If you read Part 1, you know what this bathroom became. What you don’t know is what it took to get there.

This is the part that doesn’t make the reveal photos — the decisions, the pivots, the trades that are harder and harder to find, and the work that happened before a single tile went up. If you’re planning a historic bathroom renovation, this is the post you actually need to read.

Historic bathrooms present challenges that simply don’t exist in newer homes. Original plaster, aging plumbing, specialty trades, custom millwork, and preservation decisions all affect how the project unfolds. While every house is different, this 1889 Victorian illustrates many of the decisions homeowners face when restoring a late nineteenth-century bathroom. It’s one reason I love working on historic homes—every renovation teaches you something new while asking you to respect what came before.

 

What We Found Behind the Walls

When you gut a bathroom in a house this age, you’re making a bet. Sometimes the walls are fine. Sometimes they’re not.

In this case, the mold we’d seen on the surface had stayed on the surface. The studs were clean. That was the good news.

The question then became: do we replaster, or do we drywall?

In a historic home, replastering is always the more sympathetic choice—it matches the original construction, it’s more dimensionally stable, and done well, it’s beautiful. The problem is finding someone who can do it well. We’d had two difficult experiences with plasterers by this point, and that’s not an isolated story. The old world trades are disappearing. Plastering, in particular—real lime plaster, done properly—is a skill that’s becoming genuinely difficult to source. It’s a loss worth naming.

We made the call to go with moisture-resistant drywall instead. Purple board, which is the right specification for a wet room. In a full gut bathroom it’s a defensible choice—better moisture performance than standard drywall, and in this case, the right one given what we were working with on the trades side. It doesn’t carry the same character as plaster. But it will outlast a bad plaster job by decades.

The Tub Surround

The 1913 cast iron tub left the room early. It went out for refinishing—grey on the exterior, white inside—and while it was gone, we got to work on the surround.

The original brass surround was staying. That was never in question. But we were enlarging it, which meant finding someone who could weld brass cleanly and match what was already there. That’s a shorter list than you’d think. Brass welding is its own skill, and finding a maker who could work at the level this project required took some doing. When you’re restoring a 110-year-old bathroom, the metalwork either holds up to scrutiny or it doesn’t. We found the right person, and it shows.

The Vanity

This is where the room really got solved.

The original bathroom had almost no storage. The new vanity quadrupled it—custom designed and built to fit the room to the inch, which in a 6×6 space is the only way to do it.

The vanity was built by Steve Drake and me—custom designed and built to fit the room exactly, because in a 6×6 space, there’s no other way to do it. Every inch is spoken for before you start.

By wall-mounting the faucet, we returned about six inches of counter space—enough to fit an artist-edition sink instead of something standard. That decision alone changed how the whole vanity reads.

The design went through a real pivot mid-project: it was originally spec’d in oak, and we moved to an opaque stain partway through once we saw how the wood was reading against the tile. The V-shaped mullions on the vanity doors echo the black and white tile pattern on the floor—a detail that ties the whole room together without being obvious about it.

Steve also restored the original door, and his care shows in every detail of it—same as it does in the vanity.

The Order Matters More Than Most People Realize

One of the biggest misconceptions homeowners have is that bathroom renovations happen room by room. In reality, they happen system by system, and the sequence matters. In a historic home, getting that order right can prevent costly delays, protect original materials, and keep the project moving.

For this renovation, the work followed a carefully planned progression:

• Complete demolition
• HVAC modifications
• Plumbing rough-in
• Electrical rough-in
• Moisture-resistant drywall
• Priming
• Tile installation
• Crown molding
• Paint
• Reinstalling the refinished cast iron tub
• Plumbing fixtures
• Final trim and punch list
•  

We also installed a marble threshold at the bathroom entrance. While it’s a traditional detail in Victorian homes, it serves an important practical purpose by helping contain water inside the room and protecting the original hardwood flooring beyond the doorway.

One detail says more about how we approach renovations than anything else on this project: we removed and reinstalled the toilet twice during construction so the homeowners always had a functioning bathroom while the rest of the room was under construction.

It isn’t glamorous, but thoughtful sequencing like this can make living through a renovation significantly less stressful.

The Decisions That Didn’t Make the Photos

A freestanding tub against a window looks effortless in photographs and is anything but in practice—that gap between the tub and the sill is nearly impossible to keep clean. We talked about it and chose not to do it. The tub stayed where it was. The decision came down to how the room would actually live, not how it would photograph.

The light fixture was the client’s choice, and they love it. While I might have chosen something different, great residential design isn’t about imposing a signature style. It’s about helping homeowners create spaces that feel authentically theirs, and this bathroom does exactly that.

Standard sizing doesn’t work in a room this small. Everything has to be accounted for—the plumbing, the trades, the sequence, the six inches you fight to get back. That’s the real story behind a 36-square-foot bathroom that finally works.

If you’re researching Victorian bathroom ideas, planning a historic bathroom renovation, or trying to preserve original architectural details, I hope seeing the construction process behind this project helps you make better decisions for your own home.

 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is the biggest challenge in a historic bathroom renovation?

The biggest challenge is usually what you can’t see before demolition begins. Older homes often have outdated plumbing, electrical systems, damaged plaster, or structural surprises hidden behind the walls. Planning for these unknowns—and working with trades experienced in historic homes—helps keep the renovation on track.

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Should you keep plaster walls in a historic bathroom?

If the original plaster is in good condition and you can find a skilled plasterer, preserving it is often the best choice. However, when extensive repairs are needed or qualified craftsmen aren’t available, moisture-resistant drywall can be a practical and durable solution that performs well in modern bathrooms.

