Where we work
Interior Design and Renovation in Ohio City
Ohio City reads as a nineteenth-century neighbourhood because it is one. Brick and frame houses stand shoulder to shoulder on streets laid out before the Civil War, the West Side Market has been trading from its 1912 building for more than a century, and the place still has the density and mixed grain of a town that was once its own city. It was, briefly. Ohio City incorporated on 3 March 1836, two days before Cleveland, and was annexed on 5 June 1854.
Homes here already carry their history in the fabric — the stair newel, the pocket doors, the plaster arch between two front rooms. The work we care about adds to that patiently, so what you end up with looks collected rather than installed. Old and new in the same room, and nothing that pretends the house began the day you bought it.
The neighbourhood's building stock
The houses came with the people who worked the docks, mills and factories — arrivals from New England, Germany, Hungary and Ireland through the late 1800s and early 1900s. What survives is a Victorian neighbourhood: Italianate and Queen Anne frame houses, Second Empire roofs, brick terraces, and along Franklin Boulevard a run of substantial nineteenth-century mansions, Franklin Castle among them. Carnegie West Library and St Ignatius anchor their corners.
Ohio City was also one of the first Cleveland neighbourhoods rescued deliberately. The Ohio City Redevelopment Association formed in 1968, and between 1963 and 1978 more than a hundred structures were rehabilitated at a cost of around thirty million dollars. What you are buying into today is largely the result of that work.
Design review is real here
This is the part that catches people. The Ohio City Preservation District was listed on the National Register on 9 October 1974, with an expansion listed on 25 May 1989. More consequentially for a renovation, Cleveland City Council designated Ohio City a local landmark historic district in 2005 and expanded it in 2007. The district covers mostly the area north of Lorain Avenue, with a few streets south of Lorain and some along Franklin at the eastern edge of Detroit–Shoreway. Market Square is separately designated. Cleveland has twenty-nine locally designated historic districts.
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, so the review happens whether or not you went looking for it. 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 notable exceptions.
Procedurally, most cases go first to the local Design Review Advisory Committee — there is one for Historic Ohio City — which measures it against the published Design Standards and Guidelines. The eleven-member Landmarks Commission then issues the certificate, meeting roughly every two weeks in the morning. We have worked with architectural review boards across northeast Ohio, and the review calendar goes into the schedule at the beginning so it sits inside the timeline rather than on top of it.
Working on a house this old
Expect plaster over lath, original wood windows the guidelines would rather see repaired than replaced, and a kitchen at the back of the house where nineteenth-century kitchens went. Expect radiators, a narrow deep lot, a neighbouring wall a few feet away and no driveway to stage materials on.
None of that is discouraging. It is the reason the neighbourhood looks the way it does. It does mean sequence matters — mechanical and envelope decisions before finish decisions, and exterior proposals drawn to a standard the committee can read the first time.
What working with us looks like
Our studio and client meeting space is at 5900 Detroit Avenue, a short run north-west of the Market. Projects begin with a free thirty-minute Discovery Call by phone. There is also a $450 two-hour design consultation with written notes afterwards, if you want direction before a larger commitment.
Our minimum is a total project cost of $100,000, with kitchens from $125,000 and full-home renovations from $350,000 — whole-project figures, not design fees. A $5,000 retainer books the calendar and credits against your final invoice. Design runs four to six months, construction six to eight, and we are on site every other week.
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.