Areas served
Interior Design and Renovation in Hunting Valley
Hunting Valley is the smallest kind of place with the largest kind of houses. It was farm and dairy land through the nineteenth century, part of Orange Township, and it incorporated as a village in 1924 as Cleveland industrialists moved into the valley. Jeptha Homer Wade II took 455 acres on Fairmount Road for Valley Ridge Farm. Andrew Squire built a horticultural center in 1913, including a 95-acre pharmaceutical garden, and left the estate to Western Reserve University in 1934. In the 1920s the Van Sweringen brothers assembled land east of SOM Center Road for Daisy Hill and planned a development they called Shaker Country Estates; the Depression stopped it, and after their deaths in 1940 the property was subdivided into more than sixty private estates under a master plan by landscape architect Albert Davis Taylor. The village then wrote a five-acre minimum lot size into its zoning and banned most commercial and industrial use. That is why it still looks like a valley rather than a subdivision.
Designing on estate lots
Five acres changes the design problem in ways that are not obvious until you are in it.
Houses sit far from the road and are seen from multiple sides and from a distance. Rear elevations matter as much as front ones. An addition that would disappear on a suburban lot is fully legible here. Light comes from every direction and changes across the day in a way that makes finish selection unforgiving — a paint or a stone chosen under a showroom light will read differently in a room with glazing on three walls.
The houses themselves are large enough that the real question is rarely square footage. It is circulation, zoning of the plan, and which rooms earn their keep. Estate houses accumulate rooms nobody enters. A good renovation here often subtracts.
Formal review runs through the village Architectural Board of Review, which examines detailed plans and specifications including representations of exterior appearance, submitted with building and zoning permit applications. The board applies accepted and recognized architectural principles and weighs how a proposal relates to neighboring properties. It has six voting members plus at least two architect advisors who sit in without a vote, and no plan is approved without three affirmative votes. Village Hall is at 38251 Fairmount Boulevard. The Building Department also handles pre-sale inspections, which is worth knowing if a purchase is what is prompting the project.
An advisory board with architects in the room is a board that reads drawings closely. That suits us. We have worked with architectural review boards throughout northeast Ohio, and drawings that answer the questions before they are asked are simply how we submit.
How we work
We take on a limited number of projects each year. On estate-scale work that limit is the whole point — these projects run long and they need the same eyes on them from the first meeting to the last delivery.
We start with a Discovery Call — thirty minutes by phone, at no cost, and useful even if the answer is no. A $5,000 retainer opens the calendar and is credited against your final invoice. Design fees are set against the actual scope rather than an hourly meter, and quoted after the call.
Estate work does not move quickly and should not be sold as though it does. We book eight to twelve weeks ahead, spend four to six months in design and six to eight in construction — ten to fourteen months for a renovation of any real reach. A new house on a five-acre lot is a twelve to eighteen month commitment.
We will recommend contractors, or work with the builder you already use.
Email, phone, Zoom, and in-person meetings, Monday through Friday, 9am to 7pm. We ask clients not to text.
The studio is at 5900 Detroit Avenue in Cleveland, and clients are welcome there. Hunting Valley is a working destination for us and travel is billed with the project. We maintain no office in the village.
Scope and investment
Hunting Valley work is whole-house, multi-phase, or new construction. That is the scope we want.
The floor is a $100,000 total project investment, though almost nothing in this village lands near it. A kitchen begins at $125,000, a full-home renovation at $350,000, and new construction at $1.5M. Those are project costs — building, materials, furnishings — and design fees are quoted separately against scope.
We do not take single-room projects or furniture-only engagements, at any address.
Start the conversation
If you are planning a renovation or building new in the valley, tell us what you have in mind.
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.