driving down College Street to see the property has fallen into such disrepair." (Note the frame: the neglect is the offense, not the demolition.)
• Commissioner Meyer asked the only skeptical question: could it be rehabbed as a winery again? — Klempin: after 10 years sitting empty, "not a viable option."
• Paul McCallum supplied the eyewitness history of the 1988 fire and concluded "the highest and best use of the property at this time is for residential homes."
• Commissioner Anderson recalled a child's birthday party there 20 years earlier and asked whether the property needs a historic overlay — Klempin: it is already inside the College Street Historic District.

The votes#

• Close public hearing — Telford moved, Niewald seconded, 7-0
• Approve CA24-23 with conditions as written — Telford moved, Meyer seconded, 7-0 (Shope, Telford, Niewald, Anderson, Garcia, Meyer, Bunn)
• Chairman Shope closed by "thank[ing] the Wright family for their investment in the City of Grapevine"

The four conditions (the standard Grapevine deal structure)#

1. Zoning change approved for the four single-family lots by P&Z and Council
2. Replat approved by P&Z and Council
3. All plans, exterior materials, windows, doors and door hardware, light fixtures and fences approved under a separate Certificate of Appropriateness
4. Building permit obtained from Building Services

The zoning stage — Z24-08, October 15, 2024#

• Applicant's agent: Jason Kilpatrick, Ridinger Associates (Wright presented in person)
• Request: rezone 1.314 acres from "GV" Grapevine Vintage District → "R-7.5" Single-Family; the southern remainder (proposed Lot 5) keeps its GV zoning for future commercial development
• Final plat lots (from the plat sheet): Lot 1 14,265 sq ft (0.327 ac) · Lot 2 14,508 sq ft (0.328 ac) · Lot 3 14,313 sq ft (0.329 ac) · Lot 4 14,370 sq ft (0.330 ac) — all with 25-ft building lines; 291.10 ft of College Street frontage, ~105 ft to Dooley Street
• Master Plan wrinkle staff flagged and neutralized: the Land Use Plan designates the site Low Intensity Commercial, so the proposal is "not compliant with the Master Plan" — but staff noted P&Z's ongoing exercise correcting zoning/land-use inconsistencies had already identified this property for a future land-use change. Non-compliance was disclosed, contextualized, and waved through.
• Airport noise Zone A (minimal effect) — appropriate use
• P&Z recommended 7-0 on both the zone change and the final plat
• Council: Z24-08 / Ord. 2024-097 approved 6-0-1 — motion Rogers, second Coy; ayes Tate, Freed, Rogers, Coy, Slechta, Leal; Mayor Pro Tem Darlene Freed abstained (recorded "6-1" in the minutes' tally line but listed as an abstention with zero nays — read it as 6-0-1)
• Final plat approved 7-0 — motion Coy, second Slechta
• No one spoke at the public hearing; one piece of correspondence was submitted (content not summarized in the minutes — obtainable via records request)

How the city framed it publicly#

Council Liaison Duff O'Dell told the Heritage Foundation board that Council "had a great night for Historic Preservation": the College Street winery becoming four homes plus the Worth Street apartment conversion meant "the City of Grapevine is slowly restoring the single-family homes back to the original Township." Redevelopment was cast as preservation policy, not as a loss.

Why this case matters to you#

1. Sequencing is everything. The HPC approved demolition conditioned on later zoning/plat approvals, and reserved every design decision for separate CAs. Nothing was decided all at once — and the applicant never had to guess: each stage had a defined gate.
2. "Eyesore" is the magic frame. Fourteen years of visible neglect converted a demolition request into a rescue. Compare Demolition Track Record: sound contributing houses get denied (620 Estill, 7-0); genuinely dead assets get approved with strings.
3. Adaptive-reuse must be addressed head-on. Meyer's "could it be a winery again?" is the §9 adaptive-use question in plain clothes. Klempin's one-sentence answer satisfied it — because staff had already built the record ("does not lend itself to adaptation").
4. Show your inspiration. Wright attached photos of historic Grapevine homes to a demolition application. That is why nobody asked "what will replace it?" with alarm.
5. The design fight is deferred, not avoided. Condition 3 means the actual houses at 408/416 face full CA review — materials, windows, doors, hardware, lights, fences. That's where Grapevine Pattern Book (2025) compliance now bites (adopted between the 2024 approval and the 2026 hearings).
6. Master Plan inconsistency is survivable when staff frames it as a known mapping error already queued for correction.

Open items / how to finish this file#

• April 22, 2026 minutes (CA26-05 & CA26-06) are still unpublished as of Aug 19, 2026. Checked both channels: the WebLink portal carries agendas only for all nine 2026 meetings, and the Archive Center's approved-minutes series stops at February 25, 2026. The city is running roughly six months behind on posting HPC minutes — so expect these to surface late 2026. They remain the single most useful precedent for your own project (first College Street new construction judged under the Pattern Book).
• Interim options if you don't want to wait: the HPC packet for April 22 (Archive Center, Packets series) may carry the staff reports and elevations, and the Historic Preservation office will discuss an approved CA on request.
• CA25-07 resolved — false lead. The Feb 25, 2026 agenda listed it at "416 East College Street," but the approved minutes place it at 416 West College Street (consistent with CA25-89 at 416 W College in January). It has nothing to do with this property.
• The one correspondence submitted at the Oct 15, 2024 hearing — content not in the minutes; a Public Information Act request to the City Secretary would produce it.
• Photos, plans and elevations exist in the HPC packet (Archive Center) and the Council packet (WebLink, Item 05) — the staff report PDF is in your Downloads as GVCC_2024-10-15_Item05_416EastCollege_StaffReport.pdf (26 pp, incl. survey, plat, and application forms).

Sources: Source Index §Minutes-corpus — HPC 2024-04-24 minutes (verbatim), HPC 2026-02-25 & 2026-04-22 agendas, Heritage Foundation 2024 minutes; Council/P&Z joint minutes Oct 15 2024 (OCR); Planning Services Technical Report Z24-08 (Council packet Item 05, OCR). Related: HPC 2024-04-24 · College Street Case Ledger · Demolition Track Record · HPC - Margaret Telford