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How long does a historic bathroom renovation take?

Every project is different, but historic bathroom renovations typically take longer than renovations in newer homes. Custom cabinetry, specialty trades, refinishing original fixtures, and uncovering unexpected conditions can all extend the timeline. Careful planning and sequencing help minimize delays.

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Is it worth renovating an original Victorian bathroom instead of replacing it?

In most cases, yes. Preserving original architectural details while improving storage, plumbing, lighting, and functionality allows the bathroom to meet modern needs without losing the character that makes a Victorian home special. Thoughtful renovations often add both long-term value and everyday enjoyment.

 

Studio Olio specializes in historic home renovation in Denver and remotely. If you’re planning a kitchen renovation and want to understand what’s possible — let’s talk.

Project Journal

Every historic renovation has a story. The story of this 1889 Victorian bathroom renovation unfolds across two journal entries:

Historic Bathroom Design: Restoring an 1889 Victorian Bathroom
Discover the design decisions that transformed a cramped 36-square-foot bathroom while preserving the character of this historic home.

Historic Bathroom Renovation: Behind the Build of an 1889 Victorian (Current Article)
Follow the renovation from demolition to completion, including the custom millwork, restored clawfoot tub, disappearing plaster trades, and the sequencing required to renovate a Victorian bathroom.

→ View the 1889 Victorian Bathroom Project for the complete project overview, before-and-after photos, and finished details.

 

The People Behind the Work

This project was completed with the help of Steve Drake, who brought the same precision to every job that he brought to everything else in his life — his tools were always where they should be, his vehicle was always clean, and the work he turned out reflected both.

Steve Drake was my collaborator and right hand on this project. The vanity, the door, the crown molding, the paint, the fixtures—most of what you see in these photos passed through his hands. Steve passed away not long after this project wrapped. We were lucky to work together.

The post Historic Bathroom Renovation: Behind the Build of an 1889 Victorian appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The post Victorian Kitchen Renovation: The Finished Space appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The client and our specialist did the demo themselves — which tells you something about the kind of homeowner she is. This wasn’t a passive renovation. She knows the house, she had already worked within Richmond’s historic district guidelines on previous projects, and she is not the kind of person who hands off the keys and waits for a phone call.

Before Demo Started

Before demo started, I had already brought in a structural engineer. The 1990s renovation that installed the decorative columns had done so without adding a beam, and the upper floor had been quietly sagging ever since. The report confirmed what the floor was telling us, and the beam went in during framing, after the masons had finished their work.

The east wall window was next. The original opening was still legible in the brickwork from outside — you could read it clearly if you knew what to look for. It had been bricked in and plastered over at some point, and the room had been operating without it ever since. When the plaster came off, the opening was exactly where we expected it to be. The morning light that had been missing from that wall for who knows how many decades came back.

Opening the Walls

The historic masons came in and did the work that had to happen before anything else could: they removed the lower portion of the brick firebox to make room for the range — installing a metal header to carry the weight of the upstairs fireplace on the same run — opened the bricked-in window on the east wall, re-bricked the original back door in what had been the kitchen, and opened the wall on the northwest side to take the new french doors, installing a header there as well.

That back door had been the room’s connection to the yard when the house was built. Once the kitchen moved, it no longer made sense where it was.

The outdoor work had already been completed before the interior build began — a new patio, pergola, plantings, and shed — and the french door placement followed from that. Oriented to the finished yard rather than the original service entrance, the door went where we had designed the outside to be.

What Stays When You’re Relocating a Kitchen in a Historic Home

In a historic home renovation, the question of what stays is just as important as what comes out, and in this room the list was long.

The heartwood pine floors stayed — protected under rosin paper throughout demo and build, refinished when the work was done. The fireplace surround stayed, though not in its original form — more on that in a moment.

Throughout the entire home, our specialist stripped and refinished every original door, restored the hardware, and cleaned up the hinges — supplementing with reproduction hinges where the originals were beyond saving. Every original rosette was restored and reused. Where new millwork was needed — and in a room with new openings, there was plenty — it was made to match what was already there. If you didn’t know which pieces were new, you wouldn’t know. That’s the standard.

This approach aligns with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, which encourage repairing and preserving historic materials whenever possible rather than replacing them unnecessarily.

The Passthrough

The full-width double doorway between the new kitchen and the living room stayed, though we reduced the height of the opening. The lower portion became counter, sink, dishwasher, and storage — the door opening was exactly the right width for that run of cabinets. What remained above became a passthrough.

Victorian homes move light sequentially — room to room, front to back — and the openings between rooms are how that happens. Close that opening completely and the kitchen becomes its own separate world. Keep it, even at passthrough height, and the kitchen stays in conversation with the rest of the home.

Through the passthrough, the living room is always visible — warm gold walls, bookshelves, a round brass mirror — and the two rooms stay in the quiet conversation that a well-organized Victorian house is always having with itself.

What Came Back

The fireplace surround is the thing people ask about most when they see this kitchen, and the answer is that it never left — it just became something else.

The original Victorian surround was carefully deconstructed, and its millwork was used to build the range hood. The hood runs from the range to the ceiling, using the same profiles, the same proportions, and the same painted white finish that the surround had always had.

Behind the range, dark tile runs floor to ceiling — almost black — and at its center sits a pineapple tile mosaic, the one detail in the room that doesn’t reference the house’s history. It references the client’s.

The range sits in the exact spot where the firebox had been.

The Layout of a Historic Kitchen Relocation

The layout decisions in a historic kitchen relocation follow from what the room offers, not from an ideal plan imposed onto it. That’s particularly true when relocating a kitchen in a historic home, where original openings, windows, and architectural details often determine the layout more than modern convention does.

