Areas served
Interior Design and Renovation in Gates Mills
Gates Mills looks the way it does on purpose. The village grew up around a sawmill on the Chagrin River in 1826, ran on water power through the middle of the century, and then faded when the mills did. What brought it back was not industry but taste: in the 1890s prominent Clevelanders — Samuel Prentiss Baldwin and Frank Walker among them — began turning it into a country retreat. In 1905 the Gates Mills Improvement Society, made up largely of landowners, set out deliberately to cultivate the exclusive New England character the village still trades on. The Chagrin Valley Hunt Club followed in 1909. The village incorporated in 1920 with Walker as its first mayor. Nearly nine square miles, roughly 2,300 residents, no industry, and a landscape of rolling land and river frontage that has been protected for well over a century.
Two boards, one calendar
Gates Mills reviews residential work through the Architectural Board of Review, and projects inside the Historic District go to the Historic District Sub-committee first.
Two copies of plans go to the Building Department, which routes them to the appropriate board. Any project costing more than $3,000 must have plans prepared and stamped by an architect licensed in Ohio. Drawings are due one week before a meeting. The Historic District Sub-committee sits the third Wednesday at 5pm; the ARB sits the first Thursday at 5pm.
Approval comes in two stages. Preliminary drawings go first. Final approval requires construction drawings, specifications, and material color samples — actual samples, not a rendering. ARB approval is good for one year.
That sequence has consequences. A project that clears preliminary in one cycle and returns for final in the next has spent a month before a permit exists. Material selections have to be locked earlier than most homeowners expect, because the board wants to see them. We work backward from those meeting dates and we bring the samples.
We have worked with architectural review boards across northeast Ohio, and the two-board sequence in the village is one we have built a schedule around before.
What the houses ask for
The village's character came from a century of restraint, and the houses reflect that. Renovation here is rarely about making a statement. It is about doing something quietly better than what is there.
The scale is generous — deep lots, outbuildings, garages and barns with reuse potential, houses that have been added to more than once. The recurring work is reconciling those additions: connecting a 1950s wing to a 1920s core so the circulation makes sense, opening a kitchen toward the property rather than toward the road, taking a dark center-hall plan and getting light into it without punching holes the ARB will not accept.
Interiors here also have to survive real use. Dogs, horses, mud, wet coats, a river valley climate. Specifying a floor finish or an upholstery for a Gates Mills house is a different conversation than specifying one for a city condominium, and we treat it that way.
How we work
We take a limited number of projects each year, which is how the work stays good.
Everything begins with a Discovery Call — thirty minutes, by phone, free. A $5,000 retainer holds your place in the calendar and is credited against the final invoice. Design fees are scope-based and quoted once we have had that conversation.
We are usually booking eight to twelve weeks out. Design takes four to six months, construction another six to eight, so a substantial village renovation is a ten to fourteen month undertaking; new construction runs twelve to eighteen. Board meeting dates are fixed points in that schedule from the beginning.
We will recommend contractors with the appetite for village review work, or coordinate with yours.
Email, phone, Zoom, in person. Monday through Friday, 9am to 7pm. We ask clients not to text.
Our studio is at 5900 Detroit Avenue in Cleveland, and it is where clients meet us. Gates Mills is somewhere we work regularly; travel is charged as part of the engagement. We have no office in the village.
Scope and investment
We are looking for mixed-scope work: renovation with design, additions, whole-house projects, and new construction.
We work to a $100,000 minimum total project investment. Kitchens start at $125,000, full-home renovations at $350,000, and new construction at $1.5M — all of them total project costs rather than design fees, which are quoted to scope after the Discovery Call.
Single-room work and furniture-only engagements are below our threshold.
Recent work in the village — Gates Mills Cottage Kitchen Renovation. A kitchen rebuilt inside a village cottage: plan, cabinetry, materials and finishes worked out against the constraints of the existing envelope. See it in our portfolio.
Start the conversation
If you are planning work in the village and want it handled from design through board approval, get in touch.
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.