Areas served
Interior Design and Renovation in Cleveland Heights
Cleveland Heights is not one neighborhood, and a designer who treats it as one will get it wrong. Euclid Golf, laid out by Barton Deming in 1913 on the former front nine of the Euclid Golf Course, is roughly half Colonial Revival and about a quarter Tudor Revival, with Craftsman, Prairie School, and Renaissance Revival houses filling in — 142 acres, listed on the National Register in 2002, and built almost entirely in two bursts: about 47 percent between 1913 and 1919 and another 47 percent through the 1920s. Along Fairmount Boulevard from near Cedar Road out to Wellington Road, the register runs wider still: Jacobean, Tudor, Georgian, French, Renaissance Revival, Cotswold, built by Walker & Weeks, Meade & Hamilton, Small & Rowley, Frederick Striebinger, and Charles Schneider, with Olmsted Brothers and Warren Manning on the landscape. And Forest Hill is its own case entirely.
Four different renovation problems
Euclid Golf and Fairmount Boulevard. Deming's deed restrictions set setbacks and minimum construction costs, and the houses were expensive when new — steel framing in some, tiled kitchens, chimney incinerators. The bones are good. The problems are the ones that come from a hundred years of partial updates: a 1985 kitchen inside a 1917 Colonial Revival, a primary bath carved out of a bedroom in a way that fought the window rhythm, radiator and chase locations that constrain every plan.
Forest Hill. John D. Rockefeller Jr. took his father's estate in 1923 and hired New York architect Andrew J. Thomas to plan a community of 600 French Norman houses. Eighty-one were built, in 1929 and 1930, before the Depression stopped it; he sold the remaining 650 lots in 1948. The postwar houses that filled those lots borrowed the vocabulary — slate roofs, attached garages, mirror-image pairs — without the original construction budgets. Working in Forest Hill means knowing which house you are standing in.
Ambler Heights. Larger, earlier, steeper. A different scale of house on a different kind of lot.
Across all of it: the Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission designates local landmarks and historic districts, and changes to designated properties require its approval. Whether your house is designated is a question worth answering before you draw anything, not after. We check. We have taken projects through review boards across northeast Ohio and the process holds no surprises for us.
What we do with it
Cleveland Heights houses respond well to being taken seriously and badly to being fashion-forward. The move that works is almost always the same one: open what genuinely needs opening, restore what was worth keeping, and let the new work read as new rather than as a costume.
Practically, that means kitchens that get relocated or expanded rather than reskinned. Third floors brought back into use. Primary suites assembled out of a bedroom, a sleeping porch, and a hall closet in a way that respects the exterior. Millwork matched, not approximated.
How we work
We take a limited number of projects each year, so the ones we take get real attention.
Every engagement starts with a Discovery Call: thirty minutes on the phone, free, and honest in both directions. A $5,000 retainer then books you into our calendar and comes off the final invoice. Design fees are scope-based and quoted after that call — there is no published fee, because a third floor brought back into use and a kitchen relocation are not the same piece of work.
Our calendar generally sits eight to twelve weeks out. Once design begins, expect four to six months of drawings and selections, then six to eight months on site: ten to fourteen months from first meeting to a finished house.
For construction, we will recommend contractors, or work with yours.
Email, phone, Zoom, and in-person meetings, Monday through Friday, 9am to 7pm. Please do not text.
The studio is at 5900 Detroit Avenue in Cleveland, and clients meet us there. Cleveland Heights is a regular working destination — travel is charged as part of the project — and we hold no satellite office there.
Scope and investment
We are built for mixed-scope work — design plus construction, multiple rooms, or a whole house.
The threshold is a total project investment of $100,000. In practice a Heights kitchen starts at $125,000, a full-home renovation at $350,000, and new construction at $1.5M. Read those as the cost of the project itself rather than the cost of our services; design fees sit outside them and are set against scope.
Single-room and furniture-only projects fall below that threshold. We will say so on the call.
Start the conversation
Tell us about the house. We will tell you honestly whether the project is a fit.
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.