Where we work
Interior Design and Renovation in Lakewood
There is a particular kind of Lakewood morning: light through the front room of a house built around 1912, the porch still cool, the street already awake. Most of this city went up in one long breath between the turn of the century and the late 1920s, and it stayed. More than fifty thousand people live on five and a half square miles of land here, on streets where the houses were set close together.
We design homes here that look gathered rather than decorated. A Lakewood house arrives with a past already in it — wide oak trim, plaster, a built-in buffet somebody chose in 1915. The work is to add to that slowly rather than clear it away, so the rooms read as though they were collected by the people living in them.
The houses Lakewood actually has
Lakewood became a village in 1889 and a city in 1911, and the streetcar lines that arrived between 1893 and 1916 are why the housing stock looks the way it does — whole streets laid out and filled within a decade. What repeats is the Cleveland Double: two to two-and-a-half storeys, two front doors, near-identical living floors stacked one above the other. Colonial Revival, Craftsman and Tudor Revival sit on the same blocks.
It is not uniform, though. Birdtown, eight streets built in the 1890s for National Carbon Company workers, went on the National Register in 2006. Clifton Park, at the north-west corner where the land meets the lake and the river valley, follows a plan by the landscape architect Ernest W. Bowditch — half a square mile of winding streets, its lakefront houses built between 1900 and 1915 in Neoclassical, Georgian and Renaissance Revival. The section north of Clifton Boulevard was listed in 1974. Downtown Lakewood, 105 buildings, was listed in December 2020.
Where review applies, and where it does not
Lakewood has had a historic preservation ordinance since 2009 — Chapter 1134 of the Planning and Zoning Code — and it works by designation rather than blanket coverage. Buildings and districts are nominated, and the Heritage Advisory Board oversees that programme and reviews changes to what carries a designation. If your home is on that list, a Certificate of Appropriateness comes before most exterior work: facades, windows, doors, roofing, additions, new construction.
Painting and landscaping are exempt, as are certain administratively approved repairs — gutters replaced in the same material, re-roofing to match, non-destructive storm windows, a resurfaced driveway. If the city does not act within sixty days, the certificate is deemed issued. Most Lakewood houses are not designated and will never see a board; National Register listing on its own does not restrict a private owner. Lakewood also takes part in the Heritage Home Program, so a home fifty years or older can draw on technical advice and a fixed-rate rehabilitation loan. We have worked with architectural review boards across northeast Ohio, and we establish which of this touches your address in the first week, not the fourth month.
What the work involves here
The constraints repeat because the houses were built the same way. Plaster over lath that will not tolerate a casual demolition schedule. A kitchen at the back, small, away from the light, because that is where kitchens went in 1915. Radiator lines running exactly where an island wants to sit. A third floor framed as attic space and now wanted as a primary suite.
Then the lots. Lakewood is dense by design, and a narrow side yard changes the practical business of building — where the dumpster stands, how cabinetry gets in, what an addition can honestly be. Doubles coming back to single-family living need their two kitchens and two stair runs resolved first.
Working with us
Our studio and client meeting space is at 5900 Detroit Avenue in Cleveland, a few miles east on the same street. Everything starts with a free thirty-minute Discovery Call by phone. A $5,000 retainer then holds your place and credits against the final invoice, and design fees are quoted to the scope once we know what the house needs.
We book eight to twelve weeks out, and a renovation of real scope runs four to six months of design and six to eight of construction. Our minimum is a total project cost of $100,000, with kitchens from $125,000 and whole-home work from $350,000 — project figures, not our fees. Many of these homes come back to us a few years later for the next room.
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.