The room ran roughly 16 by 20 feet, with the range and restored east window on the east wall and the sink on the south wall.

The island sits at the center, where the room naturally places you when you walk in. The back of the island is built out with doors — outlets for charging, napkin storage, the things that accumulate in a kitchen and need somewhere to go that isn’t the counter.

A freestanding table adjoins the east side of the island, running east to west — not attached, able to move, able to seat people when the kitchen is in entertaining mode.

Custom stained cabinets run the perimeter, warm enough to read with the heartwood pine rather than against it. Upper cabinets have glass doors with decorative muntins. The heartwood pine floors run continuously from this room through the rest of the home, the way they always did.

Questions We Get Asked

How do you match new trim to original Victorian millwork?

You have a knife made from the existing profile. We pulled a piece of original trim, brought it to the millwork shop, and they ground a knife to match it exactly. Every new piece of casing and baseboard in the renovated areas was run from that knife.

It’s the only way to get it right — “close enough” is visible to anyone who knows what they’re looking at.

How do you relocate plumbing, gas, and electrical in a historic home?

Carefully, and with a plan for where the floors have to open.

We opened two sections of floor in areas that would be covered by cabinet runs — that’s where the plumbing connection to the rest of the home came up, along with the gas line extension and electrical. HVAC went to the toe kicks in several of the cabinets.

None of it is visible in the finished kitchen, but it required mapping the entire sequence before the first board came up.

Why relocate a kitchen instead of renovating it in place?

In this house, relocating the kitchen solved several problems at once. The former dining room offered better proportions, higher ceilings, and a stronger relationship to the yard once the new french doors were added.

Moving the kitchen also allowed the original kitchen space to become a flexible room with natural light and direct outdoor access. Sometimes the best solution isn’t improving an existing kitchen — it’s putting the kitchen where it always should have been.

What happens to the original kitchen space when the kitchen moves?

In this house it became Room 6 — a flexible space with good light, east-facing windows, and direct yard access. It holds plants, cats, and workout equipment.

Moving the kitchen didn’t leave a problem behind. It left a room that finally made sense.

Studio Olio specializes in historic home renovation in Denver and remotely. If you’re planning a kitchen renovation and want to understand what’s possible — let’s talk.

Project Journal

Every historic renovation has a story. The story of this Victorian kitchen renovation unfolds across three journal entries:

Why the Kitchen Moved
Understanding what wasn’t working and why the dining room became the new kitchen.

Relocating a Kitchen in a Historic Home – – (current article)
The structural, masonry, and millwork work required to make the move possible.

Victorian Kitchen Renovation: The Finished Space 
The completed kitchen and the details that make it feel as though it has always belonged.

→  View the project

The post Relocating a Kitchen in a Historic Home appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

Knob-and-tube wiring that someone once extended with romex and electrical tape. A drain line running through the middle of what should have been a straightforward wall removal. Floor joists sistered with whatever lumber was available in 1962. Old houses aren’t hiding secrets — they’re accumulating history. Knowing that going in changes everything about how you plan, how you budget, and how you keep from having a breakdown in month three.

Historic home renovation cost in Denver varies more than most contractors will tell you upfront — and the reason it’s so difficult to predict has very little to do with your finish selections. Here’s how I actually think about it.

What Drives Historic Home Renovation Cost in Denver

Every project is different, but the same factors surface every time. Age of the house, scope of work, materials, structural condition, systems, permits, design, and contingency. Each one pulls the budget in its own direction. Understanding all of them before demolition starts is the difference between a renovation that finishes on budget and one that doesn’t.

During a recent addition to an 1886 Victorian in Curtis Park, we anticipated using an existing wall cavity as a chase for new mechanical systems. Once the wall was opened, the available space was significantly smaller than the original drawings suggested — not wrong, just different from what we’d planned around. We rethought a portion of the layout in the field and kept moving. It didn’t blow the budget. But it was a clear reminder that historic homes don’t always reveal their full story until construction begins. Sometimes the house gets a vote.

That’s the thing most cost guides won’t tell you: historic home renovation cost in Denver isn’t determined solely by what you’re planning to build. It’s also shaped by what the house decides to show you.

Age of the House

A 1960s ranch and an 1911 Victorian may look like they belong in the same renovation conversation, but they rarely do. The older the house, the more building eras are layered inside it — and the more likely you are to find incompatible systems stacked on top of each other. A home built in 1889 has had nearly 140 years of owners, each of whom made decisions that made sense to them at the time. Some of those decisions are lovely. Some of them are your contingency fund.

Pre-1940 homes in Denver routinely surface lead paint, asbestos in floor tiles or pipe insulation, and original plaster that’s been patched with drywall compound by someone who didn’t understand what they were working with. None of that is a reason not to renovate — it’s a reason to know what you’re walking into.

Scope of Renovation

A kitchen relocation is fundamentally different from a kitchen refresh. Moving a bathroom to a new footprint is an order of magnitude more complex than updating fixtures in place. The cost variable that matters most isn’t what you’re putting in — it’s what you’re moving.

I ask clients early: are we working within the existing footprint, or are we rethinking it? Staying in place means working with what the house already offers — its window positions, its structural rhythm, its original flow. Changing footprint means engaging structural engineering, permitting, and often discoveries in the process of demolition that no amount of pre-planning fully anticipates.

Neither approach is wrong. They just cost differently — and they require different kinds of patience.

Historic Materials

This is where I spend the most time, and where the work gets interesting.

