The method behind Hilltop Revival, a whole-house midcentury remodel in Denver

Hilltop Revival is a full remodel of a midcentury home in Denver's Hilltop neighborhood. Huron Interiors gutted and reimagined the entire house, then put back the details that made it worth saving, including its stained glass windows and a curved staircase.

Nothing about a whole-house remodel happens one room at a time. The open main level connecting kitchen, living and dining, the primary suite designed as a spa-like retreat, and the downstairs lounge with its custom bar all moved together, each with its own selections, trades and deadlines.

The design held its nerve through that. Clean midcentury lines run through the finished rooms, and the tile gets to be playful: sage green and glazed in the kitchen, graphic black and white under the office desk, dark and geometric in the powder room.

Huron Interiors is run by two sisters, Ann Marie Winkler and Kelly Smethills. Their Programa workspace shows how a two-person studio keeps this much work legible: a project structure every job starts from, fees scoped and tracked in hours, and one record per product from pinboard to purchase order.

Start from a template, not a blank page

One project in the workspace will never be installed

Alongside its live work, Huron Interiors keeps a project called Residential Project Template. It exists to be duplicated. Every new job starts from it, so the phases, task lists and schedule categories arrive already built instead of being reinvented under deadline.

The naming convention does quiet work too. Projects are named client first, scope second. When one client's ADU needed both a finishes scope and a furnishings scope, it became two projects rather than one long list. Each record stays short enough to actually read.

When Programa was invited to view Huron's project setup, the studio had more than a dozen residential projects in the workspace, covering everything from an entry room to a full remodel with an addition.

Set the fee, then track time against it

Keep the fee, hours and payment terms visible

Open one of Huron's current projects and the first line under the title is the scope: a flat fee, defined as 142 hours, with the deposit and the balance tied to handoff to the contractor. Anyone on the project reads the commercial terms before they read the first task.

The phases are named the way an architecture studio would name them: Programming, then Design Development. The timer runs against a project and a phase, so time is recorded against the work as it happens. During the week Programa reviewed, the studio logged 64 hours and 30 minutes, most of it in design development.

Because the fee is scoped in hours, tracked time stops being admin and becomes a budget. On that same project, just under 56 of the 142 scoped hours had been recorded. That is not a report someone compiles at the end of the month. It is on the overview, every day, next to the task list.

One record from Presentation to purchase order

Approval lands on the product, not in an email inbox

Huron uses Presentations to arrange product records visually for clients. A table lamp on a living room Presentation still carries its room, quantity and green Approved status. When the client signs off, that status stays attached to the item instead of sitting in an email thread.

The same records scale up. One current project runs a 75-item FF&E schedule, and purchase orders go out to suppliers like Visual Comfort, Mullan Lighting and West Elm from the same workspace. Invoicing sits beside the projects too, so the paperwork follows the product rather than chasing it.

The practical effect is that nothing has to be re-entered. The lamp the client approved on the board is the lamp on the schedule, and the lamp on the purchase order. One record, three moments in its life.

Character survives the process

The risk in systemizing a studio is that the work starts to look systemized. Hilltop Revival argues the opposite. The stained glass got kept. The dining chairs are leopard print. Three rooms got three different tiles, and each one reads as a decision rather than a default.

Those choices survived because the admin around them stayed simple. The duplicated project handled the setup, tracked time stayed visible against the fee, and every product kept its own record.

Hilltop Revival photographs as one confident decision. The workspace behind it shows hundreds of small ones, each written down once and kept where the next person could find it.