Interior design across Martin County, Florida

Each municipality runs its own permitting. The City of Stuart's Building Division reviews plans and checks contractor licenses inside city limits. The towns of Sewall's Point, Ocean Breeze and Jupiter Island issue their own permits, and Jupiter Island adds a Development Review Board. The Village of Indiantown, incorporated at the end of 2017, has its own building division. Everywhere else, including Palm City, Jensen Beach, Port Salerno, Hobe Sound and the county's share of Hutchinson Island, Martin County's building department is the permit office.

A mailing address does not settle jurisdiction, so we confirm it for each property. Private rules sit on top of public ones: Martin County leaves deed restrictions and association bylaws to the associations, so their approval is a separate step. In unincorporated areas the comprehensive plan limits buildings to four stories and 40 feet, and zoning districts can set lower limits.

The four-story rule keeps Martin County low, including its stretch of Hutchinson Island. Stuart's downtown and East Stuart were listed as National Register historic districts in 2026, Port Salerno keeps a working fishing waterfront on the Manatee Pocket, and downtown Jensen Beach is a redevelopment area whose plan calls for Florida vernacular architecture. Palm City's neighborhoods include a long list of golf and yacht club communities built from the late 1970s onward, and several more carry Stuart addresses. Mattamy Homes' Newfield, planned on more than 3,800 acres, is adding new villages in Palm City, Ocean Breeze grew from a 1938 trailer park, and the Town of Jupiter Island, with about 800 residents, sits on the barrier island between the Palm Beach County line and the Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge.

That range asks for different work in each place: renovating club-community houses from the 1980s and 1990s, keeping the character of older Stuart and Jensen Beach buildings, planning compact homes in Ocean Breeze, and furnishing new construction in Palm City.

Water defines the eastern side of the county: the St. Lucie River and its forks, the Indian River Lagoon, and the Atlantic beaches of Hutchinson Island and Jupiter Island. In unincorporated areas, a house in a mapped flood zone that was not built to current standards must be brought into compliance, including elevation to at least one foot above base flood elevation, once improvements over any five-year period reach half the building's value. We scope and phase renovations with that rule in mind.

Inland, the county changes character. Indiantown, a village of about 6,500 people on the St. Lucie Canal, has an economy that relies heavily on seasonal agriculture, and its Seminole Inn, built by S. Davies Warfield during the 1920s, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Homes there and on the county's agricultural land call for a different brief than a riverfront house: durable finishes, mudrooms and work spaces built for outdoor life.