A big house cut into 1928-sized rooms. Whole-Home Remodel in Berkeley Place
Our work · Aledo Mid-Century Renovation
Design, drawn and built
What a whole-home remodel in Berkeley Place involves
Good street, good bones, and a floor plan drawn for how families lived a generation or two ago. That is the house we take on. Walls come out, the primary suite finally shows up where there never was one, and the kitchen stops being a corridor everyone has to walk through.
Design, drawings, permits and the build, on cost-plus billing so you can watch the budget as it moves rather than reading about it afterward. You keep the house you chose. It just stops arguing with you.
In Berkeley Place
The mistake people make here is assuming a whole-home remodel means a bigger house. It almost never does. The median is 2,317 square feet and a quarter of these run past 3,056 — the space is already yours. What 1928 did with it is the problem: a formal front room nobody sits in, a kitchen walled off from everything, bedrooms that all share one bathroom off a hall, and a back half broken into a pantry, a maid's room and a sleeping porch. We spend the first weeks working out what the house already contains before anyone talks about adding to it.
Design and drafting, in house
The drawings come from the people who have to build them
Plans, elevations and selections are done here, by the team that will be on site — so the thing you approve on paper is the thing that gets built, and the number under it is real.
The construction set
Every room dimensioned, every window and door scheduled, ceiling heights called out — the drawing a plan reviewer stamps and a framer builds from.
The room in 3D
How the rooms connect once the wall between them is gone — drawn to scale, not sketched.
The selections
Stone, tile, timber and cloth, chosen together and seen in daylight before anything is ordered.
Renovating in Berkeley Place
What the houses here actually ask for
1928
Period-revival brick and stucco from the twenties and thirties — Tudor, Spanish and Colonial, one and two stories, on 60-foot lots that repeat down the block under a deep canopy.
Most of this neighborhood was built in the twenties and thirties, so the houses repeat and the problems repeat with them. A masonry shell that does not take a new opening casually, and front setbacks fixed by the neighbors rather than by the zoning table.
- Median house
- 2,317 sq ft
- Median lot
- 9,000 sq ft
- Houses with a pool
- 95 of 549
a quarter of them run past 3,056 square feet
62 feet across at the median, and 146 feet deep
a little over one in six
Measured from Tarrant Appraisal District parcels tax year 2025 via City of Fort Worth GIS, 549 single-family parcels, measured 2026-09-03
The ground rules in Berkeley Place
Berkeley Place looks like a historic district and is not one.
The city's zoning map records no historic overlay across about 97% of it, and that is the sentence that matters most when you are working on a house here, because three blocks north the answer flips. No Certificate of Appropriateness, no landmarks commission, no design review — siding, windows, doors, roofing, decks and additions are ordinary Fort Worth permit items. One address here is a city landmark and does need a certificate; a second house carries a state landmark designation, which is a different rule and a different office. We confirm the parcel before we tell anyone their block is clear.
A-5 One-Family~67%
- Min lot
- 5,000 sq ft
- Min width
- 50 ft
- Max coverage
- 50%
- Front yard
- 20 ft
B Two-Family~15%
- Min lot
- 5,000 sq ft attached / 7,500 detached
- Min width
- 50 ft
- Max coverage
- 50%
- Front yard
- 20 ft
Width is what binds here, not coverage
On the lot this neighborhood keeps repeating, 50% coverage would allow a footprint no house here comes close to. What actually runs out is width — about 62 feet at the median, five-foot side yards, and a house already standing where somebody put it in the 1920s. So the honest answer on a side addition is smaller than the coverage table suggests, and there is usually a question about whether the house as it stands still fits today's rules. We pull the parcel before anything is drawn.
Measured from City of Fort Worth GIS zoning, point-sampled 2026-09-03; Fort Worth Zoning Ordinance §§ 4.704 and 4.705 and § 6.101, read 2026-08-26
What it runs in Berkeley Place
$150,000–$750,000
a smaller house taken cosmetic-plus at the low end, down to studs on something large at the top.
Ranges for a whole-home remodel in Berkeley Place, not a quote. Before there are drawings, a range is the only honest number anyone can give you — the spread between a high and a low bid on the same job is routinely 20% or more. We bill cost-plus, so when there is a plan you see the actual materials, labor and subcontractor costs, plus our overhead and profit, rather than a single figure with the unknowns padded into it.
What moves it
- What is behind the walls. Two houses with identical floor plans can carry very different budgets depending on whether the wiring, plumbing and ductwork were replaced in the last fifty years or never — and none of that is readable from the curb, which is why we open a wall before we price the drawings.
- How much of the plan is actually structural. In most postwar houses very little of what is in the way is carrying load — but that answer comes from opening things up, not from the floor plan.
- Square footage, straightforwardly. This is the one service where the range is mostly a size range.
- Whether you live in it. Phasing a remodel around an occupied house adds time and protection work that an empty one does not need.
