Your house is 1948. Your floor plan doesn't have to be. Whole-Home Remodel in TCU / Westcliff
Our work · Westcliff Remodel
Design, drawn and built
What a whole-home remodel in TCU / Westcliff involves
Good street, good bones, and a floor plan drawn for how families lived seventy years 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 TCU / Westcliff
These are postwar brick houses with good bones and a floor plan that answers to 1948: small kitchens, a wall between every room, and one bathroom doing more work than it was designed for. Very little of that is structural. The walls actually carrying the roof in a one-story ranch are few, and the ones people live around are almost never among them — which is why the plan can change far more than the outside of the house suggests.
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 TCU / Westcliff
What the houses here actually ask for
1940s–50s
Postwar brick: 1940s Minimal Traditional cottages at the north end, one-story ranches as the neighborhood ran south, split levels where the ground rolls, and larger two-story houses toward Westcliff West.
An established postwar neighborhood on deep clay with no rock under it, on wide lots under a mature canopy. Almost everything here is a renovation or an addition to a house that has already served two or three families.
- Median house
- 1,852 sq ft
- Median lot
- 10,950 sq ft
- Built since 2010
- 71 houses
a quarter come in under 1,421, and the top tenth pass 3,380
78 feet wide at the median, and only 15 of 1,203 fall under the 50-ft minimum width
against a median year built of 1948 — the scrape-and-rebuild pressure, counted
Measured from City of Fort Worth GIS and Tarrant Appraisal District parcels, measured 2026-09-02
The ground rules in TCU / Westcliff
No historic district here. The overlay that does apply is the TCU one, and it is drawn parcel by parcel.
Nothing in Westcliff needs a Certificate of Appropriateness. What some of it does sit under is the TCU Residential overlay, which caps occupancy at three unrelated people in a dwelling unless the owner registered a nonconforming use by March 31, 2015. It is mapped to specific parcels on the city's zoning map — it is not the same shape as the ZIP code, and anyone telling you otherwise has not pulled the map. If a plan is driven by bedroom count, that gets checked before anything is drawn.
A-5 One-Family~73%
- Min lot
- 5,000 sq ft
- Min width
- 50 ft
- Max coverage
- 50%
- Front yard
- 20 ft
A-43 One-Family~7%
- Min lot
- 43,560 sq ft
- Min width
- 125 ft
- Max coverage
- 30%
- Front yard
- 35 ft
A-21 One-Family~5%
- Min lot
- 21,780 sq ft
- Min width
- 85 ft
- Max coverage
- 30%
- Front yard
- 30 ft
On a street this old, your front yard is set by your neighbours
Fort Worth takes the greatest of three numbers: the platted building line, the district minimum, and the setback of the nearest house on either side of you — up to a 50-ft maximum. That third one only applies once at least 40% of the block face is built, which on a neighborhood finished in the 1960s is every block. So the 20 ft in the table above is a floor, not an answer, and the answer is on your street rather than in the ordinance.
Measured from City of Fort Worth GIS and Tarrant Appraisal District parcels, measured 2026-09-02; Fort Worth Zoning Ordinance §§ 4.701–4.705, 4.406 and 6.101
What we'd actually do here
The moves that matter in TCU / Westcliff
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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Keep the brick. Gut the plan.
The exterior is why the street looks like one neighborhood, and the original deed restrictions are the reason it is masonry. Nearly everything worth changing is behind it.
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Find the walls that are actually holding something
A one-story postwar ranch usually carries its roof on two or three lines, not on every wall in the plan. Knowing which ones is the difference between a bigger room and a much bigger number.
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Open a wall and look at the wiring first
On our own Westcliff remodel the electrical behind the walls was the surprise, and it moved the schedule while we rebuilt it properly. In houses this age it is the most common thing a plan has not priced.
How it works
A whole-home remodel in TCU / Westcliff, 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.
Built by 6th Ave Homes
TCU Area Second-Story Addition See the project →Both numbers, one conversation
Remodel this one, or sell it to somebody who scrapes it?
Historic Fort Worth put these blocks on its endangered list because the dirt is worth more than the 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.
We can put both numbers in front of you: what the remodel would cost, and what our agents think the house sells for as it stands. One conversation, both answers, and no push toward either one.