Old-growth Douglas fir. Old-growth white oak. Single-pane divided-light windows with original glass that has a slight wave to it that no reproduction matches. Quarter-sawn oak flooring  that hasn’t been available at commercial widths since the 1930s. Historic homes contain materials that simply can’t be bought new — which means restoration is almost always the right call over replacement, and restoration takes time.

Matching historic trim profiles requires custom millwork or patience sourcing from architectural salvage. Denver has good salvage resources — I use them constantly — but salvage requires more lead time than a box store run, and it requires someone who knows what they’re looking at. Matching a plaster profile for repairs isn’t something a general contractor learns on your project; it’s something they either know or they don’t.

Much of my work is in Denver’s older neighborhoods — Capitol Hill, Curtis Park, Whittier, Potter-Huffman — where preserving original character is often just as important as improving how the home functions. The materials are a significant part of why those homes are worth renovating in the first place.

Material costs in historic renovation are highly variable. A straightforward restoration pass on original trim might run $3,000–$6,000 in labor and materials. Period-accurate hardware — bin pulls, cup pulls, porcelain knobs — is more available than most homeowners expect, and replica options run close to what you’d pay for high-end contemporary hardware. It’s not the budget line that should give anyone pause. Windows are their own category: a high-quality historic window restoration, weatherstripped and reglazed, runs $400–$800 per window. Replacement with period-appropriate units, when restoration isn’t viable, runs considerably more.

Structural Work

This is where budgets get rewritten. Not always, but often enough that I build contingency into every project specifically for what the framing reveals.

Denver’s older homes were built without the subfloor systems we take for granted today. Joists may be undersized by current code, or sized correctly but damaged by a century of moisture intrusion, pest activity, or the undersized additions tacked on in the 1950s. A structural engineer is not optional on a meaningful historic renovation. It’s one of the first calls I make.

Structural engineering fees vary considerably depending on the scope of the assessment and what the engineer finds. Every home is different enough that a single number isn’t useful here — what matters is building the fee into your budget from the start, before you know whether you’ll need a simple letter or a full set of engineered drawings.

Plumbing and Electrical Updates

The two systems that most reliably introduce budget variance are the two you can’t see until demolition begins.

In Denver’s historic homes, galvanized steel supply lines are common in anything built before 1960. Galvanized corrodes from the inside out — water pressure drops and water quality degrades over time, but the pipes can look intact from the outside while being severely restricted within. Opening walls for a kitchen renovation routinely reveals plumbing that needs to be replaced regardless of the original scope.

Electrical tells a similar story. Homes built before 1940 often have original knob-and-tube wiring. Homes updated in the 1950s and 60s frequently have aluminum branch circuit wiring, which requires specific handling. Neither automatically disqualifies the house — but both require a licensed electrician who understands what they’re looking at.

For a major renovation in an older Denver home, budget $8,000–$20,000 for electrical updates alone if you’re touching multiple rooms. Plumbing in a bathroom addition or kitchen relocation runs $6,000–$15,000 before you’ve chosen a single fixture.

Permit Requirements

Permit costs are usually not what surprises homeowners. Permit complexity is.

In Denver, permit fees are generally based on the scope and valuation of the project. A bathroom renovation that keeps everything in place will have very different permitting requirements than a kitchen expansion, addition, or structural modification.

Historic homes introduce another layer of review. Depending on the location of the property and the scope of work, projects may require additional review from Denver’s historic preservation staff before permits can be issued.

In my experience, the greater cost is often not the permit itself — it’s the time required to prepare drawings, coordinate consultants, respond to review comments, and move a project through the approval process. Current permit timelines in Denver run 4–16 weeks depending on scope. Delays have a cost, too.

When budgeting for a historic renovation, think about permitting as both a cost item and a schedule item.

Most kitchen and bathroom remodel permits are measured in hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. But permit fees are only one piece of the equation. Engineering, historic review, consultant coordination, and plan preparation can add substantially more to the overall project budget — and any of them can extend your timeline if they surface a condition that requires a redesign before review can proceed.

Design Fees

Every contractor website lists a cost range. Almost none of them account for what it actually costs to think through the project correctly before the first hammer swings.

A well-designed historic renovation costs less than a poorly designed one — not because design is cheap, but because decisions made on paper don’t cost $400 an hour in GC time to fix. I’ve walked into projects where the absence of design documentation meant that framing decisions made during demo couldn’t be undone without significant cost, because no one had resolved those questions before construction started.

Design fees for a historic renovation in Denver run between 10–18% of construction cost depending on scope and complexity. On a $200,000 renovation, that’s $20,000–$36,000. On a $75,000 bathroom addition, it’s closer to $8,000–$12,000. Those fees are doing real work: resolving conflicts before they hit the field, sourcing materials appropriate to the house, and keeping the project from drifting into something the house can’t absorb.

Not every older home project is considered historic preservation. Understanding the difference between historic preservation and historic renovation can help homeowners make better decisions about budget, materials, and project scope.

Contingency Planning

Hold 15–20% of your total budget in contingency and treat it as already spent. If you don’t need it, that’s a good month. If you do — and in historic renovation, you often will — you’ll have it.

The homeowners who struggle most are the ones who budgeted to the last dollar and then opened a wall. Not because they made poor decisions, but because they had no margin for what the house decided to show them. Contingency isn’t pessimism. It’s respect for what you don’t yet know.

The houses I work with were built to last 200 years. They deserve to be renovated by people who take them seriously — which means knowing what you’re walking into, and building a budget that can absorb what you find when you get there.

Typical Historic Renovation Ranges in Denver

• Historic bathroom renovation: $35,000–$120,000+
• Historic kitchen renovation: $70,000–$300,000+
• Whole-home historic renovation: $100,000–$400,000+

These numbers are planning ranges, not estimates. Two homes built in the same year can have dramatically different renovation costs depending on what is discovered during demolition.

