Where we work
Interior Design and Renovation in Detroit–Shoreway
This is our own street. HIM&HIS works out of 5900 Detroit Avenue, a few blocks east of Gordon Square, which makes Detroit–Shoreway the one neighbourhood where we are not visiting. We are neighbours. We know which corners hold the afternoon light, which blocks fill with people on a theatre night, and what it is to live with a hundred-year-old frame house through a Cleveland February.
It is also a neighbourhood that rewards the way we like to work. These houses were built plainly and well for people who worked nearby, and they take beautifully to being layered — old wood, brass with some wear on it, something that came from somewhere set against something new. Homes that look gathered rather than decorated. Less a style than an honest reading of what is already in the building.
How the neighbourhood got its houses
The area was part of Brooklyn Township from 1818 and came into Cleveland largely with the annexation of Ohio City on 5 June 1854. A streetcar ran the length of Detroit Avenue from 1863 and the housing followed it. Germans settled near West 76th from around 1830. Irish families filled the blocks between West 45th and West 65th and built St Colman's in 1880. Italians and Romanians arrived in the early 1900s, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel went up in 1926.
Industry along the lakefront pushed the population to 41,000 by 1920. It fell to 20,741 by 1980 after the post-war years and the completion of I-90 in 1978. The Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization started work on the commercial corridor in 1973. The Gordon Square Theatre opened in 1911 and the Gordon Square Arcade in 1921 — a full city block, and the largest construction project on the West Side when it opened.
Gordon Square is a designated district
Gordon Square is one of Cleveland's twenty-nine locally designated historic districts, and the Franklin–West Clinton district sits at the neighbourhood's eastern edge. Inside a designated district, Chapter 161 of the city code requires a Certificate of Appropriateness before any environmental change — alteration, demolition, removal or construction. An application to the Department of Building and Housing for a permit is automatically treated as a Certificate application and forwarded to the Landmarks Commission within seven days.
Ordinary maintenance or repair that does not change design, material, colour or outer appearance is exempt, and most interior work sits outside review, with windows and egress doors the exceptions. Cases go first to a local Design Review Advisory Committee for a recommendation, then to the eleven-member Landmarks Commission for the certificate. Whether a particular address falls inside a district is a map question, and the city keeps an interactive GIS map for exactly that purpose. We check it before we draw. We have worked with architectural review boards across northeast Ohio.
The houses themselves
Frame cottages and Cleveland Doubles make up much of the residential stock — two to two-and-a-half storeys, two front doors, matching floors stacked one on the other. They sit on tight lots with narrow side yards, which is a practical fact before it is an aesthetic one: material access, staging, and what an addition can honestly be.
Inside: plaster over lath, a small kitchen at the back, radiator lines exactly where an island wants to go, and a third floor with real potential once it is insulated and daylit. Doubles being brought back to single-family living need the second kitchen and the stair arrangement settled first. And with newer building all around — Battery Park, the EcoVillage houses, the studios at West 78th — we are often designing work that has to sit comfortably beside something from 1905.
Neighbours, and how we start
The Detroit Avenue space is our office and where we meet clients. It is not a shop. If you live a few streets away, come in and see how the work is actually made. Everything still begins the same way: a free thirty-minute Discovery Call by phone, then a $5,000 retainer to hold the calendar, credited against your final invoice.
We take a limited number of projects each year and book eight to twelve weeks ahead. Our minimum is a total project cost of $100,000, with kitchens from $125,000 — project totals, not fees. We procure the furnishings, hold them at Delivery by the Falls until installation day, and visit the site every other week during construction. Being ten minutes away, we tend to stay in touch long after the last delivery.
Also close by
Our studio is at 5900 Detroit Avenue, so most of this is a short drive. We also work well beyond Ohio — Florida, the Great Lakes, the Northeast and the Mountain West. We go to the house, wherever it is.