What It's Actually Like to Renovate Your Historic Home With Lorla Studio

Renovating a historic home is a big undertaking, and it takes longer than most people think. Let's talk about exactly what’s involved and how I developed our own internal process at Lorla to make a BIG, potentially disruptive home renovation project go as smoothly as possible for our clients.

Let’s start with a quick story!

One of our wonderfully kind and brilliant clients, a partner at a DC law firm, bought a center hall colonial home in Woodley Park. She fell in love with the block, the light, and the bones of the house, but it needed some serious updates and she was clear from day 1: she didn't want to live inside a museum, she wanted to bring the interior up to modern times. And crucially, she wanted the historic character intact and the interior to feel current, warm, and unmistakably hers.

The design and project management of a historic home is where we really shine as a firm, but there’s something she shared that’s equally as important to us: 

She told us she almost forgot the house was under construction for months. Not because nothing was happening, but because she never had to manage any of it unless she wanted to.

That's the experience we hope every Lorla Studio client has and what we build every project around. We hold a high standard on three fronts for our projects: design, project management and proactive communication.

Let’s get into it…

Historic Preservation Board Approvals & Permitting

Washington has some of the most beautiful architecture in the country and some of the most involved renovation rules to go with it. Rowhouses in Georgetown, Capitol Hill, and Cleveland Park. Colonials in Chevy Chase and Kalorama. Victorians in Kensington. Many of these homes sit inside historic districts, which means tedious approvals, slow timelines, and a risk of delay if the process isn't handled by people who do this regularly.

For a busy professional, that's exactly the part that turns a renovation into a second job (I just completed my own renovation of a Victorian, I get it!). Permitting questions that eat an afternoon. A review board timeline nobody explained up front. A contractor who's never worked inside a historic district and is learning the rules on your project.

We’re seasoned at managing this process and aim to keep historic preservation board approvals and permitting handled as painlessly as possible (for you, at least!).

Modern Inside, Historic Outside

Most of our DC clients want the same thing: keep what makes the house special, and make the inside feel current. That tension is the actual design problem, and it's the one we spend the most time solving.

In my own historic renovation in Kensington, that meant preserving our home's original proportions and structural logic while thoughtfully reworking the interior to fit how my family actually lives. The exterior reads exactly as it always has. Inside, nothing about the layout, light, or finishes suggests the house is a century old. That balance, old bones with a genuinely modern interior, is where most of our full home renovations in DC end up, and it's harder to get right than starting from scratch.

Fewer Decisions, Better Ones

A full-home renovation involves thousands of decisions. Left unmanaged, that's exhausting for anyone, and it's a particular kind of exhausting for someone who already spends all day making high-stakes decisions. The last thing you want at the end of a long week is an email asking whether you prefer three nearly identical shades of white for a closet door.

So we don't bring you every decision. We bring you the ones that actually matter, already narrowed to a small set of options we know work for your house, your budget, and your taste. The hundreds of smaller calls behind each of those, the ones that don't meaningfully change your experience of the finished home, we make ourselves, based on what we've learned about how you live. You end up making fewer decisions, not more, and the ones you do make carry real weight.

This is by design. Decision fatigue is one of the surefire ways renovations wear people down, and it's rarely talked about because it's not as visible as a budget overrun or a delay. We treat protecting your time as seriously as we treat protecting your budget.

One Point of Contact, Even When Something Goes Wrong

Every single full-home renovation hits a snag, without fail. A delivery arrives damaged. A subcontractor needs to be rescheduled. A wall opens up and reveals something nobody expected. What separates a good renovation from a stressful one isn't whether these things happen. It's who handles them.

In our projects, you have a single point of contact for the entire scope of the work, not a rotating cast of trades and vendors each expecting you to make the call. When something needs to be fixed, it gets fixed, and often you'll hear about it after it's already resolved rather than while it's still a problem. Putting out fires is our job, not something we hand back to you in the middle of your week.

That doesn't mean you're kept in the dark. It means you're only pulled in when a decision genuinely requires you, not every time something needs attention. There's a meaningful difference between being informed and being burdened, and we're careful to stay on the right side of it.

Original stairwell in Laura's recently remodeled 19th Century Victorian home in Kensington, MD

Setting Timeline Expectations

It typically takes 6-8 months before construction can even begin on a historic reno, and that’s assuming all parties are moving in-step. Wild, I know! 

Lorla Studio kicks off the project with a 15-step process that maps out exactly how the renovation will flow from the first discovery conversation to the finished home. Every material, every selection, every sequencing decision gets mapped out first. We have honed this process over the past decade and found that it matters even more with older homes, where the biggest source of delays and budget surprises isn't the construction itself, but decisions and approvals that get discovered mid-project because they weren't identified early. 

After this planning phase (we call it schematic design), we assemble the team (architect, structural engineers, builder), submit to historic boards and wait for reviews, edits and approvals (that’s a painful process!), and then we bid the project out and the contractor is awarded. That alone typically takes 4-8 weeks. Keep in mind that a contractor’s availability to start construction can be delayed between 1-6 months, depending on how busy they are.

By the time your crew is on site, there should be nothing left to figure out, including what the historic district will and won't allow.

We'll give you a specific timeline once we understand your project and your home's historic status, and we do everything we can to keep the project on time, including partnering with long-standing vendors and craftspeople who also stay on time and on track. 

Weekly Update Cadence

Every Tuesday, our clients receive a short update: what was completed that week, what's next, and anything else that’s ongoing.

The point isn't the update itself. It's what the update replaces: the phone call you have to make because you haven't heard anything in three weeks, the guessing about whether a permit is still under review, the small anxiety of not knowing what's happening inside your own home. 

Budget works the same way. Our goal is that you  know where things stand before you have to ask. If something changes, whether it's a material lead time or a detail the historic review board flags, you hear about it immediately and directly, not as a surprise.

A Beautiful Home Isn't the Only Goal

We care enormously about the finished product (obviously!). A full home renovation should leave you with a house that's genuinely stunning, and we know we can always deliver on that!  But we've never believed the result is the only thing that matters.

Internally, one of the standards we hold ourselves to is simple: be a delight to work with, from the first phone call to the final walkthrough. Not just competent and on budget, but we want to be a genuine pleasure to have in your life for the duration of your project. We think that standard shows up in the small things as much as the large ones, and we genuinely care about both.

If This Is What You're Looking For

A home renovation will always be disruptive, and an old DC house adds real complexity on top of that. I’m not going to sugarcoat it.  What doesn't have to be disruptive is your involvement in it. That's the difference between a renovation that becomes another item on your plate and one that simply happens, correctly, in the background of a life that's already full.

If that's the experience you want for your home, we'd absolutely love to meet you and hear more about your project.

Please inquire here and our team set up an introductory call.

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How You Can Work With Us

Lorla Studio is a full-service interior design and architecture firm based in Washington, D.C. Our talented team of designers craft modern, livable and functional spaces throughout the district and beyond. Hire us for a seamless renovation process, and a warm, approachable design you are sure to love!

Serving Washington D.C. • Bethesda • Chevy Chase • Kensington • Potomac

Check out the five questions to ask yourself before hiring an interior designer in Washington D.C. If you think we’d make a good team, contact us today!

Ready to transform your space with us?

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