At Studio Olio, much of our work focuses on Denver’s historic homes, where preserving character is just as important as improving function.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does historic home renovation cost in Denver? Most historic home renovation projects in Denver run between $100,000 and $400,000 depending on the age of the home, scope of work, and what surfaces during demolition. Smaller targeted renovations — a bathroom addition  or kitchen update within an existing footprint — typically fall between $60,000 and $150,000. Whole-home renovations, structural modifications, or projects within a designated historic district run higher. The most reliable budget is one that includes a 15–20% contingency from the start.

Why is historic home renovation cost in Denver so difficult to predict? Because the budget isn’t determined solely by what you’re planning to build — it’s also shaped by what the house reveals during demolition. Original systems, previous modifications, hidden structural conditions, and material matching requirements all influence cost in ways that can’t be fully known until walls are opened. That’s not a reason to avoid the project. It’s a reason to plan with appropriate contingency and work with someone who has seen it before.

Why does historic home renovation cost more than standard renovation in Denver? Old houses require specialists, not generalists. Original materials — plaster, old-growth lumber, divided-light windows — can’t be matched with stock products. Systems hidden inside walls often need full replacement once exposed. And in Denver’s historic districts, design review adds time and constrains material choices in ways that affect cost. The work takes longer, requires more decisions, and rewards experience that’s specific to pre-1960 construction.

Does Denver require special permits for historic home renovation? Yes. Homes within Denver’s designated historic districts — including Potter-Huffman, Curtis Park, and Wyman — require design review before permits are issued. That review governs exterior materials, window replacement, and additions visible from the street. Even outside historic districts, structural modifications to pre-1940 homes trigger additional plan review. Budget 4–8 weeks for permit processing on any project involving structural work or footprint changes.

How do I find a designer who specializes in historic home renovation in Denver? Look for someone with direct experience in pre-1960 homes — not just older homes in general, but the specific eras and styles common to Denver’s historic neighborhoods: Victorians, Foursquares, Craftsman bungalows, Colonials. Ask to see projects, ask about their relationship with the city’s historic preservation office, and ask what they do when demolition reveals something unexpected. The answer to that last question tells you most of what you need to know.

Studio Olio specializes in historic home renovation in Denver and remotely. If you’re planning a kitchen renovation and want to understand what’s possible — let’s talk.

The post How Much Does a Historic Home Renovation Cost in Denver? appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

This Victorian home renovation began with understanding why the additions never quite belonged.

An 1889 Victorian home in Richmond’s Church Hill neighborhood had everything going for it — ten-foot ceilings, intact millwork, and a layout that still largely made sense — except for the columns and arch someone installed in the dining room in the 1990s.

There is a particular kind of renovation mistake that is easy to understand in the moment and hard to live with over time — the kind where someone looks at a room that already works and decides it needs more presence, more definition, more architectural detail, without fully considering what that addition is going to do to the space as a whole.

The 1990s were full of this kind of thinking, and the dining room of this 1889 Victorian had been living with the consequences for decades by the time Studio Olio came on board: a pair of decorative columns and a plaster arch, installed purely for effect, cutting straight across a room that had been generous and well-proportioned before they were installed.

What you were walking into felt smaller than it should have.

The ceilings were ten feet. The original millwork was intact. The bones were good. But decades of accumulated decisions — paint layered over paint, rooms adjusted and added to — made the house feel compressed in a way that its proportions didn’t warrant.

The homeowner knew this. She had already completed two renovations before we came on board, and she had done them carefully, working within Richmond’s historic district guidelines and understanding what it means to be a steward of a house like this. She simply didn’t want to go through the certification process again for this scope of work, and she didn’t need to.

The original kitchen, meanwhile, had spent those same decades in the back of the home, in an 11-by-11-foot room with a back door, two east-facing windows, and just enough space to function as a 19th-century service kitchen. Previously renovated in the 2000’s.

As a Victorian kitchen, it made a certain kind of sense — these rooms were designed to be out of sight, kept at the back of the house where the work of cooking could happen away from the rooms where guests were received.

As a 21st-century kitchen for a homeowner who bakes, whose husband cooks occasionally, and who entertains when the mood strikes, it didn’t work at all.

Moving the kitchen wasn’t a small decision in this Victorian home renovation (you can see how that unfolded in the next phase of the renovation), but it was a clear one, because the dining room sat at the center of the home with the ceiling height, the proportions, the light, and the connection to the rest of the house that a kitchen actually needs to function the way people live now.

We stood in the dining room before the renovation and felt the columns’ weight before you fully register them — the sense that the room is narrower than it should be, that the ceiling is farther away than the walls suggest, that there is something slightly off about the proportions that you can’t quite name until you look up and see the arch.

At a glance, the columns and arch almost worked, because they were referencing something classical, but the longer you stood in the room, the more it became clear that they weren’t speaking the same language as the house — or even to each other.

Victorian dining rooms were designed with specific dimensions in mind: wide enough to hold a table for a full family with room to move around it, proportioned to connect to the kitchen and butler’s pantry without either being visible to guests, tall enough to feel generous without feeling cold. The underlying logic of the room was still there.

What had changed was how it was being read.

The additions weren’t structural, which meant the arch and columns were introducing visual weight without doing any of the work that would justify it, and in doing so, they divided a room that had originally been meant to read as a single, well-proportioned space into something that felt narrower, shorter, and more constrained than it actually was.

The columns suggested one idea, the arch another, and the keystone layered on a third, so instead of reinforcing the architecture that was already there, they flattened it into something more generic, where the room lost the specificity it would have had in 1889.

