Congratulations! Congratulazioni! Félicitation! You are now the proud owner of a house in Massachusetts, which means you are also the owner of everything that was done to it before you arrived, the good decisions and the bad ones, the 1987 addition, the popcorn ceiling, the kitchen that made sense to someone once and no longer makes sense to anyone. Also possibly the asbestos floor tiles, but we will get to that.

Welcome! Benvenuti! Bienvenue! I work on houses in Massachusetts and greater New England, and I trained on historic properties in Italy before I moved here, which means I have spent a significant portion of my career figuring out what to keep, what to fix, and what to remove without losing what made the house worth buying in the first place. My job is not to impose a look. It is to figure out what a house wants to be and help the people living in it find themselves in it. That is true whether the house was built in 1780 or 1995.

This post is for the people who just bought a house, or are about to, and do not know where to start. Here is where.

Should I get a home inspection before renovating?

In the current Massachusetts market, a significant number of buyers have to waive the inspection contingency to get their offer accepted. I understand why, the competition is real and the concession is sometimes necessary. But once you own the house, the inspection you waived on the way in is the first thing you should go get now.

A good home inspector will flag current issues, code violations, deferred maintenance, and conditions you will need to address before you can touch anything else. Trying to plan a renovation without that baseline is designing in the dark. The inspector's report is not a list of reasons to panic. It is the document that tells you what you are actually working with, which is the only honest starting point.

Does my house have historic protections?

This is the question most people do not think to ask until they have already planned something that turns out to require a permit they did not know existed.
In Massachusetts, if your property falls within a local historic district, you cannot make exterior changes visible from a public way without first obtaining a Certificate of Appropriateness from your local historic district commission. This is a legal requirement under Massachusetts General Law Chapter 40C. No Certificate of Appropriateness, no building permit. Just like No Martini, No Party.

Here is what surprises most people: your house does not need to be a landmark or a listed property. If it is located within a district, the rules apply to it regardless. You could own a house from 1988 sitting in the middle of a 19th-century neighborhood, and the commission still has jurisdiction over your exterior. The district is the thing, not the individual building.

The way to find out is straightforward. Check your town's zoning map, call the building department, or look up your property on the MACRIS database, the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System. If you are in a district, everything exterior that is visible from the street goes through the commission before it goes anywhere else.

One more thing worth knowing: if your property is on the National Register of Historic Places, that is a different and more involved layer of requirements on top of any local district rules. The two can coexist and they do not always point in the same direction.
If you want to understand how to Research an Existing Property or how the Certificate of Appropriateness process works and, more usefully, why applications get denied, I have written about that in detail.

What if my house is NOT in a historic district?

Then you have considerably more freedom, and also considerably more responsibility, because no one is going to stop you from making decisions you will later regret.

The absence of regulatory oversight does not mean a house has nothing worth keeping. It means the decision is yours. Character, proportion, original details, things that cannot be replaced once they are gone: all of this disappears every day in houses with no historic designation, because nobody was required to think twice about it and the contractor quoted a lower number for removing it than for working around it.
I have written about this at some length, because it is one of the things in this profession I find difficult to watch.

Where do I actually start with a renovation?

With the decisions that cannot be undone.

The order in which you make renovation decisions matters more than most people realize, and making them in the wrong sequence is expensive in ways that only become obvious after the fact. Structural and mechanical decisions come before finish decisions. The layout comes before the kitchen. The kitchen comes before the hardware. I could go on forever.
The most common version of this I see is a client who arrives completely convinced about something they saw somewhere else, a layout, a look, a specific thing that was perfect in a house that was not their house. It makes complete sense that they want it. It just does not always translate in their context. A big part of what I do before anyone picks anything is help people find what actually belongs to their space rather than someone else's.

Houses in Massachusetts, and old houses in general everywhere, have a way of presenting surprises once you open walls: a plumbing configuration that moves the bathroom, a condition you did not know was there, an original detail that changes everything you thought you wanted to do. The renovation you planned three months ago may not survive contact with the actual building, and the decisions you made early in the process may need to be remade.

The way to protect yourself from this is to front-load the thinking. Resolve the layout before you commit to the finishes. Make the decisions that drive all the other decisions first, and make them in the right order.

The Vexata quaestio: Do I need a designer?

Not necessarily, but let me tell you what design actually is, because it is not what most people think, and the confusion tends to be expensive.

