Areas served
Interior Design and Renovation in Chagrin Falls
Chagrin Falls has the oldest and most varied housing stock of any community we serve east of the city. The village incorporated in 1844, and the East Side Historic District — added to the National Register in 2013, centered on the intersection of East Washington and Philomethian — reads like a timeline: Greek Revival houses built for early Geauga County pioneer families, Italianate in the 1870s, Stick, Eastlake and Queen Anne through the 1890s, then Dutch Colonial Revival, Bungalow and Craftsman into the 1910s. The village has three historic districts in all — East Side, West Side, and the Triangle Park commercial district. On Water Street, Church Street, Franklin Street and Washington Street there are houses from the 1830s still standing, and the Historical Society runs a Century Home plaque program for owners who want the date on the front of the house.
The village reviews everything
This is the operative fact for anyone planning work in Chagrin Falls: the Village Architectural Board of Review examines all exterior renovations for all buildings, structures and homes in the village. Not just historic districts. Not just landmarks. All of it.
The board meets the first and third Tuesday of each month at 8:30am at Village Hall, 21 W. Washington Street. Initial submissions are due 20 days before the meeting — 11 days for fences and signs — with resubmissions and field changes due 11 days out. Deadlines close at noon. The village publishes design guidelines, and they are worth reading before a design is committed to.
What that means in practice is that the calendar is part of the design. A window package that changes on the fly costs a meeting cycle. We build submission dates into the schedule at the start and we design to the guidelines rather than designing first and negotiating after. Working with architectural review boards around northeast Ohio is a normal part of how we run a project, and the village board is one we have submitted to.
What these houses need
The age range here is the challenge. A Greek Revival house from the 1840s and a 1912 Craftsman are two different structural and mechanical problems wearing the same zip code.
In the older stock: low ceilings on upper floors, small original room footprints, additions layered on over 150 years that do not line up, and mechanicals that were retrofitted into a house never designed for ducts. In the Victorian houses: bays, wings, and ornate trim that are the entire reason the house is worth owning and the entire reason a floor plan will not simply open up. In the Craftsman and Dutch Colonial stock: better proportions for modern living, but built-ins and window banks that a careless kitchen plan will destroy.
The work we do most here is kitchens and baths inside old envelopes, rear additions that read as period-appropriate from the street, and whole-house design in houses that have been renovated three times badly and deserve one done properly.
How we work
We take a limited number of projects each year.
It starts with a Discovery Call — half an hour by phone, no charge. A $5,000 retainer books you into our calendar and is credited against the final invoice. Design fees are scope-based rather than open-ended, and we put a number to them once the call has told us what the project is.
We are typically booking eight to twelve weeks ahead. A renovation here takes four to six months to design and six to eight months to build, ten to fourteen months in total, and the board's twenty-day submission deadlines are planned into that from day one. New construction runs twelve to eighteen months.
We will recommend contractors, or work with the builder you have already chosen — in a village this size, most of our clients already have someone in mind.
Email, phone, Zoom, in person. Monday through Friday, 9am to 7pm. We ask that you not text.
Our studio is at 5900 Detroit Avenue in Cleveland, where we meet clients. We work in Chagrin Falls, travel is billed with the project, and we keep no office in the village.
Scope and investment
We want mixed-scope work: design plus renovation, multiple rooms, whole houses, and new construction on infill and outlying lots.
We take on projects with a total investment of $100,000 and above. Kitchens generally begin at $125,000, full-home renovations at $350,000, and new construction at $1.5M. Each of those numbers describes the finished project — the building work, the materials, the furnishings — and not a design fee. Fees are quoted to scope after the Discovery Call.
We are not taking single-room or furniture-only projects.
Recent work in the village — Chagrin Falls New Construction. A ground-up house designed for this village and its review process, from plan and elevations through interior architecture, finishes and furnishings. See it in our portfolio.
Start the conversation
If your house is old, complicated, and worth doing right, we should talk.
HIM&HIS Design · 5900 Detroit Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44102 · (216) 236-3883
Also close by
Our studio is at 5900 Detroit Avenue in Cleveland, and the practice reaches well past it — Florida, the Great Lakes, the Northeast and the Mountain West. We travel to every project.