Drive along E. Northwest Highway between Ferndale and Plano roads this fall and you will pass a three-story building that has spent most of the past sixty years doing something quiet and unremarkable: housing medical offices. That is about to change, though not in the way most Lake Highlands residents expect from a construction sign. The building isn't becoming another gym or a boutique grocery. It's becoming a country club built almost entirely around children, and the strange part is that the club has been running for more than a year without a clubhouse.
The people behind it are Nick Clark and Dawson Williams, the pair who founded Common Desk, the Dallas coworking company they sold to WeWork in 2022. Through a new venture called Radical Play, an affiliate closed on the 3.65-acre property at 10405 E. Northwest Highway for $2 million in February 2025, buying it from an entity called Northlake Meridian LLC. What they're building there, a family club now named Stonethrow, has already collected hundreds of paying members before a single interior wall has gone up.
A Medical Building With a Complicated Résumé
The site itself has been reimagined more than once. Before Clark and Williams put it under contract, the property had already drawn a separate zoning application for an empty-nester community, a use that would have aimed at the opposite end of the family life cycle from what's actually arriving. Neither project happened until this one stuck.
Getting there required a public process that played out in the fall of 2024. Clark and Williams hosted a community meeting at the Audelia Branch Library on October 9, 2024, seeking a zoning change from limited office to residential with a specific use permit for a private club. District 10 Councilmember Kathy Stewart, who represents the area, supported the plan but pushed for the kind of permit language that gives neighbors recourse if the project changes hands or changes character years down the road. That is a fairly ordinary piece of Dallas zoning process, and it is also the reason the building didn't start changing overnight. It had to clear a city process first.
The Club Filled Up Before the Building Existed
Here is the part that makes Stonethrow different from a typical amenity opening. Within a month of accepting membership applications in mid-2025, the founders had heard from more than 400 families. They capped the founding round at 250 families, who were onboarded by July 15, 2025, at a founding rate of a $1,000 initiation fee and $490 in monthly dues. Each subsequent round of roughly 250 families is structured to see the initiation fee roughly double, until new members joining after the building opens will pay somewhere in the $8,000 to $10,000 range. By November 2025, the second round of membership had already drawn more than 500 families onto its own waitlist, more than double the size of the founding cohort.
None of that money bought access to a finished building. It bought access to a running community. Stonethrow's own materials describe a club that is "already underway," hosting two to four member events a week while construction continues, and still admitting a limited number of new families on a rolling basis. Early programming has included things like taking over the Katy Trail Ice House, organizing pool takeovers, and running scramble events at area golf courses, so the club's social life has been happening all over Dallas while its actual home stays under scaffolding.
That sequence, community first, building second, is the same one Clark and Williams ran at Common Desk, where members and staff were famously loyal enough that one industry writer later described the brand as "the Chick-fil-A of coworking." It is a familiar playbook applied somewhere Dallas hasn't seen it before: a category, the private club, where every existing option in the city is already full, with waitlists that stretch years for families trying to get into a traditional club at all.
What's Actually Going Into the Building
The scale of the build has grown since the project was first announced. When Clark and Williams unveiled the plan in October 2024, they described a roughly 42,000-square-foot renovation. By the summer of 2025, the figure being reported had grown to 50,000 square feet across the same 3.65-acre footprint, a sign the design kept expanding as the founders refined what they wanted the space to do.
What's planned across those floors, based on public statements from Clark and Williams:
- A ground floor built around a resort-style pool roughly a fifth larger than a typical country club pool, alongside a beer garden and an icehouse-style family restaurant, an indoor jungle gym, a nursery, a mothers' lounge, and an enclosed green field for outdoor play
- 18,000 square feet of indoor space dedicated specifically to children, split across age-appropriate zones rather than treated as an afterthought to adult amenities
- A second floor built for parents, with a gym, dedicated yoga and pilates studios, a sauna, and a cold plunge
- A top floor adults-only restaurant with a rooftop patio, meant to give parents a space that isn't shared with the kids' side of the building
Clark has talked openly about wanting to widen who a club like this serves. Rather than building for what he's called the top half a percent of the market the way most legacy clubs do, he's said opening the model to something closer to the top 15 percent of households could let far more families actually use it. The founders expect a steady membership base of 800 to 1,200 families once the club is fully open, a scale that would make it one of the larger private clubs in the city.
The Name, and the Date Nobody Can Quite Agree On
The club went nameless for almost a year while membership built. That ended on September 26, 2025, when an email to members and prospective members announced the name Stonethrow. The team described wanting something that felt exclusive without losing warmth, language meant to carry, in their words, both the weight of a private club and the feel of a neighborhood gathering place, with an intentional nod toward nostalgia for kids roaming the neighborhood and catching fireflies.
The opening date has been harder to pin down than the name. When the project was first pitched in October 2024, the target was late 2026, contingent on the zoning case clearing. By July 2025, the publicly stated target had moved to April 2027. A November 2025 update pushed it further, to summer 2027. A January 2026 industry newsletter still described the project as just breaking ground. None of those sources contradict each other so much as they capture a plan that kept sliding later even as the membership rolls kept growing, which is a reasonably normal pattern for a ground-up renovation of a 1960s office building into something built around a resort pool and an indoor jungle gym, but it does mean residents watching the construction fence shouldn't expect a firm date soon.
What This Looks Like From the Street This Fall
For now, the building on Northwest Highway will keep looking like a construction site with an increasingly specific set of blueprints behind the fence, while the actual community Stonethrow is building keeps happening somewhere else: a pool deck across town, a golf course scramble, a rented room at the Katy Trail Ice House. That gap between the physical progress and the social one is worth watching, because it's the clearest sign yet of what kind of club Lake Highlands is getting. Not a golf course with a kids' corner attached, but a building designed from the studs out around the idea that children come first and everything else, the sauna, the rooftop restaurant, the cold plunge, gets built around that.
Whether the doors open in early 2027 or later that year, the club's real opening already happened, sometime in the summer of 2025, at a pool somewhere in Dallas, with 250 families and no building yet to call their own.
If you're weighing what a project like this means for a specific street or a specific home in Lake Highlands, that's a conversation Longoria Brown Homes is glad to have. Let's Connect.