Start with Vitruvius, a Roman architect writing in the first century BC and essentially the patron saint of everyone who has ever tried to make a building work. Firmitas, utilitas, venustas, meaning solidity, usefulness, beauty, in that order. If you ever find yourself with nothing to read, I would recommend his De Architectura, it literally has the answer to every question you may possibly have, from What do I wear today, to Is it worth it to betray my family and friends for swift capital gain. The man was thorough. His point, though, was that beauty without usefulness is not really design at all, it is decoration, and decoration without a clear spatial idea behind it is just expensive furniture waiting to get in the way.

The official definition of interior design describes it as the art and science of understanding people's behavior to create functional spaces within a building, encompassing conceptual development, space planning, site inspections, research, communication with everyone involved in a project, construction management, and execution. That is a fairly dry Wikipedianesque way of putting it, but the key distinction buried in there is this one: interior designers may decorate, but decorators do not design. In the United States these two things get collapsed into each other constantly, which is part of why people end up confused about what they are hiring and what they are paying for.

In Italy the distinction does not exist in quite the same way, because the person doing all of this is simply the architect, and the understanding is that a building is one continuous problem from the outside in. Le Corbusier designed the door handles of his buildings, and that is not a quirky biographical detail, it is a statement about what it means to think about a space as a whole rather than as a sequence of separate decisions made by separate people. I trained in that tradition at the Politecnico di Milano, which means I came to residential design in New England thinking about interiors the way someone thinks about them when they cannot separate the inside from the outside, the layout from the light, the room from the house it sits in. Approaching a project I am thinking about all the design questions at every scale at once, which is a different and I would argue more useful way to approach a renovation than thinking about the kitchen separately from the house it belongs to.

My main job is to solve the problem of a house that is not working the way it should. Sometimes that is a layout that fights you at every turn, rooms that do not connect logically, a kitchen that was placed in the center of a floor plan by someone who apparently did not consider where the light came from or how many people would be using it at once. Sometimes it is subtler than that, a house that is technically functional but that nobody feels at home in.

I saw this countless times especially in older homes that were renovated in the '60, '70 or '80, the least Belle of all the Époques. The ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, AKA the Open Space really claimed some victims there. These are not problems that get solved by choosing the right tile. They are spatial problems that require spatial thinking, and they need to be identified and worked through before anyone starts choosing anything.

What tends to happen when that step gets skipped is not usually a disaster. It is more like a slow figurative death by disappointment. A client goes directly to a contractor with a rough idea, the contractor is skilled and builds exactly what he was asked to build, and six months later everything is finished and beautiful and somehow not quite right. The flow is off, the colors are off, the world is off. The contractor did his job perfectly. The design problem was simply never solved, because nobody whose job it was to solve it was in the room. Good contractors know this, and the first thing the serious ones will tell you is Get A Designer, not because they cannot proceed, but because they would rather not build the wrong thing and deal with the consequences later.

What I offer is one person thinking about all of it at once, who gets to know you well enough over the course of a project to interpret what you actually need and not just what you asked for in the first meeting, and who is the single reference point from the first conversation to the last site visit. No handoffs between a space planner and a decorator and someone else who handles the furniture. One coherent vision, developed and executed by the same person who came up with it, and adjusted as the project reveals itself, because they always do.

The goal is never a house that looks like it came out of a magazine, which is to say a house that looks like everyone else's house. The goal is a house that feels inevitable, like it could not have been any other way, and that is also unmistakably the house of the people living in it. Getting there takes asking a lot of questions, looking carefully at things that have nothing obvious to do with interior design, and being willing to sit with a problem long enough to find the answer that is actually right rather than the one that is simply available.
If you want to see how that looks in practice you can look at my portfolio and get ready to be amazed.

So, do you need a designer? I realize I am perhaps not the most neutral person to answer that question. But in the best interest of full transparency: yes, you do, and I happen to know someone ;)
After all even Appius Claudius Caecus in this case would say Homo (or femina) quisque faber ipse fortunae suae.

I take on a small number of projects at a time, specifically because this kind of work does not do well when it is rushed or divided. If you have a house in greater Boston or New England and you are trying to figure out where to start, you know where to find me.

Ciao.

The views expressed in this journal are my own and reflect my professional experience and personal opinions. Any references to specific places, institutions, or practices are made for informational and illustrative purposes only. Nothing in this journal constitutes legal, architectural, or regulatory advice. Always consult a qualified professional for your specific situation.

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