04/21/2026
🏛️Downtown Houston Historic Preservation🏛️ After nearly 8 years working on this project with our team, starting with the Raphael and Dorrance buildings, 917 Franklin is complete.
It’s a 1904 building in downtown Houston, originally the Commercial National Bank and one of the earliest skyscrapers in the city’s first financial district. It also once housed the offices of William Marsh Rice and the original offices of the Rice Institute.
Projects like this don’t usually happen in Houston.
Most of the time, buildings like this get torn down. It’s faster. It’s easier. It pencils better.
Dan Zimmerman has continued to invest in preservation, from the buildings along Main Street to La Colombe d’Or, where a historic mansion was restored and expanded into a luxury boutique hotel while maintaining its original character.
917 Franklin now joins those earlier buildings as part of Main&Co, forming a collection of preserved structures in a part of downtown that has long been established.
In a city that tends to replace, choosing to restore is still the harder path. And it’s usually the more meaningful one.