The columns (also called colonnades) themselves weren’t entirely without precedent — by the late Victorian period you do start to see classical columns used to define transitions between rooms — but the arch was the giveaway.

An 1889 Victorian would have had rectangular cased openings with substantial trim, or at most a shallow segmental arch, not this kind of continuous rounded plaster form spanning between columns. That arch belonged to a different conversation entirely.

And then there was the keystone — a detail that only makes structural sense in a true masonry arch, where it is actually holding something in place. Here it was purely decorative, pulling from yet another architectural language: Georgian, Federal, Colonial.

Victorian columns, Mediterranean arch, Colonial keystone — three dialects in one opening, none of them quite right for an 1889 Church Hill brick Victorian, and all of them competing for attention in a room that had never needed any of it.

What the 1990s renovation was trying to do is easy enough to understand: break up a long sightline, add perceived grandeur, soften the transition between rooms. These are legitimate instincts. The execution just had no clear anchor, and the room had been living with the consequences ever since.

Why the Dining Room Needed to Change

Once we decided that the kitchen would move forward, the columns and arch stopped being a stylistic issue and became a functional one — they interrupted sightlines, constrained circulation, and turned what needed to be a working room into something that felt staged. They framed the wrong moment.

So they came out — not as a dramatic gesture, but more like an apology to the room.

Stripping that whole assembly out — the columns, the arch, the keystone — eliminated a false focal point, simplified the sightline, and gave the room back its proportions. Not as something decorated, but as something proportioned.

When does a 90s renovation do more harm than good to a historic home?

When it adds detail that competes with what’s already there rather than working with it. Victorian homes have an internal architectural logic — proportions, trim profiles, room relationships — that was developed over decades of building practice and refined to a high degree by the late 1800s.

A renovation that layers new decorative elements on top of that logic usually ends up fighting it, and the rooms feel it. The columns and arch in this dining room are a good example: they were trying to add presence to a room that already had more than enough.

Is it always worth removing a non-original addition in a historic home?

Not always — some later additions integrate well enough that removal would create more disruption than it solves. But when an addition is clearly at odds with the original room’s proportions and function, removal is almost always the right answer. The question worth asking is whether the addition belongs to the house or belongs to a particular moment in time that the house has long since outlasted.

What happens to the original kitchen space when the kitchen moves in a historic renovation?

It depends entirely on what that room was and what it was built to do. In this home, the original back kitchen had a back door, east-facing windows, and direct access to the yard — the exact right conditions for a plant room, a workout space, a sunny spot for the cats. Moving the kitchen didn’t leave a problem behind. It left a room that finally made sense.

Studio Olio specializes in historic home renovation in Denver and remotely. If you’re planning a kitchen renovation and want to understand what’s possible — let’s talk.

Project Journal

Every historic renovation has a story. The story of this Victorian kitchen renovation unfolds across three journal entries:

Why the Kitchen Moved – – (current article)
Understanding what wasn’t working and why the dining room became the new kitchen.

Relocating a Kitchen in a Historic Home 
The structural, masonry, and millwork work required to make the move possible.

Victorian Kitchen Renovation: The Finished Space 
The completed kitchen and the details that make it feel as though it has always belonged.

→  View the project

The post Victorian Home Renovation: Why the Kitchen Moved appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The stone

The countertops are grey and white granite with movement — the kind of stone that reads differently at seven in the morning than it does at noon. In a kitchen with three bay windows, that quality matters more than any trend cycle. Granite gets called dated occasionally, but in a Denver historic home renovation — original heart pine floors, restored Victorian millwork, a fireplace that came with the house — the question of whether a material is current misses the point entirely. The question is whether it belongs in this room — and this one did, completely.

I could sit in this kitchen and stare out the windows for hours.

The floors

Original heart pine — old-growth, narrow-grained, the kind of wood that takes stain differently than anything newer. I hand-stained every plank, then finished with a Bona high-traffic poly coat that would hold up to a kitchen that actually gets used. The warmth that came back is the kind you can’t buy in a new floor. Refinished, they anchored the whole room — dark enough to hold the drama of the black millwork and wallpaper, warm enough to keep the space from feeling cold.

Here is what the kitchen looks like from the front entry.

There is a clear line of sight into the laundry/mudroom at the back of the home.

The front door is painted a vibrant teal and you’ll find this brilliant blue as an accent in all of the rooms on the first floor helping to create a cohesive colour scheme. The orange colour on the visible laundry room wall complements the salmon of the entry.

I have added copper pulls to this original built in pantry and the copper on the wallpaper really pulls this wall together.

We don’t often use the microwave, so putting it into the pantry was perfect!

The built in pantry also has a passthrough that goes to the walk-in pantry. The colourful cloth is hiding the square hole because I didn’t want you to be distracted by the mess that is hiding back there! Once the walk in is complete, I’ll open the peekaboo hole up and you’ll be able to see right through.

If you look closer at the details you’ll find many mentions of what makes us feel at home; the Canadian teapot in the pantry, the painting of my very first dog Jules who has long since passed, the cookbooks that we’ve collected over the years featuring adventurous cooking and materials that bring us joy.

The fireplace

The fireplace was never restored to working — it would have been a significant undertaking, and the room didn’t need it to function as a fireplace to do its job. The exposed brick uncovered during the renovation stayed exposed, the gold-framed mirror went above the mantel, and the fireplace became what it was always going to be in this room — presence, and the thing that tells you this home has been somewhere.

A huge part of the charm of this house is the original features, like this Charles Eastlake latch that is on our pantry doors. We have similar original hardware on our front door and Eastlake inspired fireplaces in other rooms of the home.

