Interior designer in Lake Worth Beach, Florida

The city's six local historic districts are Old Lucerne, Northeast Lucerne, Southeast Lucerne, College Park, South Palm Park and Old Town. Old Lucerne keeps the original name: the Palm Beach Farms Company platted the town as Lucerne around 1912, and when the post office found that name taken, it became Lake Worth. College Park spread north of downtown in the late 1920s and again after World War II, on streets named for American colleges. South Palm Park covers about 60 blocks southeast of Old Town, toward Bryant Park and the Intracoastal.

The cottages are the city's signature. Most date from the early 1920s and have up to two bedrooms with a crawl space below, and the nonprofit Cottages of Lake Worth opens some of them to visitors on tours. Renovating one is an exercise in compression: a kitchen along one wall, storage in built-ins and window seats, lighting that makes small rooms feel generous, and a bath that works without moving plumbing far.

• Kitchen and bath layouts sized for small cottage footprints
• Built-in storage and custom furniture scaled to narrow rooms
• Finish palettes that sit comfortably with original materials
• Layered lighting for compact living and sleeping rooms

Lake Worth Beach adopted its historic preservation ordinance in 1996, and design review is overseen by the volunteer Historic Resources Preservation Board. For properties in the historic districts and the city's four individually designated landmarks, most exterior work needs a Certificate of Appropriateness submitted together with the building permit, and the application lists roofs, windows and doors among the covered alterations. City staff encourage owners to discuss a project before finalizing designs or buying windows and doors.

The review is aimed at exteriors, but interior plans often drive exterior changes: a moved window, a new door to the yard, an enclosed porch, a rear addition. We identify those early and coordinate with the licensed contractor, and with an architect when the scope calls for one, so the certificate and the permit move together instead of one waiting on the other.

Old Town, the roughly 16-acre commercial core of downtown, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. Its one- and two-story buildings date from 1912 to 1949 and mix Masonry Vernacular with Mediterranean Revival, Art Deco, Classical Revival and Moorish Revival styles; the Lake Worth Playhouse building opened in 1924. Because Old Town is also a local historic district, storefront, awning and facade changes go through the same certificate process as the houses.

Restaurants, galleries and shops on Lake and Lucerne avenues fit contemporary operations into historic shells. Our commercial interior design service plans the layout, finishes, lighting and fixtures around what the building allows, and our branding and digital design service can carry the same identity to signage and a website. Renderings help landlords and review staff understand a proposal before anything is built.

The towns around the city are very different places. Manalapan, incorporated in 1931, runs from the Lantana public beach to the Boynton Inlet and includes the southern third of Hypoluxo Island; its Architectural Commission must approve any exterior change, down to paint color, roof tile, shutters, fences, landscaping and seawalls. South Palm Beach is five-eighths of a mile of State Road A1A built mostly as condominiums. Lantana, incorporated in 1921, reaches onto the northern part of Hypoluxo Island, while Hypoluxo sits on the lagoon's mainland shore.

Inland, Atlantis was platted in 1958 as a gated golf and country club community, Palm Springs grew from a 1957 village of new houses, Lake Clarke Shores surrounds its namesake lake, and Greenacres began in 1926 as a working-class town. On the beach, new or replacement outdoor lights in the sea turtle protection zone in Lantana and Manalapan need a county permit, and South Palm Beach requires beachfront lights to be shielded from March through October.