The door closes behind you with a solid, familiar sound. You can feel how the house changes throughout the day without needing to see it happen. It’s easy to picture yourself here in ordinary moments. A cup set down on a counter. Shoes by the door. The rhythm of coming and going.

Choosing a historic renovation interior design firm requires more than reviewing portfolios and project photos. Older homes demand a different way of seeing — an understanding of proportion, craftsmanship, and the details that make a house feel right. The best historic renovations preserve that feeling rather than erase it.

A comfortable home is not necessarily larger, newer, or more expensive. It is a home designed with an understanding of human experience — how we move through a room, where we gather, where we retreat, and what allows us to feel at ease.

Most people assume comfort comes from soft furnishings, warm colors, or the amenities a house contains. Those things matter, but they are rarely the source of the feeling itself. More often, comfort begins with proportion, scale, light, and the relationship between one room and the next. We experience those things long before we consciously notice them.

The proportions of historic architecture — especially homes built with traditional scale and natural materials — mirror human scale in a way that registers before you’ve thought about it. Your nervous system settles before your mind catches up.

When the millwork is respected in an old house, you feel it before you can explain it. The rooms hold together. The proportions make sense. The baseboards meet the floor the way they were always supposed to, and nothing is trying to hide anything.

Hiring the right historic renovation interior design firm isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about understanding architecture, construction, millwork, proportions, and the thousands of small decisions that determine whether a century-old house still feels authentic when the work is complete.

That feeling is the goal. Getting there is harder than it looks, and the people you hire either understand that or they don’t.

If you’re planning historic home renovation in Denver and your house was built before 1960, here’s what separates a firm that truly understands historic homes from one that only sees the project.

They Know Which Details Aren’t Negotiable

On a 1911 Folk Victorian, the general contractor’s solution for replacing damaged door casing was stock molding from Lowe’s. He presented it as a match. It wasn’t — not in profile, not in scale, not in the way it would have read against trim that had been on those walls for over a century.

I found a custom millwork shop that could replicate the profile exactly. It cost roughly three times the stock option. The GC pushed back. We did it anyway.

That conversation happens on many historic renovation projects. Someone will try to value-engineer a detail that isn’t optional — and in an old house, the details are rarely optional.

Most homeowners would never identify a casing profile as the reason a room feels right. They would simply feel that it does. Historic homes rely on thousands of small relationships between materials, proportions, and details. When enough of those relationships are lost, the comfort of the house begins to erode, even if nobody can explain exactly why.

A designer who knows this work understands which elements the house can’t afford to lose and knows how to hold the line without burning the project down.

Gentle but firm. Everyone is human. But some things aren’t up for discussion.

They Can Read What Went Wrong — And Why

There’s a warmth that isn’t about temperature. It’s the sense that life has happened here in a steady, ordinary way, and could again. Nothing about it is perfect, but it feels steady. Reliable. The house has outlasted things — absorbed a century and held.

When I walk into a house that’s been renovated before, my eyes go to the millwork first. Is it correct for the period? Does it have the right profile? The right scale? And then: what did the last person do when it didn’t fit?

The answer is usually quarter round — that 3/4″ rounded trim tucked where the baseboard meets the floor. A base shoe is normal. Most old houses need one. But quarter round is a different decision entirely. In a house built in 1905, it reads immediately as a patch. It announces that something didn’t meet, and that someone chose to cover the mistake rather than solve it.

What that detail tells me isn’t just about the floor. It tells me about every other decision that got made on that project — whether the people doing the work were paying attention, whether anyone in the room had the knowledge or the authority to say, that’s not accurate enough.

Some people can talk a good game. On one project, the copper work on a pergola had to be assessed and corrected — work that had been done by the GC’s own roofing crew. I brought in two other experienced roofers to evaluate it. Neither of them had touched the original installation. Both of them apologized when they saw it.

That’s how bad work announces itself — not always loudly, but always honestly, to anyone who knows what they’re looking at.

What a Historic Renovation Interior Design Firm Sees Before the Renovation Begins

In an 1889 Victorian I worked on, the foyer millwork set the tone for every room that followed. The staircase, the casing, and the way the landing met the hall established a rhythm that carried through the entire house. Most people wouldn’t consciously notice those details, but they would absolutely feel it if they disappeared.

Old houses have a rhythm — the way rooms relate to each other, how the millwork scales to the ceiling height, what the proportions of the windows tell you about the period, and how the house guides you from one space to the next.

Reading that before picking up a pencil is part of the job.

The question on an old house is never just, what do I want to do here?

It’s what should stay?

Renovation culture often assumes improvement means replacement. Historic houses rarely work that way. Some of the most important decisions happen when you decide not to change something — a doorway, a casing profile, a staircase detail, or the proportions of a room. The work is often less about imposing a vision and more about understanding what the house has been trying to tell you all along.