What it felt like

The cooktop in the island meant that cooking happened in the middle of the room, with the bay windows behind you. The butler’s pantry under the stairs held everything that would otherwise crowd the counters. The open shelves kept the room breathing.

I could sit at that island and watch the birds out the windows for hours. Two people could cook together without getting in each other’s way. The heart pine floors creaked in exactly the right places.

This kitchen didn’t announce itself. It settled in — like it had always been there.

Which, in a way, it had.

O-Ren and Mags say they like their new kitchen too!

—

The post The Finished Kitchen: A 1911 Folk Victorian appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

Here is a short video of me feeding a line set through a wall. It was three seconds long, but I slowed it down to show 10 seconds.

There was also a happy surprise. When the walls opened up above the fireplace mantel, the original brick was there — intact, just waiting. It stayed exposed. It’s still there.

The post The Build: What It Actually Takes to Renovate a 1911 Kitchen appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

Before anything gets built, there’s a period where the room exists only on paper — and the job is to find the layout that stops arguing with itself.

For this kitchen, that took five iterations before I got to two concepts worth presenting. A room with three bay windows, two single doors, a set of French doors, an original built-in, and a fireplace requires that kind of rigor. Every opening is a constraint, and constraints in a room like this compound quickly.

What got decided and why

The sink wall went between the two single doors — the only run long enough to hold it. Open shelving above rather than upper cabinets, because upper cabinets in a room with this much light and this many original details would have competed with what was already there. I built the shelves from ash slab — cut, sanded, sealed, and installed on hidden brackets.

The island went in the center of the room with the cooktop built in. The orientation was deliberate: sitting at either end of the island, the bay windows are directly behind you — the light, the greenery, the shelf of plants. The island had to be shortened from the original plan — the flow from the living room to the refrigerator required it, which is something you confirm by taping the layout on the actual floor and walking every path before anything gets built.

No upper cabinets anywhere in the room. The bay windows needed a plant shelf, not cabinetry. The built-in painted black, with the botanical wallpaper — black ground, gold branches — running the full wall on either side. That wall didn’t need anything else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I keep the original built-ins in a historic home?

Almost always yes. Original millwork is the hardest thing to replicate convincingly. Removing it saves almost nothing and costs the home something it can’t get back.

What do you do when a historic room has too many openings for a functional layout?

You work with what the room gives you. In this kitchen, five openings left two usable walls — that determined everything: where the sink went, where the island went, why there are no upper cabinets. Constraints in old homes are usually solvable once you stop fighting them.

Why avoid upper cabinets in a historic kitchen renovation?

Upper cabinets work well in kitchens that need visual weight or additional storage. In a room with original millwork, significant window area, or strong architectural details, they often compete with what’s already there. Open shelving keeps the room breathing and lets the bones show.

The post The Layout: Five Openings, a Fireplace, and What Victorian Homes Were Actually Saying appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The first question every contractor asked when they walked through the home was the same: “How about we just put the kitchen where the old kitchen was?”

Every time, my answer was no.

The original kitchen was the smallest room in the home. One window. The main back entry — where you came in from the car, from the yard, from the world — opened directly into it. It was dark, it was cramped, and it sat at the back of a Folk Victorian built in 1911 that deserved better.

I knew where the kitchen needed to go the moment I walked into the room in the middle of the home.

The room that wanted to be a kitchen

Three large bay windows. Greenery outside. Light coming in that changes through the day and makes a room feel alive.

The room had almost certainly been the dining room at some point — there was a built-in passthrough directly from the walk-in pantry, which told you everything about how the home had originally been organized. Someone had understood this home once. The passthrough was staying.

There was also a fireplace. Original, like all of them in the home. Not working, but present — the kind of detail you don’t erase just because it’s inconvenient. It stayed.

And then there were the openings: three large bay windows, two single doors, and a set of French doors leading to the living room. Five openings in one room, plus a fireplace, plus a built-in. Every contractor who said no was looking at that and seeing a problem. I was looking at it and seeing a kitchen.

What made the original kitchen wrong

The size was wrong. One window in a home full of light is a waste. But neither of those was the real problem.

Victorian kitchens were never meant to be seen. They were back-of-house by design — separated from guests, separated from family rooms, tucked away from everything that constituted the presentation of the home. The kitchen was a workspace. It produced heat, smell, noise, and mess, and the entire floor plan was organized to keep all of that invisible.

The butler’s pantry was the pressure valve. It sat between the kitchen and the dining room and did several things at once: it staged meals before they were presented, stored china and silver and linens, and kept the chaos of the kitchen completely hidden from anyone sitting at the dining table. Food moved through it quietly, in an organized way, without the dining experience ever touching the work that produced it.

The back stairs did the same thing for movement. Whoever was running the household could move between floors without using the main staircase. Supplies went up, laundry came down, and the front of the home stayed calm. Two parallel systems: one for living, one for running the home. The layout wasn’t decorative. It was functional logic.

By the time I bought this home, the staff were long gone — but the bones remained. The butler’s pantry was still there, tucked under the rear staircase, with shelves on each side and a large window. The passthrough was still there, connecting it directly to the room that would become the kitchen. The rear staircase was still there, but it no longer worked for modern living.

Moving the kitchen corrected that. The old kitchen became what a back-entry room with a parking-side door actually wants to be: laundry, mud room, tool storage. The home didn’t lose a room. It gained two.

The decision

Moving a kitchen in a historic home means new plumbing, new electrical, new ventilation — all of it relocated, all of it permitted. Every contractor saw the cost and the complexity and suggested the path of least resistance.

