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 plastic sliders, also possibly the asbestos floor tiles and the lead paint, but I don't want to jinx you.

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 big 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. I always tell to people that my job is 1% creativity and 99% problem solving, most of my time is spent figuring out how the house should be, what my clients want it to be (which is not necessarily the same thing) and help them find themselves in it.

This post is for the people who just bought a house, or are about to, and don't know where to start. You start from here.

Should I get a home inspection before renovating?

In the current Massachusetts market, many of buyers have to waive the inspection contingency to get their offer accepted. I understand why, it's a tough market 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, poor or delayed maintenance and will tell you what's urgent and what can wait. Trying to plan a renovation without the inspection is like designing in the dark. The inspector's report is not a list of reasons to panic but the document that tells you what you are actually working with, which is the only good 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 listed in the national registry of historical places. If it is located within a district, the rules apply to it regardless. You could own a house from 1988 in the middle of a early 19th-century neighborhood and the commission still has jurisdiction over your exterior. The district is the thing, not the individual building.

To find out pull up your town's assessor webpage and look for the GIS or zoning map layer, most towns in Massachusetts have it on Axis GIS. If you can't find it there call the building department, or look up your property on the MACRIS database, the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System.

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 more freedom, and also more responsibility, because no one is going to stop you from making terrible decisions you will later regret. With great power comes great responsibility, and no, Stan Lee didn't come up with that, it was Cicero (an Italian of course), you can look it up if you don't believe me.

The lack of regulatory oversight does not mean a house has nothing worth keeping, it only 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 super frustrating.

Where do I actually start with a renovation?

By thinking, a lot.

There's lots to be decided and 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 totally 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. I understand why they think they want it, it must have looked pretty cool. 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 usually have tons of surprises once you open walls. It's often rats, or bats, or wasps, imagine something gross and it's usually there. There is also the structural/mechanical component that not always can be worked around. 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, and pretty fast too since the walls are open and the construction clock is ticking.

Unfortunately none of that thinking protects you from what's inside the walls. It just means that when the plan changes, and it will, you already know which decisions matter and can remake them fast instead of flamethrowing everything.

The Vexata quaestio: Do I need a designer? And what is design anyway?

Not necessarily, but let me tell you what design actually is, because it's probably not what you think and the confusion tends to be expensive.
People think of designers as these abstract artists who only work when the vibe is right, like we spend hours summoning inspiration at your expense. I don't go around with a striped scarf, beret and pointy mustache waiting to have an epiphany, and I certainly do not bill if I'm not actually producing something. But that's also why an experienced designer costs what they cost. You are paying for decades of epiphanies that already happened, which is what allows us to do things well and possibly fast.
We do enjoy the daydreaming but we need to be pragmatic on technical side. Most of us went to architecture or design school, not Hogwarts or the Musée d'Orsay. We know enough about the trades to speak the same language as the contractors and to work with them as a team, which is what keeps the project from going sideways in ways that are very hard to fix later.

Start with Vitruvius, a Roman architect writing in the first century BC and essentially the patron saint of everyone who has ever tried to design anything. 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?". He was thorough. His point though was that beauty without usefulness is not really design at all, it's decoration, and decoration without a clear spatial idea behind it's 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. We are triune somehow, they do refer to God as the great designer after all, not the great decorator. But I'm not bragging too much.
Speaking of gods, Le Corbusier designed the door handles of his buildings, that's 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. Most of the time the biggest problem is the most difficult to solve for cheap, which is the layout. 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, so put that samples down.

What tends to happen when the "figuring out the layout" step gets skipped is not usually a total disaster, it's 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.

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. Getting there takes asking a lot of questions, looking carefully at things that are not obvious and being willing to sit with a problem long enough to find the answer that is actually right rather than the one that is easy or available.
If you want to see how that looks in practice you can look at my portfolio and get ready to be amazed.

I know what you're going to think now, Nice But I Can't Afford A Designer.
Here's what you actually can't afford: doing this yourself. Unless you have the pragmatism of Seneca and the vision of Étienne-Louis Boullée this is not a DIY situation. Renovation is not a mood board, nor a Pinterest rabbit hole at midnight, a contractor you found on Yelp, a spit and a prayer. It's sequencing, negotiation, technical knowledge, material science and an eye that takes decades to develop. You can surely wing it if you want, I have walked into it many times, cause they called me to fix it. And guess how much that cost.

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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