They Speak Construction, Not Just Design

Historic home renovation isn’t decorating. The decisions that shape the outcome often happen before anything is ordered or installed — in the framing stage, the rough plumbing stage, or the moment a wall comes open and reveals something you can act on.

I came to interior design through construction. That background means I can read drawings, have a real conversation with a general contractor about structural constraints, and catch problems at the stage when they’re still fixable.

It also means I know when someone is trying to talk their way out of doing something right — and I know the difference between a constraint that’s real and one that’s simply inconvenient.

In the 1911 Folk Victorian bathroom, I could see that what was drawn as a 8-by-8-foot room could be an 8-by-15-foot room. The structure was there. Knowing to look for that possibility — and knowing how to act on it — is the kind of thing that only comes from understanding both sides of the work.

The navy clawfoot tub centered beneath the window wouldn’t exist in a 8 by-8 room. The entire character of that space lives in that decision.

They Know When to Say So

The projects that go wrong almost always have one thing in common: nobody said the hard thing early enough. The budget wasn’t right for what the house needed. The timeline didn’t account for what the work would reveal. The scope was set before anyone had a real conversation about what the house was actually asking for.

A historic renovation interior design firm worth hiring delivers that conversation before the drawings are finished — not after the GC is already on site. It’s not a comfortable conversation every time. But it’s the one that determines whether the project ends with a house that’s been respected or one that’s been worked around.

And somewhere along the way, without deciding to, you stop evaluating. You’re not comparing it to another house or wondering whether a different floor plan would work better. You’re simply there, already beginning to imagine the ordinary moments of your life unfolding inside those rooms.

That’s the architecture of comfort.

It isn’t created by a single material, a particular style, or the size of the budget. It emerges from thousands of decisions about proportion, scale, craftsmanship, and restraint — decisions that most people will never consciously notice.

What they notice instead is the feeling.

The feeling that the room holds together. That the light belongs there. That the proportions make sense. That nothing is fighting for attention. That the house understands how to hold daily life.

Your nervous system settles before your mind catches up.

The best historic renovations preserve that feeling. They allow a house to remain itself while making room for the people who live there now.

The post Architecture of Comfort | Historic Renovation Interior Design Firm appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

Throughout my entire life, I have been able to feel cities, areas, places, homes, situations, energy, people’s emotions and tension. For much of my life it felt like a burden, something I couldn’t control and while I was told it was a gift it wasn’t until I was in my mid thirties, in absolute chronic pain, attempting to heal from a terrible car accident where three cars hit mine, that I started to understand that I did in fact have control on how to navigate these feelings and other sensory perceptions that I couldn’t seem to turn off.

I worked with a very good life coach who taught me to manage my energy, and how to turn off the ability to feel what others carried when I didn’t want to — and also, if I was affected, how to clear it so that I could continue to only be affected by my own. It sounds like it was a short journey, but nearly 12 years later, I am still refining my practice.

Here are three short vignettes of three properties I’ve lived in, and my first experiences of driving up to them and walking through them. I use my perceptions with all the homes I work with.

Exhale.

I had gotten the lockbox code from the owner who was selling his two story Folk Victorian. I opened the door and the smell of dust, old wood and plaster filled my nose. There were old sheets on all of the windows, a baby carriage along with old cabinets, a beat up leather sofa and a dresser that had clearly seen better days assaulted my eyes. I think for most people it would probably read as the home where everyone gets murdered, but to my body, there was a sense of groundedness and steadiness.

Once I had adjusted to the darkness, I could see the millwork around the many doorways and very tall windows. The ceiling was 10′ tall, the floors were wooden, but some covered in glue. I walked through all the rooms, looked at the tiny porch off of the primary bedroom and was overjoyed at the originality of the porch rails. There were 6 fireplaces in the home, and what looked like an original well in the basement. My body felt at home in this house and I knew after walking through it several times that I was going to buy it and make it a home. Richmond, Virginia, 1911 Folk Victorian on 1 acre. I never wanted to leave this home. But I needed to be able to breathe again.

Exhale.

I turned my blinker on and turned left down a small two lane gravel road. Dust plumed off the back of my car as I drove down the winding road surrounded by tall trees. A stream ran alongside the road. I passed a few homes, nestled into the forest, saw the mailbox marked with the numbers I was looking for and then slowly drove down the mile long driveway, winding through the trees.

I pulled up to the two story 1875 cabin on 15 acres in rural Virginia.

I got out of my car, walked to the other side of the cabin and it took my breath away. A small lake was in the background, with a canoe tucked up on the shore, and the rolling grassland surrounded the cabin while the trees surrounded the open space. I couldn’t see a single other house. It had a screened in porch to watch the wildlife. A chicken coop was already constructed.

There was a large mound to the left, filled with wildflowers and butterflies. Never had I wanted to live somewhere so much. I was only meaning to stay 4 months but a year and a half later, I was awfully sad to leave, and excited about my cross country move.

Inhale.