But the path of least resistance would have left the smallest, darkest room in the home doing the heaviest daily work, while the room with three bay windows and an original fireplace sat there being something lesser. That’s not a renovation. That’s just moving furniture around inside a problem.

What it became

The island and the bay windows became the anchor of the room — the kind of place where you sit down with coffee and don’t leave. I could watch the birds out those windows for hours. The flow worked. The storage worked, especially once the butler’s pantry found its home under the second staircase — but that’s the next post.

This renovation made something clear to me that I haven’t stopped believing since: historic homes already know how they want to be organized. The logic is in the bones. The job isn’t to impose a new plan — it’s to find the one that was always there.

That’s why I do this work.

—

Studio Olio specializes in historic home renovation in Denver and remotely. If you’re planning a kitchen renovation and want to understand what’s possible — start with a complimentary discovery call.

→ Next: The Layout — Five Openings, a Fireplace, and Why Victorian Homes Were Built the Way They Were

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you move a kitchen in a historic home?

Yes — though it means relocating plumbing, electrical, and ventilation, all permitted. The question isn’t whether it’s possible, it’s whether the original layout is actually serving the home. Often it isn’t.

Will moving a kitchen hurt the historic character of the home?

Not if it’s done with the original logic in mind. In this case, moving the kitchen restored the home closer to how it was meant to function — the back room returned to a service entry, the kitchen moved to where the light was.

How do I know if my kitchen is in the wrong room?

Start with how the room feels to use every day. If the entry, the light, or the flow feels wrong, it usually is. Most historic homes have a logic to them — sometimes the kitchen just ended up in the wrong place over time.

The post Moving the Kitchen: A 1911 Folk Victorian appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

Here’s how to tell them apart.

Historic Preservation

Preservation is the most protective stance you can take with a historic property. The goal is to maintain what exists — original materials, original finishes, original form — with as little intervention as possible. Repair rather than replace. Stabilize rather than improve.

In practice, preservation is often legally defined. If your home sits within a historic district or carries a landmark designation, certain changes require approval, and some are off the table entirely. Denver has several locally designated historic districts — Potter-Lawson, Curtis Park, and Country Club among them — where exterior alterations go through a review process before a permit is issued.

Even without a legal designation, preservation is the right framework when a property has significant architectural or cultural integrity that would be diminished by change. The question isn’t can we update this — it’s should we.

Historic Restoration

Restoration takes a specific moment in time as its target. The goal is to return a property to how it looked and functioned during its most historically significant period — which often means removing things that later owners added and aren’t original to the house.

That drop ceiling in the dining room. The aluminum siding someone installed in the 1970s. The replacement windows that don’t match the profile of the originals. Restoration work pulls those layers back and works from what’s underneath.

This is exacting work. It requires research — historic photographs, Sanborn fire maps, paint analysis, original permit records — to establish what “original” actually looked like. It’s also the approach most likely to involve period-appropriate materials and craft techniques that aren’t easy to source.

Restoration makes the most sense when a home’s historic integrity is largely intact and the goal is to recover what’s there, not reimagine it.

Historic Renovation

This is where most of Studio Olio’s work lives.

Historic renovation keeps the character of an old house — its proportions, its architectural logic, its materials — while updating it to function well for the people who live in it now. New systems. Code-compliant electrical. A kitchen that works. A bathroom that doesn’t require a history degree to operate.

The discipline is in knowing what to touch and what to leave alone. Original millwork, old-growth fir floors, plaster walls with good bones, built-ins that have survived a hundred years of use — those stay. A non-original partition wall, a bathroom addition from the 1960s with no relationship to the rest of the house, a layout that makes the home genuinely hard to live in — those are candidates for change.

Studio Olio is currently working in Curtis Park — one of Denver’s oldest intact neighborhoods — where nearly every block has a home worth getting right.

Historic renovation is not about making an old house look old. It’s about making an old house work — without erasing the reason it was worth keeping.

Rehab (Without the Historic Consideration)

Rehab, in the conventional sense, means bringing a property up to livable or marketable condition. There’s nothing wrong with that goal. But when it’s applied to historic homes without any regard for what made them worth saving, the results tend to be the same everywhere: original details stripped out, surfaces covered in materials that have no relationship to the house’s era or character, front porches enclosed to add square footage.

The house still stands. But the thing that made it irreplaceable is gone.

Denver loses historic fabric this way more often than it should. It’s usually not malicious — it’s a cost calculation made without full information about what was there or what it was worth.

Which Approach Is Right for Your Home?

The answer depends on your home’s condition, its designation status, your goals for the space, and — honestly — how much of its original character is still intact. Most historic homes in Denver that haven’t been landmarked sit somewhere in the renovation category: enough original fabric to be worth protecting, enough that needs updating to require real decisions.

Understanding the difference between historic preservation and historic renovation is often the first step. The next question is usually: what is this actually going to cost?

If you’re wondering what a historic renovation actually costs in Denver — and why those costs can vary so dramatically from one home to the next — I’ve written a detailed guide that walks through the factors that influence renovation budgets, from structural discoveries and historic materials to permitting and contingency planning.

→ Read: How Much Does a Historic Home Renovation Cost in Denver?

That’s exactly the kind of project Studio Olio was built for. If your home was built before 1960 and you’re trying to figure out what to keep and what to change, that’s where we start.

→ Learn more about how Studio Olio approaches historic home renovation in Denver

Watch

Want to go deeper? Lora covered this topic on the Meaningful Design podcast — watch the episode below.

The post Preservation, Restoration, Renovation, Rehab: What’s the Difference (and Why It Matters for Your Historic Home) appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.