- Per square foot
- $100–$300 per square foot
- How long it takes
- 5–12 months
- City permit fees
- $1,200–$4,000 in Fort Worth
- Carry a contingency
- budget 15–20% — on a down-to-studs remodel this is the number we would not thin out
Built by 6th Ave Homes
Whole-Home Remodel in Berkeley Place See the gallery →What we'd actually do here
The moves that matter in Berkeley Place
Every neighborhood rewards something different. These are the three that come up on almost every whole-home remodel we take on.
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Confirm the parcel before you believe the neighborhood
About 97% of Berkeley Place carries no historic overlay, which makes exterior work an ordinary permit. But one address here is a city landmark and another holds a state designation, and those are two different offices with two different answers. It takes a morning to check and it decides what the whole exterior scope costs.
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Redraw the back half before you price an addition
The rear of a 1928 house here is usually three or four small rooms that were built for staff, storage and sleeping outside in August. That is where the kitchen and the family room come from, and it is a fraction of what adding the same square footage would run.
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Width binds long before coverage does
Lots here run about 62 feet across and 146 deep, so you will hit the side setbacks with room to spare under the 50% coverage cap. Anything that wants to get wider is a variance conversation; anything that goes back is usually not.
How it works
A whole-home remodel in Berkeley Place, in three steps
The people who draw it, price it, and build it share a hallway — which is why the plan you fall in love with is the plan that actually gets built.
Meet Up
We walk the house, listen to how you actually live in it, and talk honestly about budget before anyone draws a line.
Team Up
Our designers and drafting team put a real plan on paper — layout, selections, and a number you can build around.
Glasses Up
We build it, keep you in the loop, and hand back a home that feels like you. Pour something good.
Both numbers, one conversation
Put the money into this house, or buy one that is already done?
Fewer than four houses in a hundred here have been built since 2000. People keep these houses.
What the work would cost
Priced by the people who'd build it.
Design, drafting and construction, in house.
What it'd sell for as-is
Valued by the agents who sell this market.
6th Ave Homes is a licensed brokerage.
A remodeler can price the work. An agent can price the house. We do both.
The comparison you're really making is against another 1920s house somebody else already finished. So we price this one line by line, cost-plus, off a drawing rather than a walkthrough — and our agents price the finished one down the street. Same office, so nobody's steering you toward the answer that pays us more.
Our work in Berkeley Place
Contemporary Spanish-Revival Remodel
Whole-Home Remodel
Some houses are asking to become bolder versions of themselves. In Berkeley Place, the 6th Ave Homes team leaned into this home's Spanish-Revival roots and added the space it needed to feel whole, so see how it all came together.
See the whole projectNot our first time on these streets
Another one of ours in Berkeley Place
The neighborhood
A working farm until 1924. Four houses in five up by 1940.
William Joseph Rogers bought about 137 acres of this ground in 1901 and farmed it, grain and dairy. The neighborhood association's own history has the rest: the land around the farm went to a development company, the city annexed the area in 1922, and in 1924 the farm itself was sold and cut into house lots. The farmhouse is still standing on Warner Road. It went up as a wood-framed Queen Anne, and it is brick today because the new subdivision's deed restrictions forbade wood exteriors — a house that had to be re-clad to obey the rules of the neighborhood built around it. W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel owned it from 1925 to 1945, governor of Texas from 1939 and then a United States senator until 1949.
The western edge is Forest Park, and the threshold is a pair of limestone towers at Forest Park Boulevard and Park Place. The city's own account has them designed by the Fort Worth architect John Pollard, built by the Bryce Building Company in 1917-18, thirty feet tall, rubble limestone with arched openings you walk through and a hipped roof sheathed in red tile. They were restored in 1980 with money from this neighborhood and again in 2009. They belong to the park and they read as the front door of Berkeley Place, which is a fair summary of the whole relationship.
Behind the gates the park does real work. Forest Park Pool opened on the east side below the bluff in 1922 and the city calls it the oldest aquatics facility in Fort Worth. The Fort Worth Zoo has been on this ground since 1909. The miniature railroad has run since 1959 and still covers five miles between Forest Park and Trinity Park, crossing the Clear Fork on the way. Few close-in neighborhoods get an attraction of that size on the doorstep and still keep their own streets quiet, and the trade — event traffic — is the honest other half.
The eastern boundary is not a street. It is an active rail corridor, and the land along it is zoned light industrial, which is why the zoning mix here is not purely residential and why noise and vibration are a real question on the easternmost blocks and not one anywhere else in the neighborhood.
What's around it
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The Forest Park Gates
The park board approved them in December 1916 at an estimated $1,800, and the pair has been rededicated once since, in November 2011.
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Forest Park
About 121 acres by the city's count — though the city publishes three different figures for it, and the widest one, 170-plus acres, is counting the zoo and Log Cabin Village too.
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Fort Worth Zoo
Founded in 1909 with one lion, two bear cubs, an alligator, a coyote, a peacock and a few rabbits.