I pulled up to the tiny ex-miner’s cabin through an icy alley in Golden, CO. I turned the key and walked through the tiny space. The only two doors were the front and the bathroom. The window in the living room looked out onto the homes next door, but for some reason the sofa had been turned away from it, so you couldn’t look outside while sitting. The kitchen had another window that looked out onto someone’s yard. It was quite the change from my last place, which had a lot of windows, and while close to the neighbours, it hadn’t felt claustrophobic the way this one did.

I spent my month there working — not from the cabin, but anywhere with windows that didn’t feel claustrophobic. The owner offered for me to stay longer, but I absolutely couldn’t live more than a month in this tiny place. Not because it was small — because it didn’t have a right feeling, where I could breathe and exhale.

Every time I walk into someone’s home — it could be yours — I listen with my body to what the house is saying. Not the square footage. Not the condition of the mechanicals. My body either exhales, or it inhales. And what we do with that information depends on who the end user is.

The post Exhale. How I Read a House Before I Touch It. appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The post 1960’s Boulder Kitchen Renovation appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The post 1911 Victorian Bathroom Renovation appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

1889 Victorian Bathroom Renovation
Richmond, Virginia

The Situation

The bathroom was 36 square feet with mold in the walls, cracked plaster, a soffit above the sink cutting into the headroom, and almost no storage. It had been operating as an afterthought for over a century.

What it had was a large window with good morning light and a cast iron tub with 1913 stamped on the bottom. The original hex tile — black and white, already making an argument — was still on the floor.

The room had almost nothing going for it. Almost.

The Move

No plumbing moved. The tub, toilet, and sink stayed where they were — not because relocation was off the table, but because the layout wasn’t the problem. The room needed storage, light, and a design that could hold its own in a house with this much history.

The client had spent time in France and wanted something of that sensibility brought forward — classic contrast, pattern with intention, a bathroom that felt personal rather than just renovated. The original hex floor was already pointing that direction. We followed it.

The Result

The soffit came out and the room exhaled. The 1913 tub was refinished and its surround enlarged. A custom vanity built to fit the room exactly quadrupled the storage, and wall-mounting the faucet freed up enough counter space for an artist-edition sink. Black and white diamond tile on the walls — graphic and fully committed — picks up where the original hex floor leaves off.

Thirty-six square feet. It doesn’t need to be large to be exactly right.

 

---

Details Scope: Bathroom Renovation, HVAC relocation, full interior renovation Location: Richmond, VA

See the full sequence — before, during, and after — in the journal

The post 1889 Victorian Bathroom Renovation appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

1889 Victorian Kitchen Relocation
Richmond, Virginia

The Situation

The house had everything it needed — ten-foot ceilings, intact millwork, and a layout that still largely made sense — except for the way it had been altered over time. A 1990s renovation had inserted decorative columns and an arch into the dining room, dividing what had originally been a well-proportioned space into something that felt smaller and more constrained than it should have.

The kitchen was still operating as it had in the 19th century: small, back-of-house, disconnected from how the homeowner actually lived.

The Move

Rather than force a modern kitchen into a space that was never meant to hold it, the decision was to move the kitchen into the dining room — a room with the ceiling height, proportions, and central placement the kitchen needed to function well.

This required a series of adjustments guided by what the house revealed during demolition:

• A missing structural beam from a previous renovation was corrected before any new work began
• A bricked-in original window was reopened, restoring natural light that had been absent for decades
• The non-original columns, arch, and keystone were removed, giving the room back its original proportions
• Original openings were preserved and adjusted rather than closed, maintaining how light moves through the home

Throughout the project, original elements were retained and restored wherever possible — heartwood pine floors, rosettes, plinths, door hardware, trim profiles, and millwork — with new work fabricated to match so closely that it becomes indistinguishable from what was already there.

The Result

The original fireplace surround was deconstructed and rebuilt as a full-height range hood, allowing the range to sit exactly where the firebox once was.

The proportions, profiles, and painted finish remain consistent with the rest of the home, while a dark tile backdrop and a single pineapple detail quietly anchor the wall in the client’s own story. Custom cabinetry was designed in a tone that works with the original heartwood pine floors rather than against them. The layout allows the room to function in a continuous loop — separate zones for cooking, baking, and gathering — with a freestanding table that references traditional Victorian worktables while adapting to modern use.

What changed is everything — but the house absorbed it without a seam.

---

Details Scope: Kitchen relocation, structural correction, full interior renovation Location: Richmond, VA

See the full sequence — before, during, and after — in the journal.

The post 1889 Victorian Kitchen Renovation appeared first on Historic Home Renovation & Design | Denver | Studio Olio Interior Design.

The post 1911 Folk Victorian Kitchen Relocation 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.

What the Dining Room Was Dealing With in a Historic Victorian Home

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 — start with a complimentary discovery call.

→ Next: Removing the Columns and Reclaiming the Room

The post The 90s Addition Had to Go: Reworking a Kitchen in an 1889 Victorian Home 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.