Our work in TCU / Westcliff
Westcliff Remodel
Whole-Home Remodel
A home should have as much personality as the people in it. In Westcliff, the 6th Ave Homes design and construction teams reworked the main floor into a colorful, transitional whole, from the entry and dining room to the kitchen, den, and butler's pantry. Every room of the main floor is below.
See the whole projectInside the work
The rooms, up close
Not our first time on these streets
More of our work in TCU / Westcliff
The neighborhood
Built north to south, block by block, from 1945 to 1965.
J. E. Foster bought this ground in 1945, changed a street platted as Carb Avenue to Biddison, built the Westcliff Shopping Center and formed the Westcliff Company. That company and the Riverside Development Corporation then built the neighborhood north to south between 1945 and 1965 — which is why the house on one block is not the same animal as the house four streets down.
The brick is not an accident. The original deed restrictions set a minimum house size and required a fire-resistant exterior, and eighty years later that rule is still doing the work — it is why the streetscape reads as one neighborhood built by people who agreed about something, rather than as a catalogue.
Off the south edge, the park board accepted 5.4 acres at Trail Lake Drive and South Drive in November 1952 — a gift from the developer — and that became Foster Park. It runs about 11.9 acres now, with a duck pond and 0.78 miles of trail, and it is the reason the western side of this area feels green rather than campus-adjacent.
In 2023 Historic Fort Worth put Westcliff and Westcliff West on its Most Endangered Places list, and named what it was worried about: teardowns, incompatible new construction and stealth dorms. That is the argument these houses are currently losing on paper — the dirt is worth more than what is sitting on it — and it is the argument a good remodel wins on the street.
What's around it
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W. P. McLean Middle School
3816 Stadium Drive. Opened 1955, when the original McLean building on Forest Park became Paschal High.
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McLean 6th Grade
3201 South Hills Avenue. Opened in 1949 as Bluebonnet Elementary, designed by Wyatt C. Hedrick.
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Westcliff Shopping Center
3458–3580 South Hills Avenue. The cast stone was cleaned and refinished and a new canopy went up across a 22,000 sq ft façade in a restoration completed in 2025.
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Foster Park
Off the south edge: a duck pond, 0.78 miles of trail, and 11.9 acres that started as a 5.4-acre gift to the park board in 1952.
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Bellaire Drive South
The northern boundary in the city's own registry, and the line where the university stops and the neighborhood starts.
- Clay Avenue
- Anita Avenue
- Carolyn Road
- Manderly Place
- Encanto Drive
- Arundel Avenue
- Winslow Drive
- Somerset Lane
- Bellaire Circle
- Westcliff Road South
What that means for your whole-home remodel
These houses are being scraped, and that is the whole context for a remodel here. A 1948 brick ranch has the one thing a new build on the same lot cannot buy — a streetscape that agrees with it and trees older than the neighborhood. What it does not have is a plan anybody would draw today, and almost none of that is structural. The work is behind the brick: the walls that are not carrying anything, the wiring nobody has looked at in decades, and a kitchen sized for 1948.
Before you start
A whole-home remodel in TCU / Westcliff: the questions worth asking first
The answers that change a TCU / Westcliff project are usually the ones nobody asks until the drawings are done. We work through these first.
Nearby and related
- Home Additions in TCU / Westcliff
- Whole-Home Remodel in Arlington Heights
- 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.”
Do I need historic approval to remodel in Westcliff?
No. Westcliff is not one of Fort Worth's local historic districts, so there is no Certificate of Appropriateness step. Historic Fort Worth has listed the area as endangered, which is advocacy rather than regulation — it carries no permit requirement. Private deed restrictions are a separate question and are worth confirming for your block.
Does the TCU overlay affect my remodel?
Only if your parcel is inside it, and only if the plan turns on how many people can live there. Inside the overlay no more than three unrelated people may occupy a dwelling unit, unless the owner registered a nonconforming use by March 31, 2015. It is mapped parcel by parcel and it does not follow the ZIP code, so it gets checked on the city's map before a bedroom-count-driven plan is drawn.
What tends to surprise people in a house this age?
What is behind the walls. On our own Westcliff project the electrical system turned out to be a mess, and reworking it safely cost time we had not planned to spend. That is the common one in postwar houses, along with cast-iron drain lines and a slab that has been moving quietly on deep clay for seventy years. We open a wall and look before we price finishes, not after.
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 TCU / Westcliff?
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.