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The eastern rail line
Zoned light industrial, under a planned-development ordinance that allows a railroad passenger station and a restoration and museum facility on it.
- Warner Road
- Park Place Avenue
- Stanley Avenue
- Forest Park Boulevard
- Windsor Place
- Pembroke Drive
- Huntington Lane
- Wilshire Boulevard
- Hawthorne Avenue
- Glenco Terrace
- Rockridge Terrace
- Ward Parkway
- Berkeley Place
- Dartmoor Court
- Chatburn Court
- Patton Court
What that means for your whole-home remodel
People don't leave Berkeley Place, they just run out of plan. The lot is sixty feet wide and the rail line is where it's always been, so almost nothing here gets solved by going outward — which means the whole argument happens on paper, inside walls that are already standing. That's a longer conversation than a bid, and it's the one worth having first.
Inside the work
The rooms, up close
Before you start
A whole-home remodel in Berkeley Place: the questions worth asking first
The answers that change a Berkeley Place project are usually the ones nobody asks until the drawings are done. We work through these first.
Nearby and related
- Master Bath Remodel in Berkeley Place
- Whole-Home Remodel in Aledo
- Whole-Home Remodel in Arlington Heights
- Whole-Home Remodel in Mira Vista
- Whole-Home Remodel in Mistletoe Heights
“From sitting down with us in advance to walk through the process to being very timely and responsive with emails and phone calls throughout, our guide was on top of every detail. 6th Ave Homes could not have a better representative of how they want to show up in support of their clients.”
Can we open the back of the house without losing the front rooms?
That is usually the whole project here, and yes. A 1928 plan in Berkeley Place puts the formal rooms at the front and breaks the back into small service spaces — a pantry, a back hall, sometimes a maid's room or a sleeping porch. Those are what become the kitchen and family room, and the front of the house is generally the part worth keeping exactly as it is. What decides the cost is whether the walls coming out are carrying load and whether a flush beam fits in the depth available, which we answer from the framing before anyone prices finishes.
Does a whole-home remodel here mean adding square footage?
Almost never, and that surprises people. The median house in Berkeley Place is about 2,317 square feet and a quarter of them run past 3,056 — the space is already yours. What 1928 did with it is the problem, not how much of it there is. We draw the version that redistributes what the house already contains first; if that genuinely does not get you there, an addition is the honest answer, and it should be the second drawing rather than the first.
Do I need historic approval to remodel in Berkeley Place?
No, not for almost any house here — Berkeley Place is not one of Fort Worth's designated historic districts, so there is no Certificate of Appropriateness and no design review, and exterior work follows the standard permit path. The caveat worth knowing is that private deed restrictions are a separate matter from city zoning: the original Berkeley Addition restrictions forbade wood exteriors, and whether anything like that still binds your particular lot is a title question rather than a city one. We check the parcel either way.
My house is in the Tarrant County historic survey. Does that restrict what I can do?
No. A survey listing is documentation, not designation — it records that a house is historically significant and carries no approval requirement whatsoever. It is the most common misunderstanding in this neighborhood, and it's worth being clear about before you start planning around a rule that doesn't apply to you. National Register listing on its own also restricts nothing a private owner does. A Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation is the one that does, and it applies to one house here.
There's a basement under my bathroom. Is that good news or bad?
Mostly good, and it's a question that comes up here more than it does in most of Fort Worth — basements are more common in Berkeley Place than a buyer expects. Open access under the floor is the cheap version of moving a drain, because nobody is cutting concrete to find out where anything runs. What it changes is the survey: we want to see the framing and the existing runs down there before the layout is committed.
How much can I add onto a lot in Berkeley Place?
The exact answer is a parcel answer, and the surprise is usually the front yard rather than the back. Fort Worth measures the required front setback on a built-out block against the nearest houses on either side, up to fifty feet — not against the twenty feet in the zoning table. On a block that filled in during the twenties, the neighbors decide it, and it has stop-worked a Fort Worth build that got it wrong. We measure them before anything is drawn.
How much of the house has to be in scope?
Enough that the parts talk to each other. Kitchen plus the wall behind it plus the room on the other side is a whole-home conversation whether or not every bedroom is touched. What we do not do is a list of unrelated single-trade jobs in different rooms.
What usually turns up once the walls are open?
In houses built before about 1970, the usual suspects are old wiring, plumbing that was replaced halfway and then abandoned, framing that is out of square, and load paths that do not match the drawings. We budget for the class of surprise rather than the specific one, show you what turned up, and price it in the open rather than as a change order you learn about later.
Best Home Builder & Remodeler
Fort Worth Magazine · plus Small Business of the Year, Fort Worth Chamber
Thinking about a whole-home remodel in Berkeley Place?
Tell us about the house and the room that isn't working. We'll walk it with you, tell you what we'd do with it, and put a real number on it — before anyone signs anything.